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MIGRANT APES IN THE GASOLINE CRACK OF HISTORY by Cole Coonce  |
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MIGRANT APES IN THE GASOLINE CRACK OF HISTORY by Cole Coonce |
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Rocket cars. Rocket dragsters. It was only a matter of time before the technology designed to put a man on the moon and vaporize entire cities was appropriated by the speed demons on wheels... It's simple: the common method for propulsion of the rocket dragsters utilized the following method: pressurized nitrogen forces the hydrogen peroxide onto a silver plate and the ensuing, instantaneous chemical reaction creates a tremendous cloud of hot stream that is force fed out of a nozzle, creating thrust. Rockets summon, tickle and reanimate many primal notions dormant within the collective human consciousness... they tap into the memories of fire and they evoke the spirit of the transcendental, the exaltation and elevation of the human body and of the human spirit... "They wanted to escape from their misery and the stars were too far for them" -- thus spoke Zarathustra and Friedrich Nietzsche about the very banality of existence... rockets are the stuff of Jules Verne books (From the Earth to the Moon) and Fritz Lang movies (Frau Im Mond), of Arthur C. Clark and Stanley Kubrick and 2001 whose symphonic score (Richard Strauss' "Thus Spoke Zarathustra") observed a human destiny far beyond the confines of Planet Earth; of the Ancient Chinese and tossed bamboo tubes filled with saltpeter, sulfur and charcoal as part of ceremonial fires and noisy explosions scaring away evil spirits. A full millennia subsequent, this is the stuff of the Sung Dynasty attaching tubes of powder to spears and using the projectiles to repel the invading Mongol hordes... "thunder that shakes the heavens" was the Chinese description of the dual elements of physical devastation and psychological terror... the Mongols appropriated the technology for use in their conquests of Baghdad and from there rocketry spread into Europe... as the Dark Ages gave way to the Renaissance, Sir Isaac Newton solved the theorem of equal and opposite reactions, which became his Third Law of Motion and a pithy explanation of how a rocket generates altitude and velocity... this is the stuff of unmanned rockets built from the blood of indentured Hebrews, subjugated into aiding the Third Reich as it bombed the shit out of London in its quest to establish a Master Race; of the Space Race and the rocket to the moon with spacemen in aluminum suits establishing beachheads on extra terra firma... this is the stuff of our id and a Jungian subconscience -- of "migrant apes in the gasoline crack of history," William Burroughs said -- of apocryphal legend and honky imperialism and of dusty teenagers ratchet-strapping forgotten solid-fuel rockets onto the hoods of their rusted Chevy Impalas and smashing man and machine into the eternal oblivion of desert stone... THE ROAD TO BURNING MAN (1996) "For my next act, I will set myself a-fire," -- Craig Breedlove, moments after nearly drowning in a brine pond in Bonneville while becoming the first man to travel 500 mph. Picture this: a Blind Hippie and three compatriots on the road to the Burning Man festival, a sort of free-form techno-pagan celebration with colors and music and a giant, sky-scraping wooden effigy of a stick man set on fire as a sort of act of atonement for the sins of post-industrial America. If the culture is to seek penance, the Black Rock desert is as good a place as any. Injun' conflict and conflagration, war games, amateur rocket launches and sundry manifestations of tweaked machismo have been perpetrated on this very chunk of longitude and latitude. Atonement is a nice gesture, but its really to ease the soul of those still breathing, as those who have vanished and vanquished have been incorporated into a landscape whose scale and magnitude renders such gestures superfluous and futile. Still they come: in vans, cars and caravans. Roving bands of naked percussionists -- Marching Drug and Bong Corps, if you will -- jammin' on high and so blissfully oblivious to their own arrhythmia that it eventually becomes a rhythm, snake through various camps of pierced performance artists and tattooed torture artists, Fuller-ites with portable Geodesic domes (!), etc., etc. The Burning Man. It resembles a star-shaped power line stand that supports the high tension lines cutting across the Mojave between LA and Vegas. The resurrection of a skeletal Trojan Human with nothing hidden, its structure as blank as the desert that houses it, its message empty excepting whatever meaning any one of the gatherers wants to foist upon it. And with that done, the whole thing will be set on fire, of course. These projections, like the edifice itself, which will be consumed by fire at the culmination of the festival. Woodstock meets the World's Fair, whose finale is Jimi Hendrix electronically vomiting out the Star Spangled Banner while the Hinderburg immolates. Or something. The festival is held on the Black Rock dry lake bed, a location with serious overtones of ancient civilizations of Pauite Indians and genocide, WW II war games. This dry lake bed is a flat ball of string with the triumphs and transgressions of Western Man and the Noble Savage he supplanted all intertwined. The spiritual, the cosmic and Western Man's "fucked male energy" are all there... it is the only logical place to set the Man on fire and attempt to purge the sins of Modern Life and some how get right with nature. Picture this: a pilgrimage fraught with much entropy in a thermodynamic/transportational sense, but extremely dialed in and clairvoyant on a metaphysical level. This is a lo-fi transmigration towards the center of being, the Pauite Spirit Land where according to Injun' tradition, white and red brothers had been separated at creation, Black Rock, Nevada. Beyond its status as a pagan festival, Burning Man is a gesture. It is a metaphor. A reactionary statement about life at the ass end of the 20th century, whereupon technology has taken a strange turn. The whole gag was form over function. A bio-mechanoidal convergence. The least functioning the sculpture the better. Technology is inextricably intertwined with our lives, nay, our very central nervous system(s). Thematically, Burning Man is a commentary on technology gone awry, a re-enactment of 2001, when the mainframe computer on the space station in 2001 went haywire and makes a cognitive decision to lock the pod bay doors in attempt to deprive the astronauts of their oxygen. The astronauts were in a battle of wits with the computer and the computer was kickin' some serious Homo Sapien ass. So anyway, Burning Man is/was a contrived attempt to dis-empower technology, to relegate it to its proper status as a tool and not the command center. Technology is an extension of humanity, and takes the Venn Diagram one step further, it is an extension of nature. Burning Man was a contrived and somewhat precious attempt to detune technology to the basics: punch cards, strobe lights and pulse jet go-karts... All of which is sheer spectacle and an exercise in entropy and pointlessness. The festival ends with thousands of post-modern hippies, punk rockers and other bohemian-types wiped out on the dry lake bed. They were drugged out, drunked out, fucked out. The Man is cinders, caught in the ethereal, basso profundo winds that blow across a desert bed that one sci-fi writer referred to as "the afterlife." There was nothing left to burn. The only thing left was to "pack it out." Dutifully, a blind hippie begins to help clean up the trash. The next year he returns. And stays. |
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