| ART BED - Mobile sculpture, roving party, kinetic orgy, call it what you will. |  |
| "Emotional Baggage" - a suitcase-based installation of thematic ephemera found at Center Camp. |  |
| Two kids spent a good 20 minutes rolling this stitched-together mass of Winnie-the-Pooh snuggleables around Center Camp one morning, announcing loudly, "Ball of Pooh, ball of Pooh for sale!" |  |
| Starry Bamboo Mandala is a 55-foot-tall tower / geometry exercise by Gerard Minakawa. |  |
| Braver souls had their friends hoist them up to the hemp-rope bindings about eight feet off the ground. This gave them the foothold they needed to climb all the way to the top. |  |
| Blue roller - dig the color-coordinated glitter outfit and metalflake paint job on the faux- Segway. |  |
| The Burning Man Bookmobile is a free library, carrying everything from kid lit to erotica. No library card needed, no fines or fees, donations are accepted. |  |
| Mystery booth, on the south side of Center Camp. No idea what its purpose was, but the video montages were pretty interesting. |  |
| This stationary sculpture was mounted on a full-length articulated city bus: a sculpture of a plane crash at the Capitol Dome - gas jets around the rim of the dome added visual punch. |  |
| The Conexus Cathedral offered a pan-denominational play space. Here's a bit more from the Conexus Village grant proposal. |  |
| A Cheshire Cat roams the playa. |  |
| Uchronia - a massive wood installation - looms out of the dust Sunday morning, just hours before it was burned with spectacular results. |  |
| The Uchronians are a troupe of industrious Belgians who built spent two weeks building the huge sculpture/building/nightclub out of 150 kilometers of two-by-fours. |  |
| Uchronia was built one board at a time by volunteers, who worked quickly with forklifts, nail guns and what looked to be 8-foot-long two-by-fours. |  |
| By the time it was finished, the building stood 15 meters high, 30 meters wide and 60 meters long. See video below for a glimpse of the nighttime vibe. |  |
| Dust billows through the structure. |  |
| A dragon-dragonfly combination mounted high atop an art car that was "drawn" by a tethered, glowing seahorse. |  |
| A huge dust devil blows past Kidsville, where we were camping. This was just a harbinger of the big wind storm that blasted through camp for about two hours Wednesday afternoon. There's video of the storm below. |  |
| Inside the Entheon dome, artist Alex Grey's explorations of psychedelia hung beneath a 60-foot geodesic canopy, printed on filmy scrims as chill music played. At various points during the week, the Entheon Village (some 250 strong) hosted seminars on LSD, exhibits of art by the likes of Luke Brown and round-the-clock treatment for "psychedelic emergencies." |  |
| "Eyes Wide Open" offered a long, moody walk down an aisle lined with combat boots, to a huge pile of "civilian" shoes. |  |
| At the end, funereal music surrounded a lectern on which sat a thick book with the faces and names of U.S. casualties of the Iraq War, and their dates and causes of death. |  |
| Venus Eyetrap is a kinetic/inflatable sculpture by Pete Hamilton and Luke Egan. In a high wind (which was often) it looked pretty menacing - in a day-glo-cartoon sort of way. |  |
| This year's theme is Hope and Fear, the Future: The "Pavilion of the Future" served as the foundation for the Man, and an open-air gallery for art installations. |  |
| One installation - "The Game of Hope or Fear" was a sort of twisted, heavily illustrated game of LIFE. Tony Speirs and Lisa Beerntsen (husband/wife) designed it and then drafted some 85 artists, illustrators and tattooists from the Bay area and beyond to contribute |  |
Click the images to get a better look at the illustrations. I couldn't tell whether these were all by the same person or by a group of artists. Any info would be most welcome. Tony Speirs writes, "we posted the project on-line on the Burning Man newsletter (Jack Rabbit Speaks) as well as a MySpace posting and happily recieved hundreds of original drawings, e-mailed scans and Xerox copies of images from artists all over the country that we then collaged onto the piece.
Some of the artists are fairly well known ( Jason D'Aquino, comic artists Gary Amaro and Thomas Yeates and Ross Campbell-who has several books out, including "The Abandoned" and "Wet Moon" 1 & 2, and tattoo artists Kevin Harden @ Ronin Tattoo in Illinois as well as Santa Rosa's Joe Leonard who owns Monkey Wrench Tattoo up here.)" (see blog | 
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| Some drawings look like talented doodles, others like magazine illustrations, and still others like tattoo flash. |  |
| Center Camp displayed some historical artifacts, including this thrashed little trailer, which served as the "gate" outpost for Burning Man 1996 back before there was much in the way of streets, a Black Rock City Department of Public Works or anything much resembling order. I covered the festival for the L.A. Times and remember the directions to camp were pretty vague: Drive off the main road at the gate. Head due north across the playa for 10 miles, then turn due west. Make sure to bring a compass. If you're even 2 degrees off you could wind up lost out in the middle of the desert. |  |
| Eye of God - constructed almost entirely out of CDs. |  |
| Statues of welded steel and iron guard Center Camp, representing Hope and Fear. |  |
| A little iron dragon hovers near the Death Guild camp. |  |
| The "I.T. is Michael Christian's observation tower and paean to "War of the Worlds." |  |
| A kid's LED spinner makes wild patterns in the dark. |  |
| Another cat car The Bad Trip Bunny - quite a bit more angry than the Cheshire Cat. |  |
| Mantis art car by Mark "Scrap Daddy" Bradford. |  |
| Mastodon, ready for a nighttime cruise. |  |
| Kostume Kult runs a costume swap meet/madhouse every year inside a cramped little dome. This girl got away with a killer cheerleader ensemble. |  |
| Nunquam Dormio. (My Latin's a little rusty - "I Never Sleep?") - this was the logo and canopy for a meditation tent out on the deep playa. |  |
| Aside from Wednesday's epic dust storm, the weather was almost balmy for most of the week. Still, if you're going to ward off the sun, you might as well be stylish about it. |  |
| Penguins roamed the playa. It takes a certain kind of dedication to wear one of these getups in 100-degree weather just so you can stroll around giving furry hugs. |  |
| Dachee is a pyramid built of wood salvaged from a fire 25 years ago. The pattern of stones on the ground mimics the layout of Black Rock City. |  |
| The PyroKinetics Fire Pendulum is a propane-fueled kinetic sculpture. (video below Mounted on a gimbal, the counterweight and five-way gas jet - triggered by remote control - keep the pendulum swinging in a wild dance. |  |
| Black Rock Rangers - the de-facto in-camp police force. Note the tight shorts and altered logo - this may be an ersatz Ranger, or just one with the customary crusty sense of humor. addendum: Kathryn "Ranger Tony Danza" Hill informs me these are indeed mock rangers, and furthermore they'e not cops, but more "nonconfrontational community mediators." |  |
| Rangers from the U.S. Bureau of Land Management patrol Black Rock City, along with deputies from the Washoe and Pershing County Sheriff's Departments. |  |
| Wear whatever you feel ... |  |
| Wear whatever's comfy. |  |
| The Flaming Lotus Girls' kinetic flame sculpture The Serpent Mother is a 165-foot-long skeleton that spouts microprocessor-controlled jets of fire along the length of its spine. |  |
| The serpent's head rears back and opens its jaws, spitting fire. There's video below of the artwork in action. |  |
| Just another burner at work. |  |
| This year, the Temple was a study in white, almost Art-Deco lines. Burners use Sharpies to scrawl messages to the dead and leave them behind to be consumed in Sunday night's Temple Burn. |  |
| This rattlesnake skull was sculpted from scrap and mounted perfectly on a gimbal that let it pivot freely in the wind. |  |
| This vintage steam engine was rebuilt and runs across the playa by day and night by the Kinetic Steam Works. It looses huge, tooting blasts from its steam whistle and stamps slogans into the playa with the hand-sculpted rubber treads on its huge iron wheels. |  |
| Here it is by night, with gaslights burning, chugging forward at 2.5 mph. |  |
| A parade of more than 20 stilt-walkers stalks into Center Camp. |  |
| This massive observation tower stood a few hundred feet from the Man, its walls an invitation to graffiti artists. |  |
| Turtle car. Nuff said. Note the snappy headgear on its crew. |  |
| Fire workers circle the man on the night of the Burn. |  |
| The Man goes up Saturday night in an huge explosion of fireworks. |  |
| "Fully involved," as the firefighters like to say. |  |
| After blazing for a good 15 minutes, the Man's legs weaken, toppling him to the playa. |  |
| The fire is so hot it melts the man's neon tubes and steel framing, which pours to the floor in a white-hot rivulet of molten glass and metal. |  |
| The morning after the Burn, people scavenge for souvenirs. Most prized are globs of melted neon glass. The ground is still hot, and embers still burn at the center of the site, a good 15 hours later. |  |
| Playa name: Factoid. This is what I looked like in the midst of the dust storm. Yeah, I could have hidden in the tent or even the van, but where's the fun in that? Storm video below. |  |
