|
The Great Burn of 03 Part Five: Deborah, Joe & the Herzog in Me
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.
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 freak shows, pubic hair 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. 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 decor. The effect after just an hour of hanging the grass: stunning.
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 commodified 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.
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 sings 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. "We are cursed with what we are doing here. It's a land that Gott, 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 replicated his protagonist's mad quest, foible for foible. The results were catastrophic. Local jealousies incited tribal wars, crew members were injured, there were deaths. Herzog's German investors abandoned him, and the planned 3-month jungle film shoot took three years to complete. My friend Harrod's father, documentary filmmaker Les Blank, captured Herzog's catastrophic coup in the renowned documentary film 'Burden of Dreams.' 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!
Just then, an unfamiliar voice called out to me. I turned from where I stood atop a ladder and regarded a young man in his twenties clad in the standard playa garb, a Lawrence of Arabia meets Tank Girl meets Dune thing, with thick dust storm goggles and a camelback for hydration. 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," he said. "I'm Klaus Kinski's son."
-RSM The Duke of Words To Burn In this story: Tom Kennedy, Flash Hopkins, Joe Mangrum, Deborah Mangrum-Price, Al Honig, Dana Albany, Larry Harvey, Werner Herzog, Klaus Kinski, Les Blank, Rick McKinney Jigglebox pix from Burning Man `02! Part One: Crashing The Burning Gate This page recently dug up and dusted off in loving memory of Tom Kennedy, my friend.
© Rick McKinney |
