! Practice random acts of silliness !

Burning, fucking burning. I was at the hottest, coolest, craziest, most border-crossing event in the world. And I was curious for years since Toby was crazy about it ever since he went for the first time. Sadly he and Jade couldn't go this year. I didn't find anybody to go with instead and then it turned out I would be working in LA at the time anyway.



So I burried the thought... Until I mentioned to Jan how I would love to experience it. That was on the weekend it started. He said he had been dying to go, too, but hadn't found anyone. He said: LET'S GO! and wrote a concept for an art installation overnight which would have to include me singing and dancing, in order to get me off work for the whole week! I believed that would never work. but it did. We had one day of preparation (usually one prepares for a year, you pimp your car to be an art car, get a tent and camp group together, food, gifts, booze, drugs, music, special crazy equipment and whatnot). We rented a car, bought a camera, borrowed a tent and bombed down (up) to Nevada in 14 hours. We didn't find the friends of-a-friend-camp we were supposed to but we made a ton of new friends which is the easiest thing there.

BURNING MAN is a huge art exhibition in the middle of nowhere and at the same time a freaky rave and at the same time a community based city in the desert. 50.000 people gather to celebrate freedom from every convention for one week and after that burn the art (the main event is the burning of the central "man" in the middle of the "playa"), then they pack tents and everything including their grey water to leave the place without a trace. It's an awesome idea and that is why people love it and it grows every year. Black Rock City is circular, so that the street names are the hours, you don't need to remember much that way. It is 7 miles across, lots of room for everybody.
You just leave your camp whenever you feel like it, day or night, and do whatever you want, basically: go dancing (good PsyTrance and wellknown DJs on three dance floors), have drinks at one of the numerous bars for free (since the living culture says: give away to others what you bring, share everything), get into crazy conversations with random people, marvel the spectacularly creative cars and domes and costumes (you will stand out if you go out in normal clothes! At least bikini required. you can also go naked or naked with a corset or a wig or you can paint your whole body, you can decorate your bike with lights for the night or just hang out in one of the lounges with nice music, reggae or Elvis songs or Shpongle or almost anything. Anything that you can imagine and that you cannot imagine is there.
One great thing for example was the "pimped potty": one of the portapotties (DixieKlo) was decorated with picture frames, made nice with candles, incenses, a fluffy toilet lid and a radio! (See picture above)...



The shooting worked out really well, too. The first day we developed more ideas and came up with a splitting of the project into three separate ones. So the second day we shot the first installation: I walked in the desert towards the camera in a ballroom dress, drawing a line in the ground with a long bamboo stick, a scarf blowing in the wind. You have some close-ups of the stick cutting the earth and then I walk away into the distance again with the mountain panorama in the background. The second installation is the "Station to Station" one. I walk, dance, climb, cartwheel and run into doors and huts and other art installations in the middle of the desert, just to come out of others, as if I would have traveled underground. This one will have a crazy soundtrack and will be postproducted and processed heavily. The third one involves me singing a song from the musical FAME ("They know how to do it in LA") about a drug addicted girl who broke down trying to live her dreams, while I walk through a sand storm at Burning Man. I can't wait what Jan will make out of this material!