Paul Addis — boring, cliche asshat
September 5th, 2007This article probably only makes sense to folks familiar with the annual Burning Man festival, which just took place last week, where some guy named Paul Addis took it upon himself to set fire to the eponymous structure early in the week…
“The man burns early” meme has been going around for years and years. Someone finally decided to just do it.
Part of me really appreciates the anarchistic spirit of actually doing it. The burn itself for me is the least interesting, most contrived part of the whole event, but it’s just that sort of “thing” that hangs over you the whole event, sort of a vague anticipation like waiting for the cake to be brought out at a birthday party. It’s the centerpiece of the event, but if it’s the best, most important or memorable part of the party for you, then you’re doing something wrong. So fucking with it, particularly in such an environment like burning man, might be a good thing every now and again, sort of like what ben Franklin said about holding revolutions every now and again, just to keep things from getting too comfortable.
BUT…………………………………………….. he did two canonically, unforgivably bad things with his little stunt: 1) he endangered other people’s lives, and 2) he fucked with other people’s shit. He’s trying to claim that he organized it beforehands to make sure it was a safe, controlled burn with no one underneath there, but I talked with some rangers who were personally involved with dragging people who had passed out[1] under there. There very well could have been lots of deaths because of his self-absorbed disdain, both the people passed out and the rangers who had to run in there to do a search & sweep. I have no faith in his “I organized people on the playa to make sure it was safe” story; trying to organize people on the playa is the very definition of herding cats. Cats on mushrooms, no less.
And people worked long and hard on getting the man up there. Like it or not, that’s their art. Don’t like it? Stay away from the man; look at all the other stuff out there, or just stay home. Start your own counter cultural festival. Don’t break shit you don’t like; make something better. His little tantrum ruined the event for a lot of people in a lot of ways; from the DPW folks who ripped out a full-sized, fully adorned replacement in 20 hours to those of us who didn’t get to see the art and displays underneath, we all had something taken away from us because he had to prove some vague, “political” point about “what the burn ought to be”. Pissing in everyone’s cherrios is not an effective way to get some point across. Burning Man depends on the notion of the social contract that people won’t bust up each other or each other’s shit, and it’s one of the rare places on earth where you can have a pretty good chance of people simply and cheerfully following that social contract[2]. I’m tossing around an idea for an art project next year, called the Art Dozer. Essentially it’ll just be a bulldozer parked in the middle of the playa, fully gassed up and a missive encouraging people to bulldoze art they don’t like. It’s a social contract similar to the one tested by the folks behind the youniversal trust project[3] in 2006. Of course, the proper behavior is that no one’s art deserves to be bulldozed, but can all of 50,000 people resist that urge? Given the number of people who are rallying behind Mr. Addis, I suspect that we as a community now support destroying art that’s not up to our standards, so we might as well make it easy for the tourists.
I hear a rumor that he may very well be looking at over 20 years in federal prison for arson on federal land. I think that’s completely out of line, but hey, he took the risk (or, to quote his apparent hero, Hunter S. Thompson[4] “buy the ticket, take the ride”) and at this point his fate is well out of his hands. I suspect he will do some short time, pay an appropriatly whopping fine (which his fans will probably pay, anyway), and get a metric shit ton of public service, hopefully doing something that opens his eyes to the fact that there’s a hell of a lot more important shit in the world that needs earnest attention than anything concerning a silly little party in the desert.
I’ve seen a couple videos & scraps of writing by the guy who did it in the last few days since I first posted this missive to a local mailing list, and I’m increasingly unimpressed with him. Hint: Being Hunter S. Thompson is cool. Aping Hunter S. Thompson is lame. Actively casting yourself as a latter-day Hunter S. Thompson by name while aping the man is fucking pathetic. Jesus dude, you’re 35 years old. It’s time to grow a personality of your own, rather than leasing one by the hour from the local rent-a-center. You probably have no idea how much of a self parody you are; you’re precicely the boring cliche you claim to rise above.
-mike
[1] fucking amatuers.
[2] well, at least until friday, when all the weekend warrior yahoos show up.
[3] essentially, they created a pyramid, covered with currency of assorted US denominations all over it, that people could just peel off and walk away with. Amazingly, after a week, the vast majority of the money remained, despite the fact that tens of thousands of people had nothing preventing them walking away with all of it. Cool shit.
[4] apparently he plays HST in a play, called Gonzo. I was vaguely interested in seeing it beforehand, now I’d be unable to seperate the performance from the lame, half-assed fucktard behind the show.



