Program Notes
https://www.patreon.com/lorenzohagerty
Guest speaker: Annie Oak
http://visionarycongress.org/Today’s podcast features the 2015 Palenque Norte Lecture given by Annie Oak at the Burning Man Festival. In her talk, Annie takes us on a tour of the various factors involved in organizing events such as festivals, dance parties, and theme camps. As a co-founder of the Woman’s Visionary Congress, now in its 10th year, and as a co-founder of a major theme camp at Burning Man, not to mention numerous other events that Annie has helped organize. Also, in this podcast the tragic death of fellow saloner Kai Wingo is discussed.
Women’s Visionary Congress
Camp Soft Landing
Kai Wingo Obituary
Go Fund Me Contributions to help Kai’s family
Podcast 458 – “Practical Mushroom Activism”
featuring Kai Wingo
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Transcript
00:00:00 ►
Greetings from Cyberdelic Space, this is Lorenzo and I’m your host here in the Psychedelic
00:00:22 ►
Salon.
00:00:23 ►
And, as you know, I didn’t post a new podcast last week.
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Normally, I spend the weekend previewing a talk and then writing my comments, which I then record on Monday.
00:00:35 ►
However, when the weekend before last arrived, I just couldn’t get my mojo working enough to begin.
00:00:41 ►
And by Monday, I realized that the only way to get that week’s podcast out was to force
00:00:46 ►
the issue, which is actually something that I try to not do. So I decided to skip a week.
00:00:53 ►
Now, a few days before making that decision, I had watched the new Star Wars movie, so
00:00:58 ►
I half-jokingly told myself that there must have been a tear in the force that was causing me to
00:01:03 ►
resist working on a new program.
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Anyway, I more or less stayed off the net for the next several days,
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taking a little holiday from the digital world, and didn’t even turn my computer on.
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So, when I checked my email on Friday, I was shocked to learn that on the Saturday,
00:01:20 ►
when I normally would begin working on this podcast,
00:01:23 ►
that our dear friend and fellow
00:01:25 ►
salonner, Kai Wingo, had died. Now, if you listen to my podcast with Kai, number 458, which I posted
00:01:34 ►
this past July 6th, you will remember me saying that I thought it to be one of the best programs
00:01:40 ►
I had played here in the salon. Kai was a relatively young person in our community who
00:01:45 ►
showed great promise of becoming one of our longtime leaders and eventually a respected
00:01:50 ►
elder of our tribe. And so my sadness at learning of her death was multiplied when I learned that
00:01:57 ►
her death could most probably have been prevented. Kai was completing the 37th day of a 40-day fast when her electrolytes and potassium dropped too low, apparently causing her death.
00:02:11 ►
From my strictly layman’s point of view, it appears to me that Kai unintentionally starved herself to death.
00:02:19 ►
Now that may prove wrong when we learn more, but for now, that’s what I understand to have happened.
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wrong when we learn more, but for now, that’s what I understand to have happened.
00:02:29 ►
After today’s talk, I’ll return and say a little more about Kai and the wonderful work that she was doing, but first I want to play the talk that I had originally planned on
00:02:34 ►
presenting to you last week.
00:02:36 ►
It’s the talk that Annie Oak gave at last year’s Palenque Norte lectures, which were
00:02:40 ►
delivered during the Burning Man Festival.
00:02:42 ►
And Annie’s talk centers around the art of event organizing,
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and it is the third in a series of talks that I’ve been playing,
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which focus, among other things, on the safety factors that must be taken into account
00:02:55 ►
when producing events such as festivals, dance parties, Burning Man camps,
00:03:00 ►
and other activities that we think of as events.
00:03:04 ►
However, Kai’s death has brought into focus for me the fact that
00:03:07 ►
what Annie has to say here also applies to small-scale events,
00:03:12 ►
such as doing mushrooms by yourself.
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It’s important that you also realize that such an activity is also an event,
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and that safety factors must be taken into account in that situation as well.
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and that safety factors must be taken into account in that situation as well.
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And we now learn that even without the use of any psychoactive plants or chemicals,
00:03:38 ►
something that seems as harmless as fasting must also be planned for with safety being a primary consideration.
00:03:43 ►
I’ll speak more about that after we listen to Annie’s talk about organizing larger events,
00:03:47 ►
but as we listen to her advice, we should keep in mind the fact that many of the things that Annie covers are equally important
00:03:50 ►
for the solo psychonaut to consider.
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Now, let’s join Christopher Pezza at Camp Soft Landing
00:03:57 ►
in August of 2015 as he introduces Annie Oak.
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My name is Pezz, and you’re at the Palenque Norte Speaker Series.
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Thanks for being here.
00:04:10 ►
So our next speaker is Annie Oak.
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And Annie is not only an artist, journalist, and civil rights activist,
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but she also co-founded this camp.
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She’s the creator of the Full Circle Tea House next door,
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also the founder of the Women’s Visionary Congress,
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which is an incredible psychedelic conference slash retreat that happens annually,
00:04:36 ►
and more recently the co-founder of an interactive theatric events company called Take Three Presents.
00:05:05 ►
So I’m very excited to have Annie Oak here to speak with us tonight Thank you. Welcome, everybody, to our camp. This is an awesome camp. We’re Camp Soft Landing,
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and we have the Palenque Norte Speaker Series
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and the Full Circle Tea House next door.
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140 people who serve in both projects
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and in other places on the playa,
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including the Zendo Project, are camped with us this year.
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So we’re a big experiment in community art here.
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And it’s a beautiful thing to watch.
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We’re all having a great time, and we’re delighted you could join us.
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So I wanted to talk about my art.
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I’m an artist.
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And the form of art that I do I call community art.
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Community art.
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It’s an art form in which I design and create collaboratively with other people,
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gathering and event spaces that have an educational and transformational intent.
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And it’s an art form that requires some skills that we have learned in our lives
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and many skills that we’ve learned out here on the playa.
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And I’d like to talk about some of the examples of those art forms.
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And I’m going to ask whoever has the radio on to turn down
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their radio. Thank you.
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When we talk about community art,
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we’re talking about spaces where people come together for
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transformational purposes
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and for community exchange, for educational purposes,
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to get information, to have a good time, to alter our consciousness,
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to make art and receive art, to listen to music, to drink tea, to camp, to sleep,
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to be together in an intentional way.
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And the three examples that I’d like to talk about this year,
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in terms of the art that I’ve created,
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are first the Women’s Visionary Congress,
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second is the Full Circle Tea House in this camp that we’re in here,
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and the third is Take Three Presents,
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the production company that Chris Pezza just mentioned.
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He is one of my two partners in this project.
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And these are examples of community art projects.
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Two of them are for-profit businesses.
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One of them is a non-profit business.
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So these are both art projects and startups.
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And the reason that they were structured as businesses is because I think artists need to recreate the concept of business
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and really make business into their own art form
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and art forms into sustainable projects
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so that they can continue beyond you,
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so that they have a life beyond the artist
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because they’re collaborative pieces of art.
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And transformational art needs to be sustainable art
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if it’s going to continue.
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So also all of these projects I’d like to mention,
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in addition to being little businesses,
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are at capacity right now.
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The ones that we sell tickets to sell out at every event.
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The ones that are open
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and free are busy
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and serving a lot of people.
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They
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are small by
00:08:56 ►
design. Their
00:08:57 ►
intention is not to make money.
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Their intention is to be sustainable
00:09:01 ►
in different ways.
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And their intention is to be sustainable in different ways. And their intention is to be successful by a different set of standards
00:09:11 ►
as both pieces of art and businesses.
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The Women’s Visionary Congress I founded nine years ago
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to be an organization created by and for women who are
00:09:25 ►
interested in
00:09:27 ►
non-ordinary states of
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consciousness and
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we of course include in that
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community we say people of all genders
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men included
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we gather
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once a year for our large
00:09:41 ►
gathering and event
00:09:43 ►
in Petaluma in June.
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And then we have salons around the country.
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We’ve had salons in Seattle and had salons in Vancouver.
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We’ve had salons in New Mexico.
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And it was created as a nonprofit organization.
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We’re going to celebrate our 10th anniversary next year.
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organization. We’re going to celebrate our 10th anniversary next year. And it is an organization that supports the work of visionary women who are working with non-ordinary states of consciousness
00:10:13 ►
to come and present their work, and also people of all genders to come and present their work and
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hear this work presented. I created it because I was part of a community of psychedelic women,
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and I didn’t feel their work was being presented and honored well enough
00:10:27 ►
within the psychedelic community. So that’s a community art project
00:10:32 ►
that is now off and running on its own. We have a group
00:10:36 ►
of volunteers and some part-time staff people who are all moving it
00:10:40 ►
forward. We make enough money to be able to support it
00:10:44 ►
and to hold these events. We give enough money to be able to support it and to hold these events. We give
00:10:46 ►
out money in grants. We have a great community of people who are now part of this art project
00:10:53 ►
that will continue that project on into the future on our 10th anniversary next year.
00:11:00 ►
And it’s a piece of art because it was intended to not only showcase the work of people doing research or healing or art or ritual with altered states of consciousness, with different psychedelic medicines or other states of consciousness.
00:11:20 ►
It was intended to showcase that, but it was also intended to create a community and a space for that community to gather.
00:11:27 ►
And so that piece of art is launched in the world.
00:11:30 ►
We’re a 501c3 now for eight years.
00:11:32 ►
We’re beholden to the U.S. government as a piece of art, which is an interesting thing to think about.
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Our books are audited.
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We write grant proposals.
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We reach out to funders.
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And we’re about
00:11:46 ►
to pass it along to another generation.
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I think every piece of community
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art needs to have a succession plan.
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The creators need to at some
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point step aside and
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say, here, this is your art
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too. What do you want to do with it?
00:12:01 ►
You know the old founder
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syndrome with companies
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where the founder starts a company and then they’re too attached to it
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to really get out of the way and let other people take it to another level
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I think community art is just like that
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so the Women’s Visionary Congress will be taken over
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by another generation of young women
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to move forward and create something new with it
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to choose the speakers for the events.
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I and other elder women will remain on the board.
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We specifically do multi-generational events
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that include both older and younger women
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and older and younger people of all generations.
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So that’s kind of launched and prospering, I would say.
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The project that we’ve all been enjoying here at Burning Man,
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the Tea House, is another community art project.
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The Tea House has its own logic.
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I don’t know if you’ve been next door,
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but the Tea House is being run by volunteers
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who are working
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within a structure that we set up as a piece of community art. We thought that it would
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be a great idea to create a tea house that was simple enough to run so that people could
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make it their own and really take it into wherever they wanted to take it.
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I had been out here on the playa for 15 years,
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and it occurred to me that there just weren’t enough spaces
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where alcohol wasn’t being served,
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where there wasn’t a lot of loud music,
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where there was a place for people to rest and hydrate
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and drink tea and be in community and have quiet conversations
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and play some beautiful acoustic music,
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which we have in the tea house.
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And so I created the tea house as a community art project,
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as a structure within which people could pour their own creativity.
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We run 24 hours a day for two weeks.
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We’ve been out here since last Tuesday with a build crew of 15 people,
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and we’ve been serving since last Friday.
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So we’re on week two for us out here.
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And it’s a project that is a small business.
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It’s set up like a small business so that we can get discounts for buying our
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supplies wholesale. We have a way to get our tea and our herbs and our tea gear and our tea tables
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at wholesale prices. And then we give it all away, course here on the playa we also give away
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hundreds of gallons of water we’re on track to go through our first 250 gallons of water
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what other camps out here on the playa give away water we’re committed to giving away water and
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we’ve given away about 200 gallons of it so far we’re i’m about to go into center camp and get
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another water delivery for another 250 gallons of water.
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And the reason we can afford to do that is because all these beautiful people who are camped in this camp pay camp dues.
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And the camp dues that support Camp Soft Landing as a community art project allow us to, for me to get on my bike and go into center camp and say,
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for me to get on my bike and go into center camp and say,
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hey, we want another 250 gallons of water at a buck a gallon, please,
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so that people who are out of water can not only drink tea but fill their water bottles.
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That’s a community art project.
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And it’s made possible because the beautiful people in our camp are willing to pay either 125 apiece for low-income people
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to help support this project as a community art project.
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We believe in really supporting the community,
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and giving away water is an important part of that,
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and also, of course, tea.
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We buy bulk herbs and mix all of our own teas.
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We buy pu-erh from our amazing tea dealer, David Lee Hoffman,
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and we offer that as a gift to the community.
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We go to a lot of festivals with the tea house.
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We’ve been doing it now for five years.
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And every festival we serve at,
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we always serve for free.
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We take this community ethic of the gift economy
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from Burning Man everywhere we go as a community art project,
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and we gift people water and tea.
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We also, because we were able to raise money from our campers,
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buy a really awesome state-of-the-art water filter this year, a Berkey water filter.
00:16:39 ►
Shout out to incredible people who build these water filters so we can filter the heck out of our water.
00:16:47 ►
So no matter what kind of water we get delivered to our cube,
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it often tastes like plastic.
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It’s been stored in plastic.
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It’s been stored in plastic in our cube.
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It’s stored in plastic in our 120 gallons that we bring in in jerry cans out here.
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Before we get our first water delivery out here on the playa,
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in in jerry cans out here before we get our first water delivery out here on the playa we’re able to filter that out and give you really high quality filtered water out here on the playa because
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people in this camp have given us enough money to go out and buy a 700 water filter and a bunch of
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awesome filters so we could in theory take whatever kind of water we got
00:17:22 ►
so this is also part of what I see as a community art project,
00:17:28 ►
supporting the health and safety of the community.
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We’re going to store that water filter in San Francisco,
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where this tea house is based,
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along with all of our other tea gear and our water boilers.
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And you know what?
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If there’s an earthquake in San Francisco, you know what we’ll be doing?
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We’ll be serving tea and giving
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away water in the panhandle
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in Golden Gate Park because
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we’re a community-based
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art project and we’re able and ready
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to do that with whatever water
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we get and we can
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take this idea of a
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community art project and
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really offer it to the world in useful ways.
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And being able to filter water is a very useful part of that project.
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Our water is also stored in our 250-gallon water cube
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out there by the entrance to the tea house.
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And a few years ago, when we got our water delivery,
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they came along and chlorinated it.
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And we sat down and cried, all of us, because we had 250 gallons of water we couldn’t drink.
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It was undrinkable. It tasted like pool water.
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And so somebody in our camp of amazing people here in our community art project camp behind me
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raised their hand and said,
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art project camp behind me, raised their hand and said, hey, I own a boat, and I know how to set up a water filtration system, and if you take me into Reno, into the marine supply
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store, I can build us a custom water filter and filter out all that chlorine from your
00:19:00 ►
250 gallons of undrinkable water, and he did.
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or 250 gallons of undrinkable water, and he did.
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He hand-built a water purification system,
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which is our backup water filter for that water cube.
00:19:14 ►
So we rely on the ingenuity of our community to create the art that we want to give back to the community,
00:19:18 ►
and that’s a really good example of that.
00:19:22 ►
So the Tea House is a volunteer-run project. We depend upon people to sign up
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and help us be able to serve 24-7. We’ll be up and serving until next Tuesday morning
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when we leave the Playa. We come out here early so that we can serve the builders
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and we stay late so that we can serve the people
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who are tearing the city down
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because we want to be able to make sure
00:19:53 ►
that they have a place to get out of the sun
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and lots of water and a place to rest and so on.
00:19:59 ►
We’ve also been working with the Zendo Project this year,
00:20:01 ►
which has been great.
00:20:03 ►
The Multidisciplinary Association for Psychedelic Studies runs the Zendo Project this year, which has been great. The Multidisciplinary Association for Psychedelic Studies
00:20:06 ►
runs the Zendo Project,
00:20:08 ►
a psychedelic harm reduction project
00:20:11 ►
where people can go if they need one-on-one care.
00:20:14 ►
They’re right across the street here at 915 and D,
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and a lot of those people are camping in our camp,
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and the Zendo people have been coming over
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and filling up their water containers
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here at our water cube,
00:20:27 ►
so we’re helping to support that project as well,
00:20:29 ►
which is a wonderful project.
00:20:31 ►
If you know somebody who needs care,
00:20:34 ►
I highly recommend that you bring them over there
00:20:37 ►
to receive care at the Zendo project.
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So part of making sure that these projects are sustainable
00:20:48 ►
is making sure that other people have a stake in them
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and bring their ideas to how they unfold.
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There are now five sister tea houses that have been started
00:21:02 ►
based on the model of our full circle tea house here.
00:21:06 ►
There’s one in Paris, France
00:21:09 ►
that serves wine and cheese along with their tea
00:21:12 ►
because they’re French. There’s one in Austin, Texas.
00:21:15 ►
There’s one in New York City. There’s one in Oakland.
00:21:19 ►
And there’s another one in LA.
00:21:21 ►
It was intentionally modeled to be
00:21:24 ►
inexpensive to put together. It’s built out
00:21:28 ►
of car barns that you can order off of Amazon and have delivered to your doorstep like I did.
00:21:34 ►
The tea boilers are easy to get. It’s easy to find the herbs. It’s easy to find the tea gear. It’s all
00:21:39 ►
put together with the intention of being easy to replicate. It’s an open source idea, like they say in the software world.
00:21:47 ►
I think that community-based art should be replicated.
00:21:50 ►
It should be made as simple as possible
00:21:52 ►
so that it can be taken up and replicated by other people
00:21:55 ►
who can put their own spin on this idea of community artwork.
00:22:00 ►
It shouldn’t be expensive. It shouldn’t be copyrighted.
00:22:03 ►
It shouldn’t be tied up with your own ego.
00:22:06 ►
It should be adaptable, and it should be open enough that people can put their own stamp on it.
00:22:11 ►
This camp that we run has some really great systems.
00:22:15 ►
We designed with one of our friends an evapotron, which is on the top of our panel truck.
00:22:21 ►
As you go outside the tent, we’re evaporating hundreds of gallons of gray water with our evapotron. It’s at the top of our panel truck as you go outside the tent we’re evaporating hundreds of gallons of gray water with our evapotron it’s at the top of our truck we haul the gray water to the top of the
00:22:30 ►
truck and pour it down these cylinders of wire fencing with burlap over them sitting in kiddie
00:22:36 ►
pools with pumps in them and we just pump the gray water to the top of this cylinder and we
00:22:41 ►
evaporate our water it’s a a simple technology, but it means
00:22:46 ►
that we don’t have to take our gray water and do ugly evap ponds here, which damage the surface of
00:22:53 ►
the playa. Community art should be environmentally sustainable art, should be friendly art that
00:22:59 ►
develops technology that allows you to create a sustainable community space
00:23:07 ►
and also be environmentally sensitive.
00:23:10 ►
So we’ve worked on those systems.
00:23:12 ►
If you want to see how we handle our compost and gray water and washing systems,
00:23:16 ►
you can poke your head in our utility area for our tea house
00:23:20 ►
and see how we manage all that.
00:23:22 ►
We compost all the tea.
00:23:24 ►
Of course, we embrace
00:23:25 ►
the leave no trace doctrine that
00:23:27 ►
Burning Man, I think, has been
00:23:29 ►
really… I think the
00:23:31 ►
greatest gift to the world that Burning Man has done
00:23:34 ►
is really upheld
00:23:35 ►
the doctrine of leave no trace.
00:23:38 ►
Of all the things they’ve done,
00:23:40 ►
I think that’s probably the most
00:23:41 ►
profound. That and radical
00:23:43 ►
self-reliance, of course,
00:23:45 ►
and radical inclusion.
00:23:48 ►
But Leave No Trace, we take it seriously.
00:23:50 ►
We moop every square inch of this camp when we’re done.
00:23:54 ►
We get this footprint, this 200 by 250 foot footprint
00:23:58 ►
because we’re really diligent about cleaning up our space
00:24:02 ►
at the end of the burn.
00:24:04 ►
And I think all community art should embrace those values, the leave no trace values.
00:24:10 ►
I think that’s really incredibly important.
00:24:16 ►
I want to talk a little bit about Take Three Presents.
00:24:20 ►
Take Three Presents is a business that I and Christopher Pezza and a third partner, Misha Steiner, who is running the Skinny Kitty Tea House on the other side of the city.
00:24:32 ►
We’re sister tea houses.
00:24:34 ►
The three of us formed another project, which I see as a community art project, another for-profit business.
00:24:44 ►
And we put on events. We put on private, immersive
00:24:50 ►
art parties that are based in the western part of the United States. And they reflect,
00:24:59 ►
I think, other things that I’ve learned about community art that we have taken in part from our experience on the playa
00:25:08 ►
and in part from other experiences that we’ve had
00:25:11 ►
and brought it forward.
00:25:14 ►
One of the things that we all decided
00:25:16 ►
in regards to the immersive art parties that we throw
00:25:22 ►
is that we were going to work with artists,
00:25:23 ►
teams of artists, to create immersive art environments
00:25:29 ►
along a theme, along a narrative.
00:25:31 ►
We also decided in our community art parties
00:25:35 ►
that we were not going to serve alcohol.
00:25:39 ►
One of the things I don’t like about Burning Man,
00:25:41 ►
after being out here for all these years,
00:25:43 ►
is what I think is the confusion
00:25:45 ►
between a gift economy and free alcohol.
00:25:48 ►
I wish people would come
00:25:50 ►
up with other ways to gift aside
00:25:52 ►
from just endlessly
00:25:53 ►
running bars.
00:25:56 ►
Alcohol is an inferior
00:25:57 ►
drug. You know? It just
00:26:00 ►
is. It dehydrates you out here.
00:26:01 ►
You feel really great for, you know,
00:26:04 ►
a beer or two.
00:26:04 ►
And is it dehydrates you out here. You feel really great for, you know, a beer or two.
00:26:13 ►
You know, I’m not above going to one of my favorite little cocktail bars once during the burn and having a lovely martini at Muhammad’s Martini Bar.
00:26:18 ►
Woo, shout out.
00:26:19 ►
But really, drinking out here on the playa, you can’t rehydrate effectively.
00:26:23 ►
You just walk around dehydrated, cranky, with a headache.
00:26:27 ►
So one of the things that we agreed on is that we didn’t want to serve alcohol at our parties.
00:26:36 ►
We served tea, and we let people bring in their own personal quantities of alcohol. If you want to bring in, you know, your champagne for the morning
00:26:49 ►
or a six-pack of beer or your hip flask, great.
00:26:52 ►
Because as it turns out, the amount of alcohol that people can carry in
00:26:57 ►
on their own steam is just about the right amount of alcohol, right?
00:27:03 ►
It’s really hard to get into serious trouble
00:27:05 ►
with the amount of alcohol that you can carry in
00:27:07 ►
with you and your posse,
00:27:08 ►
but running an open bar,
00:27:10 ►
it’s pretty easy to dose your community
00:27:13 ►
with just a little bit too much alcohol,
00:27:15 ►
which, as we all know,
00:27:16 ►
doesn’t really go very well with psychedelics at all.
00:27:20 ►
So we don’t serve alcohol at our parties
00:27:25 ►
we run the tea bar
00:27:26 ►
no one seems to miss it
00:27:28 ►
if you really want your flask or your beer or your champagne
00:27:32 ►
people bring it in
00:27:33 ►
we don’t search you at the gate
00:27:35 ►
another thing I don’t like about Burning Man
00:27:37 ►
although I understand that they don’t want
00:27:39 ►
stowaways and people’s vans
00:27:42 ►
but we don’t search people
00:27:44 ►
at our parties it’s not veryans, but we don’t search people at our parties.
00:27:45 ►
It’s not very friendly.
00:27:48 ►
Another thing we don’t do at our Take Three events,
00:27:52 ►
we don’t advertise on social media.
00:27:54 ►
They’re private parties.
00:27:56 ►
We’ve taken the entire art community
00:27:59 ►
that we’ve built around those events off of social media.
00:28:03 ►
And the reason we did that is because
00:28:05 ►
we perceive a certain value that people have
00:28:08 ►
towards privacy.
00:28:11 ►
I’m from the generation where I was raised
00:28:14 ►
not to live my life in public.
00:28:17 ►
I don’t post to social media about who I’m with
00:28:19 ►
and where I’m going and what I’m doing
00:28:21 ►
and the next party I’m headed to
00:28:23 ►
and who I’m going out with and what my birthday is.
00:28:26 ►
No, thank you.
00:28:27 ►
No, really.
00:28:29 ►
I believe there’s a value to privacy and living in a private realm,
00:28:33 ►
and the parties that we throw are private,
00:28:36 ►
and we don’t let people post about them on social media.
00:28:40 ►
And if you do name the party and post about it on social media
00:28:43 ►
or take photos and put it up on Facebook, we take you off the party list.
00:28:48 ►
And we’re serious about it. There is a space
00:28:51 ►
for community art that is not on social media, that is
00:28:55 ►
private and I think that’s worth supporting.
00:28:59 ►
And I know that’s a radical idea but we’re really into radical ideas, you know,
00:29:03 ►
be a radical community.
00:29:03 ►
I know that’s a radical idea, but we’re really into radical ideas.
00:29:04 ►
You know, be a radical community.
00:29:12 ►
Also, I wanted to talk about another thing that we do in all of our projects,
00:29:14 ►
and that is that they’re all multi-generational.
00:29:18 ►
Did you see the kids serving behind the tea bar in the tea house?
00:29:20 ►
Yeah, that’s right.
00:29:25 ►
We have people in this camp as young as that kid, people into their late 70s.
00:29:31 ►
One of the things I don’t like about the electronic dance music scene is that it’s all people of the same age.
00:29:33 ►
How boring. You know, really.
00:29:37 ►
It’s so much more interesting to have people of all generations.
00:29:42 ►
Kids, old people, people of all genders.
00:29:44 ►
Make space for people of all genders. Whatever gender you want to be. I don’t think there are just two genders make space for people of all genders whatever gender you want to be
00:29:47 ►
I don’t think there are just two genders around here
00:29:49 ►
and people of all generations
00:29:52 ►
really coming together to be part of a community art project
00:29:57 ►
when you’re not serving alcohol
00:29:59 ►
you can recruit an 8 year old kid to be your tea server
00:30:02 ►
he’s having a ball, He’s an amazing tea server.
00:30:06 ►
So it’s a way to include people of all generations
00:30:09 ►
in a community art project and a vision like that.
00:30:13 ►
And that’s really important to all the events that we do,
00:30:19 ►
all of our tea house events,
00:30:21 ►
all of the Women’s Congress events
00:30:24 ►
really focus on people of all generations
00:30:27 ►
at our take three events I created
00:30:31 ►
what I call the granny room to recruit elders in our
00:30:36 ►
community, we set them up in their own space in a comfortable room
00:30:40 ►
you know because sometimes they don’t want to be out there dancing all night
00:30:44 ►
although sometimes they do, but we give them their own space to be elders and grandparents. And
00:30:51 ►
when people feel like they need a little grounding at those parties, guess where they go to?
00:30:56 ►
They go talk to granny or grandpa. And often many of us don’t have our grandparents around anymore.
00:31:05 ►
I miss my grandparents so much,
00:31:07 ►
and when I do, I can go talk to our grannies in our space
00:31:13 ►
that we create just for them.
00:31:15 ►
We set up a nice room just like granny would want it,
00:31:19 ►
and it’s a place for sleeping.
00:31:21 ►
Granny watches over you while you sleep
00:31:23 ►
because we want to make sure that in our community art projects we support health and safety, just like filtering our water.
00:31:31 ►
We always have a space for people to sleep so that you don’t get back in your car after one of our
00:31:36 ►
events and put yourself in danger of falling asleep behind the wheel. The most dangerous thing
00:31:41 ►
we do here at Burning Man is drive out of here. By far the most
00:31:45 ►
dangerous thing we do is coming in
00:31:47 ►
on the road and leaving on the road.
00:31:50 ►
So we create a sleeping space
00:31:51 ►
in our tea house. We create sleeping
00:31:53 ►
spaces at all of our community art
00:31:56 ►
events for people to rest.
00:31:58 ►
And in the granny space,
00:32:00 ►
it’s become very popular
00:32:01 ►
to go to the granny space and sleep,
00:32:04 ►
especially for unaccompanied women,
00:32:06 ►
because they know that it’s safe.
00:32:08 ►
Granny doesn’t allow any nookie in the granny space.
00:32:12 ►
We have other spaces for nookie, you know,
00:32:14 ►
but there’s no nookie in the granny space.
00:32:17 ►
So you can go there.
00:32:18 ►
It’s a safe place.
00:32:19 ►
You can sleep.
00:32:20 ►
Nobody will bother you.
00:32:22 ►
Granny’s watching over you.
00:32:23 ►
How beautiful, you know, to be watched over by granny
00:32:26 ►
as you sleep, what could be safer
00:32:28 ►
more comfortable
00:32:29 ►
so we’re really trying to
00:32:32 ►
include all generations
00:32:34 ►
all generations
00:32:36 ►
of people in our
00:32:38 ►
art projects
00:32:40 ►
it’s really
00:32:41 ►
important, a couple other things
00:32:44 ►
that we’re trying to do in our art projects.
00:32:46 ►
We’re trying to do creative financing.
00:32:48 ►
All artists need to become financiers.
00:32:51 ►
We need to find creative ways to support ourselves as artists.
00:32:56 ►
Kickstarter and Indiegogo, of course.
00:32:58 ►
Yes. Crowdfunding, of course.
00:33:01 ►
It’s been done, and it’s been done, and it’s been done.
00:33:04 ►
And also grants. We write
00:33:05 ►
grant proposals. We target donors. We tithe our own incomes. I financed the tea house out of my
00:33:13 ►
pocket for four years. We’re about to do our first crowdsourcing campaign sometime this winter.
00:33:20 ►
I had a good job in Silicon Valley. My parents belonged to a church, and they tithed their income.
00:33:27 ►
Christians traditionally have tithed a portion of their income to their community.
00:33:32 ►
I thought, well, okay, I’ll just take a portion of my income, and I’ll build a tea house.
00:33:37 ►
Same thing, right?
00:33:38 ►
Old idea.
00:33:41 ►
Tithe your income.
00:33:42 ►
Give some of it to your community.
00:33:44 ►
Create community art
00:33:45 ►
it’s easy
00:33:46 ►
tickets, we sell tickets to our event
00:33:49 ►
we do fundraising campaigns
00:33:50 ►
there’s something really cool called Patreon
00:33:53 ►
that I’d like to do a shout out to
00:33:55 ►
interesting crowdfunding platform
00:33:58 ►
that allows artists
00:33:59 ►
just to say
00:34:00 ►
instead of funding a project
00:34:02 ►
just fund me as an artist
00:34:03 ►
I think that’s cool.
00:34:05 ►
That’s an evolution of crowdfunding.
00:34:08 ►
I might try that.
00:34:09 ►
It’s a little scary because, of course, there’s rejection.
00:34:12 ►
The world could say, we don’t like you as an artist.
00:34:15 ►
We’re not giving you any money.
00:34:16 ►
But you have to ask, right?
00:34:19 ►
A friend of mine, Amanda Palmer, famous musician,
00:34:24 ►
started the Dresden Dolls and many other art projects, lives in an arts collective called the Cloud Club that I used to live in in Boston. She took my apartment over. I was just there. I get to sit at her kitchen table. It used to be my kitchen table and write. She’s using Patreon and I think that’s a cool thing. Shout out to her.
00:34:45 ►
She’s been very successful in crowdfunding.
00:34:49 ►
So I want to talk about a couple more things.
00:34:51 ►
One is how to sustain community art projects.
00:34:54 ►
I think they need to continuously evolve.
00:34:58 ►
Good artists never repeat themselves.
00:35:02 ►
Strong community art projects always evolve.
00:35:05 ►
They always do something new.
00:35:07 ►
The big news for me this year is that
00:35:09 ►
somebody else has stepped forward in our camp
00:35:13 ►
to run Camp Soft Landing.
00:35:15 ►
Hallelujah.
00:35:17 ►
After five years of running this camp,
00:35:19 ►
along with Christopher Pezza and our friend Trip,
00:35:24 ►
I’m retiring from running a giant Burning Man camp,
00:35:28 ►
which makes me weep tears of joy,
00:35:32 ►
because it’s time for someone else to run it
00:35:34 ►
so that I can create a new tea house with other people
00:35:37 ►
so that our community can build a whole new tea house next year
00:35:42 ►
and bring it to the playa.
00:35:43 ►
That’s our intention.
00:35:45 ►
So in order to evolve community art projects,
00:35:48 ►
you have to let pieces of the project go
00:35:52 ►
and say, hey, you run this.
00:35:54 ►
I’m going to evolve that piece of the project over here.
00:35:57 ►
I’m going to build a new tea house.
00:35:59 ►
The car barns that we build our tea house out of
00:36:02 ►
are old, and they’re reaching the end of their lives,
00:36:04 ►
and we need to raise money and build a proper tea house.
00:36:07 ►
We have some ideas on how to do that
00:36:09 ►
that reflect the ethic of community art.
00:36:13 ►
I think you also need to think about radical self-reliance,
00:36:19 ►
real radical self-reliance.
00:36:22 ►
I think that one of the best things we do is
00:36:26 ►
go to Japlaya. Japlaya is the
00:36:27 ►
4th of July event
00:36:29 ►
where we bring our tea house and we build it
00:36:31 ►
in the playa north of here,
00:36:34 ►
north of the 12-mile access
00:36:35 ►
from where the Burning Man
00:36:37 ►
site is. And we do
00:36:39 ►
real radical self-reliance up there.
00:36:42 ►
We build a tea house out in the middle of nowhere
00:36:44 ►
and half our crew comes in from Las Vegas and half our crew comes in from San Francisco and we real radical self-reliance up there. We build a tea house out in the middle of nowhere,
00:36:47 ►
and half our crew comes in from Las Vegas,
00:36:49 ►
and half our crew comes in from San Francisco, and we build a tea house, and we sit around,
00:36:51 ►
and we drink tea, and we see who shows up.
00:36:53 ►
There are a couple thousand people out there.
00:36:55 ►
People build these Bedouin camps far away from each other.
00:37:00 ►
You can barely see the other camp in the distance.
00:37:03 ►
It’s how Burning Man used to be and we still
00:37:05 ►
do it and we set
00:37:08 ►
up our own potties,
00:37:09 ►
our own grey water system.
00:37:12 ►
It’s really radical
00:37:14 ►
self-reliance and I’d like to support
00:37:16 ►
more of that. I’d like
00:37:18 ►
people to really learn
00:37:20 ►
how to run their own
00:37:21 ►
logistics and their
00:37:23 ►
own systems and be fully independent and Japlaya teaches you how to do that.
00:37:30 ►
So I’d like to bring our community art project more and more to open Playa
00:37:35 ►
and really run a fully self-sustaining, what I call revolutionary self-reliance,
00:37:43 ►
going beyond the radical self-reliance to really, really self-reliance, going beyond the radical self-reliance
00:37:46 ►
to really, really self-reliant systems.
00:37:50 ►
And this land has really taught us how to do that.
00:37:54 ►
So shout out to the good things that Burning Man has done.
00:37:58 ►
It’s taught us how to not be spectators,
00:38:01 ►
how to really fully participate.
00:38:04 ►
It’s taught us how to work together to build camps,
00:38:09 ►
to build gray water systems, to build electrical systems.
00:38:13 ►
Our generators are right behind us.
00:38:15 ►
How to set up fuel storage systems,
00:38:17 ►
how to handle water storage, how to filter water,
00:38:21 ►
how to be our own rangers.
00:38:23 ►
I was a ranger here for a little while.
00:38:26 ►
I got good training as a ranger and took those ideas out
00:38:29 ►
and have formed our own ranger crews for our own events.
00:38:32 ►
Very useful training.
00:38:34 ►
We bring in our own medical people at our own events, our own EMTs.
00:38:39 ►
We try to set a high bar for taking care of our own community
00:38:43 ►
when we run community events.
00:38:45 ►
Of course,
00:38:51 ►
we don’t need to do that here because we’ve got lots of medical people here on the playa, but I think that that’s part of being able to be radically self-reliant. We’re able to settle
00:38:57 ►
disputes. We have to have a dispute resolution process. Disputes always occur. They’re part of
00:39:03 ►
human nature. We need a process to
00:39:05 ►
work out disputes. Here in our
00:39:08 ►
camp, Soft Landing, we have seven sub
00:39:10 ►
camps. Each sub camp has a leader.
00:39:12 ►
That leader is responsible
00:39:13 ►
for working through things in their sub
00:39:16 ►
camp and laying out the placement of
00:39:18 ►
people within the sub camp in the map
00:39:20 ►
that we draw. Each sub camp has
00:39:22 ►
a place. As people come into
00:39:24 ►
the camp, each person is placed,
00:39:26 ►
depending upon which sub-camp they’re in. And if there’s a dispute within that sub-camp,
00:39:32 ►
the leader handles it. And if it’s something the camp managers need to sort out, then the leader
00:39:36 ►
of that sub-camp come to us and say, hey, we have an issue. Could you help us work this out? And that decentralized model, as it turns out,
00:39:46 ►
works out really well.
00:39:49 ►
This camp is a beautiful group of people.
00:39:51 ►
We have no drama in this camp.
00:39:54 ►
People sort it out.
00:39:56 ►
It’s a really lovely thing to see.
00:39:58 ►
Everyone treats each other with respect
00:40:00 ►
because we have a way to handle disputes
00:40:02 ►
and to handle questions.
00:40:04 ►
And I think that every community art project needs that. because we have a way to handle disputes and to handle questions.
00:40:08 ►
And I think that every community art project needs that. They need a dispute resolution process that works for them somehow.
00:40:14 ►
I really believe in decentralized community art.
00:40:18 ►
I’m not really happy with the idea of Burning Man getting bigger and bigger.
00:40:22 ►
I understand why.
00:40:24 ►
But I like the small model.
00:40:28 ►
I like decentralized art.
00:40:30 ►
It’s harder to target,
00:40:32 ►
harder for authorities to lean on you in various ways,
00:40:35 ►
harder to target.
00:40:37 ►
Be small, be agile, be decentralized.
00:40:41 ►
I like that model myself.
00:40:43 ►
I think community art projects should be transparent.
00:40:47 ►
One of my other beefs with Burning Man is they’re not particularly transparent with any of the data
00:40:51 ►
about arrests or disputes within their own community. They keep, you know, files on people
00:40:59 ►
in their HR department that you can’t get access to. I found out about that firsthand.
00:41:07 ►
There’s no transparency, really.
00:41:09 ►
I used to be a reporter here on the playa.
00:41:12 ►
The first three years I was here from 96 to 99.
00:41:15 ►
It’s very difficult to get any information out of the org, and I understand why they want to control information, of course.
00:41:19 ►
But I think a good community art project
00:41:21 ►
has a level of transparency and accountability
00:41:24 ►
to the communities that they serve.
00:41:26 ►
I really believe in that.
00:41:29 ►
I really believe in not holding too tightly to one’s brand.
00:41:34 ►
I don’t like the idea of brands.
00:41:35 ►
Community art projects should be,
00:41:38 ►
sure, if you want to spin off another tea house, that’s great,
00:41:41 ►
but it shouldn’t be the full circle tea house, regional tea house,
00:41:46 ►
regional tea house,
00:41:48 ►
like a regional burn, it should
00:41:50 ►
be its own thing, you know?
00:41:52 ►
I think you need to let good
00:41:53 ►
ideas go and prosper on their own
00:41:56 ►
two feet without
00:41:57 ►
branding it. I don’t like the idea
00:42:00 ►
of branding. I really
00:42:02 ►
believe people should come up with their
00:42:03 ►
own ideas, take a good idea. All art is based on the previous
00:42:08 ►
art that came before. It’s all derivative. All art is derivative
00:42:12 ►
and it should be open and freely exchanged. Good community art
00:42:16 ►
I think should be like that. I also believe that good community art
00:42:20 ►
should foster as much freedom for people to change their consciousness.
00:42:24 ►
I really think that in states where medical cannabis
00:42:27 ►
is available, that community art gatherings should always
00:42:32 ►
have the space for people to use cannabis and use it safely
00:42:36 ►
without harassment. If I was doing a large gathering,
00:42:40 ►
I’d much rather have people use cannabis than alcohol any day
00:42:44 ►
of the week.
00:42:46 ►
You know why?
00:42:48 ►
You know why?
00:42:52 ►
Would you rather deal with high people or drunk people?
00:42:56 ►
I mean, there’s really no question.
00:43:00 ►
We hold these truths to be self-evident, right?
00:43:13 ►
So the future, sustainable models, sustainable financial models, more women running events, more women running events, more women running events.
00:43:18 ►
Yeah, absolutely.
00:43:22 ►
I’ve had the great pleasure of meeting with other event producers in San Francisco.
00:43:24 ►
Guess how many women there are in that room? Very
00:43:26 ►
few. Not
00:43:28 ►
enough. And you really
00:43:30 ►
have to hold your ground, ladies.
00:43:32 ►
The gentlemen, bless their souls,
00:43:34 ►
they’ve got that fine male energy.
00:43:36 ►
You know, you really have to just
00:43:38 ►
stand up and offer your fine female
00:43:39 ►
energy right there with them.
00:43:42 ►
You know, they’re our brothers. We need to all work
00:43:44 ►
together. It takes some grit
00:43:45 ►
to do that, but the more women who do it,
00:43:47 ►
the easier it will be. I love my
00:43:49 ►
partners dearly. I’m really
00:43:51 ►
pleased to be working with them, and
00:43:53 ►
I just want
00:43:56 ►
more women to be
00:43:57 ►
active in community art projects.
00:44:01 ►
More of the future. I want it to
00:44:03 ►
be less expensive. I don’t like how expensive the burn is
00:44:06 ►
that’s bullshit, it’s too expensive
00:44:08 ►
don’t like that
00:44:10 ►
I want community art events to be affordable
00:44:13 ►
we have a low
00:44:15 ►
income option for people who want to join
00:44:17 ►
this camp, they can still donate money
00:44:19 ►
to this
00:44:21 ►
community art project but they don’t have
00:44:23 ►
to pay the full price.
00:44:25 ►
There should always be a lesser cost option
00:44:28 ►
for people who don’t make a lot of money in the default world.
00:44:32 ►
And, of course, Burning Man does that.
00:44:33 ►
They do offer low-income tickets,
00:44:35 ►
but it’s still expensive for people.
00:44:38 ►
I want it to be less expensive.
00:44:40 ►
I like Japlaya. It’s free.
00:44:43 ►
There are no tickets. There’s no gate.
00:44:44 ►
There’s no law enforcement
00:44:46 ►
it’s just you out there in the vastness
00:44:47 ►
go get lost, we’ve all been lost out there on the upper playa
00:44:51 ►
it’s delicious
00:44:52 ►
it’s like where the heck are we, I don’t know, let’s stop
00:44:54 ►
this is beautiful, isn’t this beautiful?
00:44:58 ►
do you have any idea where we are?
00:45:01 ►
let’s get back in the truck
00:45:02 ►
I think community art needs to fight to stay real We are, sort of. Let’s get back in the truck. Okay.
00:45:08 ►
I think community art needs to fight to stay real.
00:45:10 ►
Serve the people that you’re serving.
00:45:13 ►
Serve the present needs.
00:45:16 ►
Don’t get hijacked by intermediaries, by someone’s software platform or social media, blah, blah.
00:45:21 ►
Try to be as direct as possible in your business models
00:45:24 ►
and your organizational models.
00:45:26 ►
Don’t get co-opted by some company who wants to be your corporate sponsor.
00:45:32 ►
Don’t get co-opted by a handful of donors.
00:45:35 ►
Have a decentralized financial model.
00:45:39 ►
Asking people in this camp to each donate some money towards camp fees is pretty decentralized.
00:45:45 ►
People are pretty willing to do that.
00:45:48 ►
And if they have an issue, we explain what it goes for.
00:45:51 ►
It goes for water that we’re giving away.
00:45:52 ►
It goes for fuel to keep the generators going.
00:45:56 ►
It goes for our tea gear.
00:45:58 ►
It goes for our tea that we give away, our pu-erh that we give away, our herbs.
00:46:03 ►
It goes for the things that we give away. It goes for our firewood. It goes for our new burn barrel. It goes for our kitchen
00:46:09 ►
gear so we can all be together and cook together. And I think that in a community art project,
00:46:17 ►
you need to make sure the artists are all taking good care of themselves. I’m working
00:46:22 ►
on that myself. Self-care. Don’t let people get burned out.
00:46:25 ►
Artists get burned out.
00:46:26 ►
Activists get burned out.
00:46:28 ►
To practice good self-care.
00:46:30 ►
Know when it’s time to bow out and go,
00:46:32 ►
you’re an amazing guy or an amazing woman.
00:46:36 ►
Here, you run this part of the project.
00:46:38 ►
I’ll be over here, you know,
00:46:40 ►
thinking about what I want to do next
00:46:42 ►
or doing something different.
00:46:45 ►
Simplify wherever possible.
00:46:47 ►
Stay small.
00:46:48 ►
Stay inexpensive.
00:46:50 ►
Stay decentralized.
00:46:53 ►
Balance the publicity you’re getting
00:46:56 ►
with your ability to offer people private spaces to be.
00:47:01 ►
You don’t need to tell the world everything.
00:47:04 ►
People value private spaces. People value
00:47:08 ►
mystery. People value something that they can add their special sauce to that’s just
00:47:15 ►
not all decided in advance. Leave some things up to chance. Ask people how they want to contribute in your community art project.
00:47:29 ►
So I’m going to stop talking for a little while
00:47:32 ►
and take some questions,
00:47:34 ►
and then I have some, I think, final things to say
00:47:37 ►
about all this.
00:47:38 ►
Any questions out there?
00:47:41 ►
Hi, Annie. I’m Jonathan.
00:47:44 ►
Hi.
00:47:44 ►
Hi. I think we met at Symbiosis Tea House once.
00:47:49 ►
So I was interested in, you know, I’ve been a rainbow gathering facilitator and kitchen builder.
00:47:55 ►
I think I talked to you about it a few years ago for 20 years and build kitchens and camps.
00:48:02 ►
And I guess I started with that in 86.
00:48:05 ►
So I see some of the aspects of this, leave no trace,
00:48:08 ►
certainly the term welcome home.
00:48:10 ►
You may recall one of the other terms in Rainbow Gathering,
00:48:13 ►
always free, which this isn’t, but you speak of.
00:48:16 ►
Are you familiar with that?
00:48:19 ►
And where would you see, how would you compare the community art project successes of Rainbow with those of Burning Man?
00:48:30 ►
And where Burning Man is, you know, you feel does things, you know, more effectively or has better practices.
00:48:38 ►
And where there are practices it might learn from the Rainbow Gathering, if you’re familiar with it.
00:48:42 ►
I am familiar with Rainbow Gatherings.
00:48:44 ►
I’ve gone to them. I’ve been on their phone tree
00:48:47 ►
for people who’ve been arrested at Rainbow Gatherings.
00:48:51 ►
The authorities often set up roadblocks and just haul people in and run
00:48:55 ►
warrants on them. It’s really challenging sometimes for the people there.
00:49:00 ►
I think the Rainbow Family of Light are heroes.
00:49:04 ►
I think they have pointed the way for 50 years, give or take.
00:49:10 ►
Thank you.
00:49:14 ►
They’re the original, you know, free community people.
00:49:20 ►
And I think we have a lot to learn from them. The Rainbow family brought their family to open land
00:49:31 ►
and national parks around the country
00:49:36 ►
and they set up big communities in the middle of these national parks
00:49:40 ►
with no permits.
00:49:42 ►
Nobody is in charge.
00:49:44 ►
It’s self-organizing.
00:49:46 ►
People set up their own kitchens.
00:49:48 ►
They build beautiful kitchens.
00:49:49 ►
The Rainbow family set the bar
00:49:51 ►
for building camp kitchens.
00:49:54 ►
They build camp latrines.
00:49:55 ►
They do camp hygiene.
00:49:58 ►
We have a lot to learn from them,
00:50:01 ►
and it’s still going on.
00:50:03 ►
It’s beautifully decentralized.
00:50:05 ►
It’s the original decentralized.
00:50:06 ►
Nobody is in charge here,
00:50:08 ►
and nobody has asked permission
00:50:10 ►
for these tens of thousands of people
00:50:13 ►
to show up at this national forest
00:50:16 ►
and just gather because we feel that we have a right to,
00:50:20 ►
a constitutional right to assembly.
00:50:22 ►
The downside of it is that
00:50:25 ►
they attract a lot of attention from law enforcement.
00:50:28 ►
Here the law enforcement is with us within the perimeter.
00:50:32 ►
They are in charge of this event.
00:50:34 ►
They could close the gate any time they wanted.
00:50:36 ►
They could come in here and arrest us all.
00:50:38 ►
They can do whatever they want.
00:50:40 ►
And it’s also true when people gather in the National Forest.
00:50:43 ►
They set up roadblocks.
00:50:45 ►
They run warrants, as I said.
00:50:47 ►
They pull people out of their vehicles and arrest them.
00:50:50 ►
They search, just like they do here,
00:50:52 ►
with dogs and guns and night vision goggles and uniforms.
00:51:00 ►
You know, that’s kind of the world we already live in.
00:51:03 ►
And it’s, I think, a challenge for community art projects
00:51:08 ►
to try to shield their communities from that.
00:51:12 ►
It’s a hard thing to do.
00:51:14 ►
It’s one reason why privacy is a virtue.
00:51:19 ►
If you’re going to have a private event,
00:51:21 ►
keep it off social media
00:51:22 ►
and only tell the people who are on your party
00:51:25 ►
list. That’s one way to not tell the authorities that you’re having a gathering. That’s one
00:51:34 ►
way to do it. But the Rainbow family has been really good at supporting each other through
00:51:40 ►
the difficult process of dealing with law enforcement. They have a phone tree where people who are arrested can reach their families.
00:51:49 ►
They have systems where people can get bailed out,
00:51:52 ►
where their children can be taken care of if they’re in custody.
00:51:55 ►
They have really pioneered all of that.
00:51:58 ►
And it’s been a beautiful service to watch people take care of themselves like that
00:52:04 ►
in often very extreme environments where the authorities are extremely aggressive.
00:52:10 ►
And we owe them all a great deal of
00:52:12 ►
honor and support.
00:52:16 ►
It’s the ultimate decentralized thing. Perhaps you want to do
00:52:20 ►
a community art project where nobody is in charge, like the Rainbow family.
00:52:24 ►
There’s nobody in charge here.
00:52:26 ►
And yet there are people who step up year after year to build the kitchens
00:52:30 ►
and run the emergency medical services that they run out there and take care of their community.
00:52:40 ►
One of my favorite things about the Rainbow community is they have a handoff with the local ambulance services.
00:52:45 ►
And I know this because I know somebody who works their emergency medical.
00:52:50 ►
They’re often up a trail, not just in the forest, but up a trail.
00:52:55 ►
They will get somebody who’s hurt or sick or injured, and they’ll carry them down the trail,
00:52:59 ►
and they’ll put them in a rainbow family vehicle,
00:53:01 ►
and they’ll drive out to an arranged handoff site with a local
00:53:05 ►
ambulance crew and they will give that injured or sick person to the local ambulance crew to take
00:53:11 ►
to the local medical facility they work that out in advance they have their own radio networks
00:53:16 ►
they’re very organized it’s a beautiful thing it’s a true piece of community art. It really is. Thank you.
00:53:26 ►
I’m curious if
00:53:27 ►
you’ve ever faced any
00:53:29 ►
animosity or jealousy throughout
00:53:31 ►
your journey, especially
00:53:34 ►
from close people
00:53:35 ►
also wanting to be involved and how
00:53:38 ►
do you manage that, mitigate that
00:53:39 ►
or suggestions in terms of
00:53:41 ►
how do you
00:53:42 ►
go through that?
00:53:47 ►
Yeah, well that’s human nature, you know.
00:53:49 ►
We’re all imperfect beings, right?
00:53:51 ►
Of course there’s going to be animosity and tension and jealousy
00:53:54 ►
and blah, blah, blah, blah, blah.
00:53:58 ►
I think that’s one of the great lessons of Burning Man in some sense.
00:54:02 ►
I know some of the founders of Burning Man.
00:54:04 ►
They went through a really scorching process
00:54:07 ►
of suing each other
00:54:08 ►
and being in conflict with each other.
00:54:13 ►
And it was hard to watch, you know.
00:54:16 ►
And yet that was their path.
00:54:18 ►
And they’ve worked out a lot of things, I think.
00:54:21 ►
But it’s a model not to emulate. I think it’s’s a model not to emulate
00:54:25 ►
I think it’s really
00:54:28 ►
a challenge but an ultimate challenge
00:54:30 ►
to treat each other
00:54:31 ►
with kindness and respect
00:54:33 ►
as organizers
00:54:34 ►
it’s hard to do
00:54:36 ►
we’re all imperfect
00:54:38 ►
and we have to always ask ourselves
00:54:42 ►
am I doing this because I want
00:54:43 ►
my ego stroked or I want validation or I want to be known
00:54:48 ►
or am I doing this because I really think
00:54:51 ►
it’s the best thing for this project?
00:54:55 ►
I think it’s a really big challenge.
00:54:57 ►
I think when people start copywriting things
00:55:00 ►
and getting jealous of each other’s ideas,
00:55:04 ►
you move out of the realm of art and closer
00:55:07 ►
more towards the realm of commerce and competition.
00:55:11 ►
I think it’s the ultimate challenge, really. How do you
00:55:15 ►
work out here effectively, and even when you’re tired and hungry and
00:55:19 ►
dehydrated and cranky, and you don’t want to share your
00:55:23 ►
last avocado.
00:55:21 ►
dehydrated and cranky and you don’t want to share your last
00:55:24 ►
avocado
00:55:24 ►
or somebody has plugged in their
00:55:30 ►
boombox
00:55:32 ►
into your
00:55:33 ►
tea house sound system and are playing
00:55:35 ►
music that hmm
00:55:37 ►
I don’t know maybe we should switch the station
00:55:39 ►
I think that’s the ultimate challenge
00:55:42 ►
is just to figure out how to treat each
00:55:44 ►
other with kindness and respect that’s the ultimate challenge, is just to figure out how to treat each other with kindness and respect.
00:55:45 ►
That’s the ultimate community art project, right?
00:55:49 ►
In all of the work that you’ve done, have you ever personally experienced possibly being looked at differently,
00:55:58 ►
or, like, you’re less capable because of your gender? And if so, like, how did you navigate that?
00:56:05 ►
Or any suggestions you would make for, like, other women
00:56:08 ►
that are trying to navigate working equally with men
00:56:11 ►
in community organization?
00:56:15 ►
Great question.
00:56:16 ►
You know, the men I work with, I really love and honor.
00:56:20 ►
I mean, I work with them because I really believe in them as people.
00:56:24 ►
But they’re growing up in a sexist culture.
00:56:27 ►
That’s the culture they’re growing up in, you know.
00:56:30 ►
And even if they’re raised in households with really strong women, they’re soaking in it.
00:56:37 ►
And so are women, by the way.
00:56:38 ►
We’re growing up in sexist culture, too.
00:56:41 ►
We treat, you know, the men around us and the people of other genders in
00:56:45 ►
a sexist way also sometimes.
00:56:48 ►
None of us are immune from sexism.
00:56:51 ►
But dealing with it
00:56:52 ►
in a community context
00:56:54 ►
when you’re running an event
00:56:55 ►
is a challenge.
00:56:57 ►
What I’ve learned is it’s
00:56:59 ►
important to know when to step up and say
00:57:02 ►
I feel excluded from that decision.
00:57:04 ►
I want to be part of that decision. How come I wasn’t part of that
00:57:08 ►
decision? How could we make it better? How could we
00:57:11 ►
enhance our communication so that I’m really part of these decisions?
00:57:16 ►
How can we work on this?
00:57:17 ►
You know? And maybe the time to do
00:57:21 ►
that is not when you’re loading and unloading the truck. You know?
00:57:25 ►
You’ve got to figure out when.
00:57:27 ►
So even though you might have this emotion that goes,
00:57:30 ►
God damn it, they made a decision I wasn’t part of.
00:57:33 ►
Maybe you want to wait until it’s not the middle of the night
00:57:36 ►
and you’re loading a truck to work that out.
00:57:41 ►
I really believe that strong organizations have a balance in genders.
00:57:46 ►
We’re only as strong as all the genders participating.
00:57:50 ►
And I always say, we all need to be part of this decision
00:57:54 ►
so that we can make the best decision possible.
00:57:57 ►
How can I be part of this decision too?
00:58:00 ►
How can we make that possible?
00:58:03 ►
Without laying blame or expressing anger.
00:58:08 ►
Sometimes we need to express anger.
00:58:10 ►
I know sometimes I’ve definitely expressed anger.
00:58:13 ►
God damn it.
00:58:14 ►
How come I wasn’t part of that?
00:58:17 ►
But I think it’s really an art form, a community art form, to figure out how to work that out
00:58:27 ►
and just insist that you be treated as an equal,
00:58:31 ►
come up with very specific examples of where you feel that you weren’t,
00:58:35 ►
and find a time to sit down and discuss it
00:58:37 ►
and find a solution to a communications issue
00:58:42 ►
or a structural issue within your organization
00:58:45 ►
and work it out.
00:58:48 ►
It’s the only way that we’re going to have more women in event producing
00:58:52 ►
and that women coming into these kinds of community art projects
00:58:57 ►
will see a space for them.
00:58:59 ►
And the women who are already there should make sure
00:59:01 ►
that the women who they’re working with are treated with respect as well.
00:59:06 ►
And also that the transgender people, the people of all genders, are treated with respect.
00:59:12 ►
We’re all in some gender continuum out there.
00:59:17 ►
So I think it’s an ongoing discussion.
00:59:25 ►
discussion. And the reason why I founded a women’s organization is because I wanted women to learn how to run events and handing it over to a new generation of women helps facilitate
00:59:33 ►
that. If you’re in a position to mentor people or hand over a piece of your project to other
00:59:39 ►
women to run, go do it. Or y’all men out there, find women to mentor if you have
00:59:45 ►
special skills. It really helps.
00:59:48 ►
I’ve certainly had some great
00:59:49 ►
male mentors doing this work
00:59:51 ►
and
00:59:52 ►
I’m inspired by the men that
00:59:55 ►
I work with as well.
00:59:57 ►
More questions?
00:59:59 ►
Bryce? What’s your favorite event
01:00:01 ►
that you’ve ever been to?
01:00:04 ►
Favorite event that I’ve ever been to? Favorite event that I’ve ever been to?
01:00:07 ►
Oh, wow.
01:00:08 ►
I guess I have to say Japlaya, you know,
01:00:12 ►
because it seems like such the logical extension
01:00:16 ►
of everything we’ve learned at Burning Man.
01:00:20 ►
I wonder what would happen, you know,
01:00:24 ►
if there was no Burning Man.
01:00:26 ►
I asked John Mitchell this question a couple of talks ago.
01:00:30 ►
I said, can you imagine a post-Burning Man world
01:00:34 ►
where we take what we’ve learned and we’re still out on the playa?
01:00:39 ►
What would that look like?
01:00:41 ►
I like to playa because it shows that people can take all this radical self-reliance and build
01:00:47 ►
camps, have fun, treat the land with respect, take care
01:00:52 ►
of each other and have a whopping good time out there. Oh my goodness.
01:00:57 ►
I think also it
01:00:59 ►
allows us to learn more about the land. I don’t particularly like
01:01:04 ►
being hemmed in by a perimeter.
01:01:05 ►
Once you’re out on Japlaya and you’ve got a couple hundred miles of open playa
01:01:09 ►
between your front doorstep and the next mountain range,
01:01:13 ►
it really changes your image of what the playa is.
01:01:18 ►
You learn how to navigate by the land features.
01:01:21 ►
You learn about the land.
01:01:23 ►
And so I really love that about Japlaya.
01:01:25 ►
I worry about the carrying capacity of this land
01:01:29 ►
with more and more people on it.
01:01:31 ►
I worry about the impact of all of us
01:01:33 ►
on this little scrap of land.
01:01:34 ►
Of course, they moved the site to lessen the footprint,
01:01:39 ►
but I really want decentralized models.
01:01:43 ►
This is a centralized model.
01:01:44 ►
Centralized models are vulnerable
01:01:46 ►
to all sorts of collapse events,
01:01:49 ►
as is this.
01:01:51 ►
And it will become more and more vulnerable
01:01:52 ►
as it gets bigger and bigger and bigger.
01:01:55 ►
So yeah, Japlaya,
01:01:57 ►
4th of July weekend.
01:01:59 ►
Bring your posse.
01:02:00 ►
Find our tea house out there.
01:02:02 ►
We’re out there.
01:02:03 ►
Come drink tea with us
01:02:05 ►
and one thing I want to finally say is
01:02:09 ►
you know
01:02:09 ►
the skills that we develop in our community art projects
01:02:13 ►
will come in handy no matter what happens in the future
01:02:16 ►
if there’s environmental collapse
01:02:18 ►
if there’s a giant water crisis
01:02:20 ►
if there’s a natural disaster
01:02:22 ►
if there’s some authoritarian state goes nuts
01:02:26 ►
and takes over things
01:02:27 ►
we have to be able to learn how to take care of
01:02:30 ►
ourselves and our communities and everything
01:02:31 ►
that we’ve learned in community art projects
01:02:34 ►
teach us how to do that
01:02:35 ►
and our very practical skills
01:02:38 ►
blending art
01:02:39 ►
and logistics
01:02:41 ►
practicality
01:02:43 ►
and beauty.
01:02:48 ►
And I encourage you all to start one of your own.
01:02:49 ►
Thank you very much.
01:02:55 ►
Thank you, Annie.
01:03:01 ►
You’re listening to The Psychedelic Salon,
01:03:04 ►
where people are changing their lives one thought at a time.
01:03:07 ►
Yes, and thank you, Annie.
01:03:11 ►
Thank you for everything that you’ve done and continue to do for our community.
01:03:19 ►
And I happen to agree with what she just said about the importance of what has been learned through the Burning Man experience.
01:03:26 ►
Although I haven’t been to a burn since 2007, mainly because it’s become too expensive for me to attend,
01:03:33 ►
in the past I have been involved not only in organizing the Planque Norte lectures, but also in organizing a theme camp.
01:03:43 ►
And to me at least, even being part of a theme camp brings with it a significant chance to learn more about oneself than most other experiences do. Because in addition to the
01:03:45 ►
physical challenges in making it through a burn, the mental challenges are even more significant.
01:03:51 ►
As you know, fatigue coupled with the extreme heat and the incessant dust of the playa can,
01:03:58 ►
well, it can bring out the worst in us. At least that’s been the case for me. So again, I want to
01:04:04 ►
thank Annie, John, Pez, and every other member of Camp Soft Landing
01:04:07 ►
for hosting the Palenque Norte lectures these past years.
01:04:11 ►
Without the good people of Camp Soft Landing, there actually would be no Palenque Norte speaker series,
01:04:17 ►
which has already provided almost 70 talks for us here in the salon.
01:04:21 ►
On behalf of the hundreds of thousands of fellow salonners all over the world,
01:04:25 ►
I want to thank you wonderful burners for what I happen to know is a largely thankless, hot,
01:04:31 ►
and dusty work that provides these talks for us. As you know, Annie is also the co-founder of the
01:04:38 ►
Women’s Visionary Congress, and this year’s Congress, now in its 10th year I should add,
01:04:43 ►
will take place this coming June 17th through the 19th in Petaluma, California.
01:04:49 ►
And additionally, for the first time this year, there’s also going to be a Women’s Visionary Congress Salon that will be held in New York City on Friday, March 11th.
01:04:59 ►
And you can find out more about these events at visionarycongress.org.
01:05:03 ►
Find out more about these events at visionarycongress.org.
01:05:08 ►
Also, if you go to the salon’s website at psychedelicsalon.com and click on the events link at the top of the page,
01:05:11 ►
you’ll also find links to these events.
01:05:14 ►
It was at last year’s Women’s Visionary Congress
01:05:17 ►
that Kai Wingo first came to the attention of many of us.
01:05:20 ►
Thanks to the Congress’s donors and supporters,
01:05:23 ►
Kai received a grant that allowed her to participate in the 2015 Congress.
01:05:29 ►
Inspired what she experienced there, Kai organized a conference of her own in Cleveland, Ohio,
01:05:34 ►
in which Annie Oak, Shawna Holm, and other women elders from our community participated.
01:05:40 ►
In the months ahead, there will be more news here in the salon about the life and work of Kai Wingo,
01:05:45 ►
but today I would simply like to read a short note that Shauna Holmes sent me this morning.
01:05:52 ►
Kai left behind three beautiful children and a grieving community of folks who loved her.
01:05:58 ►
She was warm and down-to-earth and very accessible.
01:06:01 ►
She was also brilliant and highly resourceful.
01:06:04 ►
How many women get laid
01:06:06 ►
off from their jobs and decide to create an urban mushroom farm? Kai pulled it off and she wove
01:06:12 ►
together communities to celebrate and learn about the incredible health benefits of the mushrooms.
01:06:18 ►
From medicinal mushrooms to visionary mushrooms, Kai could speak with knowledge on how to grow them, cook them, eat them, and journey safely with them.
01:06:28 ►
She created the Women and Entheogens Conference that took place in September 2015, which brought
01:06:34 ►
together people from around the country to hear researchers and teachers share their
01:06:39 ►
knowledge.
01:06:40 ►
Kai was an inspiration to all, and through her recorded talks, she touched many people whom she will never know.
01:06:47 ►
She will be dearly missed and leaves behind a legacy that will continue to grow.
01:06:52 ►
Now, in the program notes for today’s podcast, I will also provide a link to the GoFundMe site that is raising money for Kai’s funeral expenses and to help with the expenses for her three young children.
01:07:05 ►
Kai’s funeral expenses and to help with the expenses for her three young children. Hopefully you can chip in a bit to help those that Kai has left behind for us to help care for. And for now,
01:07:13 ►
this is Lorenzo signing off from Cyberdelic Space. Be careful out there, my friends. Thank you.