late night fires

Thoughts have been quite scattered lately, and it's been nearly impossible to force my brain to wrap them up in packages neat enough to be considered passably presentable. My head feels like my apartment when I haven't straightened in far too long.

Spent last night -- all of it, until about 8am -- at one of the best let-your-hair-down events I've ever been to outside of Burning Man. It took place at an enourmous warehouse in a deserted part of Oakland. The place, NIMBY, generally houses gigantic studios for industrial artists. Two stages with magnificent bands and performers -- including an incredibly charming ensemble of clowns (literally) who played a delightful fusion of marching band/brass band music and funk with a "world-beat" flavor -- and an outdoor patio featuring the usual house/techno/etc as well as a raging bonfire inside of a overside iron drum, synchronized fire dancers, metal/fire sculptures, trippy projected visuals, and so on. One of the most oddly moving events of the whole night involved a man who started throwing boxfuls of restaurant order slips into the bonfire. When the crowd around the fire took notice, he passed the order slips around -- soon everyone was chucking orders for sweet & sour pork, mandarin chicken, and mongolian beef into the flames . . . it struck me as a symbolic protest against the inherently demeaning aspects of a wage/service economy . . . but maybe it was just me.

Also -- I tended bar for the first time ever. Keep in mind that I jumped in without knowing how to mix anything but the simplest drinks, the ones whose names describe their contents (e.g., rum and coke). It was absolute chaos behind the bar -- four or five bartenders dancing around one another to find the currently-open bottle of bottom-shelf vodka, rum, whiskey, or gin; multiple hands in the tiny cash box full of random bills. Super stressful but very fun.

The highlight - my partner Gerardo's flamenco drag performance. He'd worked on this thing for a month, I'd put the music together, and it came off beautifully. Gerardo's studied flamenco for years, but he's just now learning to do it in "high drag" - that is, drag in which the makeup, etc., is an additional layer to the male body rather than a disguise (e.g., facial hair remains, legs generally go unshaven), drag which sharpens the male/female contradictions rather than covers them over (the polar opposite of androgyny, I suppose).

The organizers of the party -- a Burning Man camp called Dustfish which we may camp with this year -- even fried up bacon in the morning for the hardcore stragglers.

Speaking of Burning Man, I must admit that my thoughts are becoming increasingly preoccupied with it. I'll try to write more on this later, but I think these thoughts have helped me stumble onto a theory of games and events that I kind of like (though I'm sure it's full of holes) . . . and I'm now trying to figure out how on earth I'm going to realize the art project I want to do.

Any poets out there interested in establishing a "post-avant" theme camp on the playa this year . . . ??