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The Great Burn of 03 Part Five: Deborah, Joe & the Herzog in Me “I’ve seen things you people wouldn’t believe. Attack ships
on fire off the shoulder of Orion. I watched C-beams glitter in the dark near
the Tannhauser Gate. All those moments will be lost in time.. like tears in
rain.” - Rutger Hauer, Blade Runner Picture the scene. I’m standing inside the Great Temple (as I
have only now learned it was called). We have finished our work installing
the various altars and filigree trim around the 13 triangular alcoves in each
of which a select candidate will sit still upon a dais godlike in repose, their
15 minutes of god fame as it were. How can I not? I’m fascinated by Joe & Deborah’s work with live wheat
grass. The idea of sculpting living earth out here in this vast expanse of
desiccated desert is so totally whacked that, of course, it appeals to me. Perhaps forty of the temple’s 65-feet are open on the inside, the effect being
that of a giant cathedral ceiling with naught but Dana’s altars inside, one
to the north, one to the south. Impressive, the altars only occupy the space
on which they stand. Staring at this open space, Joe envisioned jungle-like
growth, an opportunity to fill the vast air space inside the temple with a smaller
version of his original grant request to the Burning Man Foundation: a giant
jungle-like enclosure full of living, breathing plant life. Denied his grant in a phone call from (guess who?) Lady B months ago, Joe decided
to pick up thirty flats of wheat grass en route to Black Rock and dovetail his
brilliant-green, respiring wheat grass art with Dana’s altar décor. The effect
after just an hour of hanging There in the blowing dust at the festival’s epicenter, we hung balls of wheat
grass vertically in two or three foot intervals down floor-length strands of
hemp twine. So pervasive is the dust this year that it often completely obscured
wide swaths of the brightly painted temple exterior. From a distance in broad
daylight, the allegedly colorful Aztec temple appeared Egyptian-pyramid brown.
I found it somewhat sad, all that effort to translate someone’s colorful temple
vision from paper to the vaulting reality now before us, all that and Dana’s
altars too, now white-washed by alkaline dust. Brown-washed, really. The golds,
the reds, the silver, all of it dulled down by dust, the dust of centuries,
of millennia, the dust that mocks us and will outlive us all. Follow this train of thought a little further, however, and one comes back
refreshingly to the impermanence of all things, to the wisdom of the Burn and
to this: the tightly-squeezed and synthesized nectar of the artist’s soul, the
blood and sweat and juice of passion shot out in one grand orgasm of creation
and then, in one wildly-gesticulated “Fuck You!” to the whole of consumer culture
and commoditized art, set ablaze and turned into ash. Gone! Dust before decay.
Ash over assimilation. Catharsis in the embrace of chaos. Instant ecstasy
instead of advert-induced entropy. Cremation over commercialization. The artist
standing back in the shadows, far back behind the swirling masses of inferno-crazed
“burners,” cracks a tiny smile and says, “Now it is mine forever.” I never asked Joe or Deborah how they felt watching their babies burn. But
having followed Joe’s lead in the four-part process of cutting 4-inch chunks
of sod, poking through with thumb, rolling them outward into spherical “balls”
and finally suspending them, like a thousand Chia creatures and Doctor Suessesque
sod ball planetoids all green explosion and dripping wet with life, having done
this for hours and watched thus as the dry and largely-empty temple blossomed
green and suddenly breathing.. and all the while knowing death was imminent,
cremation absolute, well, I think I can guess how they felt. Somewhere in this process of painting the dusty temple’s inner space with bursts
of neon green, the miraculous occurred. I say miraculous not in the Jesus water-into-wine
sense or anything so pat as that, but in the uncanny collision of twin molecules
across the vast expanse of time and space sense. I had taken a razor knife
from my tool-belt and begun making shorter work of the flats of sod by slicing
them up rather than Joe’s method of tearing them with bare hands. Seeing this,
Deborah commented on my method as being very Teutonic, or precise in a German
way. I continued, “We are cursed with what we are doing here. It’s a land zat God,
if he exists, has created in anger… And we in comparison to the articulate vileness
and baseness and obscenity of all this chungle, we only sound and look like
badly pronounced and half-finished sentences out of a stupid suburban novel,
a cheap novel.” These were the words of one of my favorite monologues. Not fictional, but
the true, bewildered expressions of a white man trapped in the jungle beneath
the burden of an impossible dream. In the late 1970s, German film director
Werner Herzog ventured into the Amazon to make a film about a mad visionary
who pulls a massive riverboat up and over a mountain. Unfortunately for all
involved, Herzog wasn’t content to use a model boat, and so Climate-wise and in many other ways, we were about a million miles from that
jungle as my Werner impression kicked into full swing for Deborah, Joe and a
small audience of Burning Man participants milling about there in the temple.
I think I was at the part where Herzog refers to his lead actor, Klaus Kinski
(father of Nastassia), when
the uncanny occurred. When one day later right there at Burning Man, I had
the opportunity to tell my friend’s dad this story, the normally taciturn Les
Blank expressed what I can only describe as his own subdued brand of astonishment. “Kinski alvays says it’s full of erotic elements. I don’t see it so much erotic.
I see it more full of obscenity. I would see fornication and asphyxiation and
chocking and fighting for survival and growing and just rotting away.” Click HERE for the full text of Werner's rant, as transcribed by ME! What came next is noteworthy not just because of the who involved,
but the whole kit and burning caboodle! The who, the what, the where, and the
amazing juxtapositions of when, are what will burn the moment
into my memory forever. That this kid and I and my silly Werner impression
should all come together right then on that desert under these circumstances,
well, to me that’s the Magical Quantum Clockwork of The Universe, a thing I
imagine only a very lucky few will ever get to view. “That’s a really excellent impression of Werner,” the young man said. “I’m
Klaus Kinski’s son.” And I am NOT Klaus Kinski's son! I subsist on less than $100/week. Until next time, check out the Jigglebox photo gallery from Burning Man `02!
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Already the rangers have opened the floodgates, allowing the general burning
public to filter in and around our work, ogling, oogling, etc. Most of the
team has taken the cue and lit out across the playa in search of cocktails and
freakshows, Panoni pube sculpting exhibitions and the occasional passing water
truck opportunity to shed dusty-rags-running and grab a whore’s bath on the
fly. Me, I’ve decided to hang out.
the grass: stunning.
Having once lived in Deutschland and apparently born with a proclivity for accents,
I slip in and out of a German accent all the time when I’m having fun. Actually,
German, British, Appalachian moonshiner, Texan and a few others. But this time
it was German. “Vee must seek symmetry in our verk,” I said, poking my thumb
up through another patch of sod and curling it into a ball. “Za Erss, za chungle,
zees things reqvire discipline for surfifal.” Staring into the moisture-rich
wheat grass and spoofing German, I drifted in my mind to the ravings of one
of my favorite Germans, film director Werner Herzog, describing as he did his
Amazonian jungle nightmare. Rivulets of dark earthen juice ran from the moist
sod and down the dry skin of my arm. Deborah’s smile spurred me on.
replicated his protagonist’s mad quest, foible for foible. The results were
catastrophic. Local jealousies incited tribal wars, crew members were injured,
there were even deaths. Herzog’s German investors abandoned him, and the planned
3-month jungle film shoot took three years (over the initial plan of three months)
to complete. My friend Harrod’s father, documentary filmmaker 
An unfamiliar voice called out to me just then. I turned from where I stood
atop a ladder and regarded a young man in his twenties clad in the standard
playa garb, sort of Lawrence of Arabia meets Tank Girl meets Dune, with thick
dust storm goggles and a camelback for hydration. 