Dave Raphael

We thought we might fly on Wednesday.  Wind.  White.  No surprise there…

Thursday morning popped up and I met John over at Burning Sky to check the weather and see about our flight.  This comes after a morning of pacing around my camp, my neighbors camp, the camp across the street and the camp next to them, extolling my calmness while chewing my fingers down to the cuticle…  After they announced the second weather hold, we headed back to Mystical Misfits, I hadnt spent much time over there yet and was clearly missing out on some fun.

Backing up just a bit, John is, I suppose one could finally say, a dear old friend.  I met him on my first job in the movies plugging in lights when I was 20 or 21 and this guy is absolutely the reason I first attended Burning Man in 2006.  As my good fortune would have it, John is a sky diver and jumping at Burning Man is as much of the ritual for him as is going in the first place.  You can scroll back through my blog to find a bit more history on this fine character in my circus.  Last year I shot him packing up his chute after a jump.  This year, there was a different story to tell.

There are a few different ways to jump at Burning Man, I think that if you have a plane or can talk a pilot into getting you in the air, nobody is really going to stop you however most people jump through Burning Sky.  Its a fairly well organized camp and they charter a plane and pilot for a few days for the express purpose of skydiving at Burning Man.  I am not a skydiver, so have never gone through the process, but from what I understand, you buy jump tickets during the winter in packages of five.  I also think you need a significant number of jumps under your belt before they’ll sell you a ticket at all.  John was not planning to use all his tickets jumping and that’s where things would get Juicy Junior, real Juicy (in a black suited kind of way).  Burning Sky might not let you jump with no experience, but if you get a ticket from a jumper they will let you fly in an observer seat providing you land with the plane.  And thats where I was this morning, holding a poker chip that would finally get me on a plane to see this madness in the center of the ghost of Lake Lahontan from about 11,000 feet.

Back at Mystical Misfits, I got a good look of what the camp has grown into.  Now two flatbeds worth of scaffolding large, slowly hauled up from the bowels of LA County, they were a sight to see in 2009 and easily the biggest camp on the block.

The big addition to the camp this year was a swing.  Safest swing in Black Rock City.

There was much discussion that morning about truss welds, the joys of rigging, trust and ultimately, hope.

We killed about an hour enjoying the view, trying to find more coffee and eating some bar-b-que sausage creation before heading back to check on the weather.

The scene back at burning sky was exactly as we left it, a bunch of bored skydivers and two anxious people, rocking on their heels, looking at the sky, hoping to trade white for blue.  We had made the decision to get on the plane if there was a plane to get on, and twenty mintues after checking in, a walkie squawked and we lucked out with word that there was a clear enough opening to fly.  With that announcement, there was madness in the camp as everyone scrambled to get their rigs together and hop the ride that would drop us at the airport.

Next thing I know Ive been handed a parachute, walked the plank into the back of the burning sky art car and am trying to balance the adrenaline surge and quell the freak out of the summer.  After months of waiting, this was actually happening…

increased heart rate.  check.  sweaty palms.  check.  tunnelvision.  check.  and this was just the van…

The best part of the mad dash into this van so we could make it into the air before the weather changed was the breakneck five miles per hour speed which hurled us towards the airport.  There are few things that I know of that can stretch time quite like driving in a car really, really, really, really slow.  Just what the doctor ordered…

End of the road and a long walk back.  Welcome to Nevada’s own wretched hive of scum and villany.

The first time I went to Burning Man, I had the good fortune to magically and randomly camp next to some truly amazing people.  Every year that I return, its always a high priority of mine to reconnect with this small group of people I first met in 2006.  When I caught up with David

and Susan

they almost instantly asked if I had met their neighbor yet.  Yeah, check it out, she’s taking apart her car or something.  Huh?

at its core, burning man is an arts festival and from my view of things, this element is really lost on many people who have never attended.  There is always something really cool to see there but I guess as with anything, there is also a lot of shit to sort through in order to find it…  I approached Drake’s camp with some well earned black rock city skepticism, but as it turned out, this was definitely the coolest project I saw this year.

meet Drake Logan:

Drake had put her car on a U-haul trailer in San Francisco, pulled it over the Sierras and parked it on a tarp in Nevada for the sole purpose of disassembling the vehicle down to as many independent nuts, bolts and assorted metal and plastic pieces as possible.  All for the sake of loading every single part into the U-haul, bringing it back to the bay and assembling it into some kind of sculpture.  Instantly, I was captivated by such a seemingly maniacal prospect.

People talk a lot of shit about what they want to do with their art projects and if I had overheard this on a Sunday morning in early August at Ritual, I would have walked out onto Valencia laughing to myself and probably would have told jokes to my camp mates about some burner pipe dream I heard about at hipster central.

But when I first heard about this project, the car was more than half taken apart and the tables were entirely turned.  I was pretty awestruck at the gravity of what was going on.  Its hard enough getting yourself and what you need to burning man, this was really taking things to the next level.

When you work with, or hang around artists for any amount of time, it becomes easy enough to identify the arc of any creative process.  A lot of time is spent thinking about how or why some action is going to occur.  A lot of time is spent preparing for that action once it is determined what that action actually is.  And then, at some user defined point, that action is executed and for me, that’s always the most exciting time to be around or in the creative process.  The thinking, planning and finishing all have their own mood but the doing is where I can usually catch the crest of that wave of energy, get up on it and ride it to the heart of the matter.

And that’s exactly where Drake was when I walked into her camp: completely excited, bursting with wholly positive energy, beaming that “YES, Im DOING this” light and everyone that got near her felt it.

After shooting for a short while Drake asked me if I had an opinion on the best way to get the top of the engine block case off.  It was then I realized the absolute best part of this project: Drake’s not a mechanic.  Awesome.  It was enough to drag a car out there to take it apart, but to go through that without expert knowledge on how to do it?  Amazing.

During the time I was hanging around, lots of people passed through and most were asked if they knew about cars or had any advice on the logical order to proceed with the task at hand, whatever it was at the moment.  This really blew my mind and totally transformed this project into something way way way cooler than what it had initially appeared to be.

Another thing not often understood about the festival is that it is truly a “leave no trace” event.  Once youve gone out there you realize how misused that phrase is.  There is no trash disposal at burning man.  what you bring in, you bring out, down to every little bit of trash you generate.

Its one thing to camp under those circumstances, but to fully strip an automobile and collect every single piece of material?  Ever break auto glass into a million pieces?  Ever change the oil on your car in your driveway?  Ever think about how many pieces of things are in a car?  crazy.

You can view a trailer of the documentary video Julia Robertson has shot of Drake’s work.

Drake’s show runs today, 2 November through 26 December at the Float Center in Oakland CA.  The opening party is scheduled for this coming Saturday, 7 November at 6 pm.  If you are in the Bay Area, might be worth stopping in to see how this evolved.

Last week I posted this video on my facebook page:

Burning Man 2007 skydive

Since then Ive watched it too many times.  Today I popped it up again and quite randomly found the guy in purple hanging loose right as the plane got airborne oddly familiar.  Turns out that I was out on the playa that afternoon taking pictures of peeps for a coffee table book project Im working on and purple hang loose guy landed right in front of me.

Tom was from Rotterdam, if memory serves correct.  Im pretty sure he’s officially the first Dutch guy I had ever met at Burning Man.

As we chatted, pooh bear appointed David showed up in an art car and stopped to offer Tom a ride either back to his camp or possibly just around…

Before long, cruising in an art car got to be way cooler than standing in front of my summicron and they were both gone, just as fast as they showed up, one from the sky, one from the department of mutant vehicles, with just a few frames to document the moment.

A moment all but forgotten about until I started watching videos of people jumping out of planes.  Ive shot about 500 people on two continents for this project so far and this serves as the first time I have randomly recognized a stranger I shot out there in the ether.  Color me pleased with being able to offer everyone an epilogue to the youtube clip.

Life sized person.

John is a fairly seminal character in my life.  I worked on my first paid job in the motion picture industry with him in 1993 or ’94.  Three summers ago, during one of those breakup inspired lost weekends that lasted eight months, I caught up with him in LA and we wound up camping in Joshua Tree for the weekend.  It was early August.  By the time we got back to LA I was sold on Burning Man, it was time.  I had heard about the festival for years but I had other things going on in the desert and it just didnt have the appeal until then.  Two weeks later I was headed up to black rock with a car full of excitement and the first sign of being alive that I had been trying to discover for months and months and months and months.  Hope and Fear provided no sign of John.  Keep in mind I knew exactly where his camp was and went there every day for a week, but thats the way it goes at Black Rock City.  Went back the next year with fully organized plans to meet up.  Again, a week went by and The Green Man didnt not produce the meeting we were hoping for.  So it goes.  Last year I was sitting in the camp across the street from me and noticed some sky divers.  What the fuck, I’ll roll over to Mystical Misfits and see if he turns up.  Sho’ nuff, as I got off my bike there’s John packing up his parachute.  I suppose this is what you look like right after you jump out of a plane…

Over his shoulder while he packed his ‘chute, one of the dancers from the camp next door climbed up on the three stories of scaffold to twirl through the air.  John had the good fortune to build his township of a camp right next door to a commune of dancers mostly from the North West.

Ive photographed a few sky divers right after they’ve landed but this was the first time I ever watched, with full attention, someone pack a parachute.  I’m still really amazed at how simple the mechanics of the pack are.  As John put it that afternoon, “you dont worry about the chute not opening, you worry about it staying closed”.  Good times were had that afternoon which was three years in the making.  This roll of film got blasted off in the first five or six minutes of that communion and while it must seem somewhat pedestrian overall, it was a bit of a milestone moment for me that might make a burner or two crack a smile.

This is one of the many things DC missed this year because apparently staying home and quilting was more important than this shit…  I think this was Thursday afternoon.  The changing contrast in these photos is a reflection of the changing air density at center camp, there was a big dust storm brewing and as the wind kicked up, this was a quick glimpse of what was in store…