Monday, January 17, 2011

Flashback

My friend Vandy sent me this awesome picture from a Burning Man festival in the late 90s. Burning Man is a crazy festival in the Black Rock Desert in Nevada every Labor Day weekend that culminates in the burning of a giant wooden effigy (the "Man"). Apparently our friend Jonathan Ainscow found this picture on the internet, taken by someone else. From left, that's Lynn, me, Jonathan, and Vandy.

I went to Burning Man several times in the 1990s. I hear it's more controlled now. It was really crazy back then. I first heard about Burning Man from Catherine (always ahead of the curve). I first went with Michael and Lauren and met up with Catherine, Angela, and others there. Lynn and I went to one during our first few weeks of dating and my car broke down in the desert (that's quite a story). The last couple times we went with Vandy and Leo and other friends. Later some of our SF friends had our own mini-festivals in the Black Rock Desert. We would bring something to burn (Burning Chair, Burning Futon - my old futon after I finally got a real bed). We have some great photos from those trips, including some taken by Hannah (an amazing photographer). Black Rock is such a dramatic landscape. When you see car commercials of cars driving across a big flat dry expanse - that's Black Rock. It would be fun to go back someday.
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3 comments:

  1. MichaelJanuary 20, 2011 at 8:18 AM

    Huh, so you wore clothes that year?

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  2. EthanJanuary 20, 2011 at 10:22 PM

    Hah! I wish I knew how to scan and post that picture from our first Burning Man of me covered in mud head to toe and wearing my old pink bathing suit (which Deepak thought undermined my manliness on our BVI sailing trip, although apparently not from the sounds coming from my cabin :-) and you wearing shorts and a flowered straw hat. I remember walking around with you for a long time getting progressively drier, itchier, and more uncomfortable until finally finding a small tub of already-muddy water to (sort of) rinse off the mud. I posted a picture of me all muddy from that trip on my office door when I left my job at Sybase in 1995 (my last tech job except for the short-term consulting gig that Deepak hired me for at Netscape) as a way of saying "You never really knew me."

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  3. UnknownJanuary 22, 2011 at 2:47 PM

    SPACEAGE NEBRASKA!!!

    FYI It's reunion year for the camp (per Dave Klaus' recent missive)

    Perhaps we should all get back there one more time? I went in 2009 after a 6-year hiatus and as it turns out it's still ridiculously fun...

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