DigiScents>Scent City>Skunk Club>The Smell of Burning Man
I rolled down the window of my sleek, sexy, black honda civic to welcome in a little desert air. My car smelled like a combination of cigarette smoke and the coffee I'd been pounding down in order to stay awake. It was 2am on Friday, September 1st and I was in this crazy situation because of Burning Man. I wanna go there and wallow in the dirt, because Burning Man is the only art museum I've ever been to where you can crawl inside of the art. So I'm off to dig my heels into the surface of the playa, which is as dry, musty, and cracked as the surface of the moon.
This was my third year on the playa, during which time the crowd has swelled to almost 30 thousand. The map of the playa was themed as the human body this year, with plenty of potential for sensory fun. As I wandered in an overstimulated stupor that first early morning, neon lights in the distance welcomed me to to one of the most original and crassly suggestive of odor you can imagine. The Giant Anus,a 12' diameter sphincter with two "mighty squatting legs". Apparantly, in the ideal situation, the plan was for the anus to emit at least the visual suggestion of gas, and to be merrily lighting its own farts from five pressurized propane torches crowning the uppermost regions of its obscene arc. Oh well. It was pretty impressive as is, and the Anus was hosting an opera about constipation. A future classic, I'm sure. Bundled up against the incredibly cold wind, people were happily climbing the stairs onto the platform of the Anus where the sphinxter was equipped with a sliding board.
A couple of hundred feet away from the Anus was a giant Head, facing center camp and spouting fire out of its eyes and nostrils. There was a crowd encircling the Head, at 4am, a rave was in full force. The familiar fumes of propane reached my nose loud and clear, unclogged as of yet with the silty playa dust.
I woke up to a burning sun the next morning and went to meet my neighbors. They were sitting outside their shade structure, drinking coffee and smoking cigarettes. They welcomed me enthusiastically (the burning man community is mostly male). After some coffee talk and basic information exchange, we started talking Burning Man...blah blah blah sensory overload, personal journey, etc. But, Tian, one of my neighbors, was waxing eloquent about the Burning Man experience, so I got out my notebook, "It took me a while to figure out that life is a game. I want to make life into a video game. Burning Man is a cultural soup, deep enough for me to swim in". Looking around me, the video game analogy was true, the air was thick with technical innovation and the "cultural soup" was thick with many flavors of freaks. In the coffee tent, a Mr. "Haw Haw", flamboyeantly painted and garbed as a huge watermelon, struck a pose obligingly, encircling his wedge headdress with his seed-dotted pink arms. I passed groups of humans painted raspberry, mango, lemon, and blueberry, like walking jelly beans in fright wigs. Attempting to tread lightly on his personal space, I asked a boy with a realistic hot-dog chapeau why he chose that particular flavor for himself. I was rewarded with "uh, i don't know". Oh, well. Oliver, of the ----- camp LOVES the smell of bacon, "It just says to me "Come to the bacon!" It seems that Oliver was influenced in his youth to be pork-positive, "My earliest memory of smell is when I spent time in Vienna and the air was full of the smells of sausages. I guess you could say I like pork". Ok, Oliver, we GET it!
So, what are the smells of Burning Man? "The smell of the playa is a dry smell until the weekend, then it's gasoline and burnt plastic." (Alex, Ill-Vill). Yummy. Not. Thank God for the infamous Space Cowboys! In this millenial year they were finally bringing immersive scent to their saloon's chill tent. I brought my stinky, bad-ass little self into the chill tent Friday night. Though most of the chillers seemed to be busy hugging and kissing, the air, redolent of cucumber essence, was thrilling in a landscape barren of PLEASANT scents!
A golf cart rolls up containing an old friend of mind, escorted by a Leprachaun, complete with his big box of Lucky Charms. The elf informs me that he has realized that "as far as sexual contact, there's always a compatible smell". (I wonder if he knows about the Lucky Charms Bedroom Personality Test?) Our magical leprachaun takes his box and leaves. I wish I could magically change ordinary, shapeless white marshmallows into ANYTHING. Feeling inadequate, I retreat to Cookie Camp and barter for a cookie.
Next stop was Camp B.O....but where are they? Felled by a dust storm!
Daytime raves are fun, especially when you're forced to put fashion aside and wear a dust mask and goggles, and Lush looks good with its huge blossoms and toadstools. Then there's Flavor.
Free SMELLS! Follow your nose! The Ole'Fac-Tree is where I meet Emily, Hamurabi, and Alison, who've been friends for years. They're digging into the scent-saturated dixie-cup blossoms of the Ole'Fac-Tree. Since they're reunited from college, the smells on their collective minds are of coffee and old couches, pencil shavings and sage. Oh....Hippies! I ask Hamurabi what scents he likes to smell on his girlfriends, and being a forward-thinking guy, he likes the new vegetable scents that are trendy right now. Melissa, another smell enthusiast at the Tree, believes that smell is an involuntary and passive form of communication, "Smell sets a mood, it's the least active form of communication there is." though her companion, Alex, can think of more deliberate uses of smell. He maintains that it is the smell of his automatic coffeemaker perking the coffee that wakes him up, and proposes a coffee alarm clock. The scented essences stuffed into the blossoms of the tree are a welcome change from the smells of dust, fire, and rain.
By the way, another Black Rock City odor is beginning to insinuate itself into my rowdy, primal, consciousness. But i'm too polite to mention it, i'll just say that it was a scream the way somebody tacked up illustrations of chocolate desserts onto the doors of the port-a-potties. Mmmmmmmmmm, chocolatey!
I am filthy. I am tired. I am hungry. If Camp B.O. hadn't blown down, they probably would welcome me, since I haven't showered in three days. I also know that next year, like women are said to forget the pain of birth, I'll forget the pain and I'll be back. So I load up my bag of stinky trash, revelling in the smells of day-old tins of smoked oysters, power bar wrappers, and miscellaneous embarrassing items. I'm ready for Pine-sol.
