apparently burning man is going on right now. of all the tritely obvious overdone neohippie crap. any revelation that you have to go sit in a desert with a bunch of self-absorbed badly dressed retards to obtain probably isn’t worth it. if you want to be a hippie, be a hippie, fine. just don’t try to pretend you’re doing anything more enlightened or transcendental than sitting around in the sand with a bunch of stoned artfag morons. burning man as a concept isn’t any more original or interesting than some corporate weekend hiking retreat or a fucking family vacation to disney world. transcendentalism and philsophy through connection with the natural world has been done before, and been done better. go read emerson.

i can see burning man being interesting to people who still think drugs and naked people equal independence and free thinking, but come on. didn’t that get old in high school? just because the people are older and it lasts longer than a keg party on the beach, and it gets written up in wired instead of the school newspaper, it’s not necessarily any more complex. what’s different? there’s a bunch of pseudo artistic pretentious crap piled around the fringes and it costs more to participate? hoo boy, sign me up. invite some of the art students who hang around soho over to take e and draw on the floor for a week, you’ll have essentialy the same experience and you won’t have to shell out hundreds to have it.