Portfolio
Burning Man
Awesome Earth People
Big Cities and Little 'uns
I just shot for about 8 hours inside a sandstorm here on another blistering day at Burning Man. While going through the middle of it, I came across a formal Japanese tea ceremony. It was amazing. The man in red on the left had a pure white face and bald head. His movements were slow and measured with the tea ceremony. Just after he finished serving the woman on the right, he invited me over to sit. The whole process took about five minutes. He intricately folded red napkins to clean off the stirring brush, put matcha green tea into a golden bowl, added another tea drink (I cannot describe the taste), and then, in the end, he used chopsticks to pull out floating bits of gold from a small box of water. The first piece of gold flew away in the sandstorm, so he got another and put it all the way down into the tea. I then drank the whole thing at once. It was so amazing. I bowed and said thank you very much in Japanese, then I went away back into the sandstorm.
on Saturday night, the party and the fire keep going all night long. This was taken about 15 minutes after the man fell down and was being consumed. The burning reminds me of this wonderful little physics nugget from Richard Feynman. This might be from his book The Pleasure of Finding Things Out. Anyway, he makes a nice description that trees don't grow out of the ground, but they mostly grow out of the air. They get a few nutrients and some water and stuff from the ground, but 99% of the meat of the tree is made from carbon. The leaves grab the carbon dioxide and then use the sun to slice off the C from the O2. It hangs on to the carbon and it becomes the wood. The tree then gets rid of the O2 because it is waste. Later, we take that wood and make it super-hot with fire, which makes the carbon re-connect with the oxygen, creating carbon dioxide once again. And then the cycle starts all over as it floats over to a nearby tree to go through it all again. All that fire, then, can be seen as stored sunlight. Anyhoo... that's the kind of stuff I read! Haha... you can probably search on YouTube for "Feynman Tree Growing out of Air" and see more. He has so many great little physics thoughts like that. Wow, I really end up boring whoever sits by me on burn night.
Everyone at Burning Man is in costume all week long while the event is going on. I remember in his first year, my friend Rene was wearing just like regular clothes from The Gap when he went to Center Camp. Let's just say that it didn't go smoothly for him, but it rarely does anyway.