richard “taymar” gilmore

Sunset at the Junction: It being the week before leaving for Burning Man 2009, only Sunday at Sunset Junction fetched me out of the house at all. It was awesome to see Chris Clark belting R&B standards from mainstage, but an impromptu toke meeting in a nearby alley meant I only got to hear The Sonics’ finale, “The Witch,” which is only my favorite song from these original Nuggeteers. I savored every slow-passing second in the heat—music from the likes of The Submarines, Mika Miko and Tiny Masters of Today, the latter pack of striplings enough to restore any lost faith in the rock verities, as well as the giddy confabs with pals from the RECORD, accidental meetings with ex-girlfriends; even the hi-skool snubs from industry barnacles and no-talents felt good, for such too is life under the municipal big top in rock ‘n’ roll’s Greatest Show on Earth. I packed it in after The Sonics, walking slowly east on Sunset through the cacophony as it faded like a departing circus train.

Another City Full of Freaks and Cops: Since packing for Burning Man is a lot like prepping a trip to another planet, I was a whirlwind until my ride pulled up at my door in Boyle Heights on Thursday afternoon. Blonday (emphasis on the final vowel, as per Eli Wallach in The Good, the Bad&; the Ugly) is a slender athletic lady as delightfully tow-headed as cognomen indicates and just as obsessed with getting to the Nevada desert, but I contemplated the battered 1989 Chevy Cheyenne she drove with sinking heart. Sure enough, the thing’s engine exploded as we went over the Grapevine, but she coolly swerved to the side of Interstate 5, avoiding having us sucked under a passing semi as smoke billowed from under the hood. A Vermont Yankee with all the fabled calm of the breed, she blithely phoned fellow inmates at Camp Overmind to deliver another set of wheels from L.A. It was late at night by the time her giddy crew arrived and we abandoned the stricken heap at a roadside garage in Lebec, CA, and sped on toward the Black Rock Desert. We breezed through the stringent pre-opening security on Friday afternoon, with the guy behind the window shouting out “Rockstar!” (my name in Burner circles) and snapping a pic of my battered mug grinning at the window, as the wind came up and the alkali dust began biting our lungs. Deposited by exhausted Blonday at the vacant Center Camp lot that would soon contain the Black Rock Beacon, I had just enough time to set up my tent and sleep through a dust storm that raged through the night. The only on-playa newspaper was open for biz at last.

A Stoner Crusoe Takes Stock: Dawn rose Saturday on the usual slow-winding hum of hungover activity in fast-building Black Rock City, as several hundred scantily dressed artisans, showfolk and temporary public officials struggled to bring everything together in the Babylonian heat. I didn’t have to walk more than a couple of hundred feet to tick off an unprecedented number of uniformed cops in attendance, harbingers of the one mother army of the Other White Meat soon to hot-trotter it from as far away as Elko and Humboldt Co., Nevada, to be in on the fun and profit of busting queerly dressed creeps from out-of-state. Still, my creaky joints demanded California-prescribed medication, so I wandered out to the Man for a spot of late a.m. contemplation. He stood this year on a two-pronged fork high above the playa’s flat surface surrounded by tons of carefully latticed stickwood, admirable for burning. Cop cars prowled the promenades out to the deep playa where the big art installations are kept and a Harvard MBA cat I talked to later over near the Burners Without Borders camp swore he saw police letting drug-sniffing hounds snuffle at random passersby in an effort to establish what passes in some redneck courtroom as probable cause. Later on, a fellow Beacon colleague related the knee-slapper about the seven straight-arrow undercover cops riding around on bikes chanting “Weed!” “Blow!” “Mushrooms!” and rounding on whatever poor schmuck incautious enough to glance at them. Unbelievable stuff any other year, but I knew county budgets are ten-toes-up generally across rural America and times are just as hard for itchy-palmed polizei as anyone else. I also knew the rules—a bust for weed meant paying about six hundred bucks on the spot for the privilege of rejoining a festival to which I’d sweated a neutron bomb to get. Don’t-bend-an-inch pride made sure I’d only pocketed an extra two hundred before leaving the land of the ATM, so a pinch meant my hillbilly ass would be hauled off-playa to the county jail in Lovelock, where they’d jugged prankster Paul Addis after he prematurely burnt the Man back in ’07. I snaked out the Rockstar drug baggie and examined contents in the desert light—

1 eighth oz. of Purple Grandad—an indica strain noted throughout the West for brute skullfuckery.

1 lump of blond hashish—a lady’s gift, therefore full of meaning to a romantic heart.

Taken together, this would be a pretty haul indeed for any snout-twitchy minion of J.Q. Law. Throw in a bleached mohawk, genetically guilty vulpine face and selected passages from my Collected Works on the subject of police, and I’d be looking at a fair stretch in chokey, if not direct transportation-in-irons to Ceti Alpha 5. Boyle Heights, even Van Nuys, began to look like Paradise. I pocketed my stash and walked slowly back to town, feeling like a (reputed) ancestor of mine. Who was Jesse James, after all, but one more accidental outlaw undone by a passion for art?

The Great BRC Land Grab of ‘09: This year’s theme was Evolution, so the powers and principalities of Burning Man drastically cut the number of early arrival passes, ensuring a massive social-Darwinian rush by unregistered theme camps for lot space once the gates opened at 12:01 Monday morning. I took early arrival last year and have to concede BMORG’s point—too many big-name camps squatted on prime real estate behind circled RVs and called such velvet-rope insularity “participation.” The whining throughout Burnerdom was about what you’d expect, but the policy change paid off in fevered activity inside BRC as the hours ticked off to opening, climaxed by a thunderous party at the gate, as the first festivalgoers were greeted with fanfares, water cannons and bursts of flame from psyched-up early arrivals. Turntables thumped everywhere and a few brave fools threw aerosol cans into burn barrels at the city’s edge, capering like monkeys as they detonated. From the platform at Lamplighter’s camp, the ribbon of headlights looked to stretch past the curvature of the Earth. Everyone seemed convinced something was about to happen that was beyond the power of even the augmented cop presence to control and they were right. This might be their state but this was sure-as-shit our city. Touring it in the pre-dawn hours of Opening Day, I saw little disharmony and a great deal of hugging, kissing and mutual aid. The 5 mph speed limit was kicking up a lot of dust as the influx choked all streets, turning everything into a hazy fantasia of headlights, raised tentpoles and groping, with plenty of squealing and thumped backs. Gaudy art cars began to prowl, lit like all the brothels in Gehenna and pumping a riotously varied stream of party music, including a leitmotif I’d hear throughout the week—Bobby Darin’s “Mack the Knife.” The admonitory “Ya know when that shark bites/With his teeth, babe/Scarlet billows start to spread ” reminded me to clock each and every cop car as it prowled slowly by. Back at the Beacon, the gang was almost all there- Howeird, Ali Baba, Francis, Durgy, Nod & Rod, and more, all enjoying a few last moments of rest before Mitch, the paper’s own Willie Hearst, rolled into camp like Falstaff with a Russian beauty in his RV to issue the usual witty instructions. As an outside reporter, I was but supercargo, but as one of the publication’s legmen, I looked forward to working like a diesel mule for my crew. After our printing press died on Tuesday, the Beacon might just as well spent six consecutive Saturday nights camped at the corner of Hollywood and Highland, for all the rest we got.

“Help, I’m Stepping Into the Twilight Zone/This Place is a Madhouse, Feels Like Being Cloned”: Plans for multipart coverage for L.A. RECORD blew apart in the first of many duststorms, as the interior of every RV was clogged with choking Burners and the big tent at Media Mecca was hunker-room-only for swearing members of the real-world press. On-playa wifi service, one of ‘08’s success stories, was ‘09’s bust, as reporters struggled to file and to navigate cunningly designed obstacles erected by organizers. I well understand a need for security (given the Coxey’s Army of mendicant cops on hand, no way in East Fucking Hell was this journo going to send a detailed précis of his dope baggie over unsecured wifi), but navigating BMORG hoops is a little like living an old episode of The Prisoner with yourself as No. 6. Again, this is deliberate and in full keeping with the movement’s prankish origins, so I bore it only a little better than some. The better part of my L.A. fangs, claws and other psychic props of ferocity were drawn simply by dealing early on with a bureaucracy whose default mode was loving kindness. Similar epiphanies were popping all over BRC, as normally alienated products of post-everything American culture became alive to gladsome fellowship in a physical environment drawn from Cotton Mather’s dreams of Hell. Utter strangers greeted each other like sworn brothers and there was a smile on every parched and powdered face. Attendance might’ve been slightly down among recession-wracked Americans, but most of the slack looked taken up by roving hordes of twentyish European and Japanese tourists. These took to Burner life in the usual way- getting their linen dusty by day and sensibly discarding it at night, when the action went beyond street-fair-of-the-absurd levels into realms of inspired lunacy obtainable nowhere outside the films of Frank Tashlin or the Marx Bros. By midweek, reality itself was just another event rumored to going off one hella far bike ride past Gerlach.

Art vs. Romance, Plus Beautiful Girls, Larry Harvey and Mr. Possible Popeye Doyle: Since this was my fourth trip to temporary Black Rock City, I well knew what I was leaving behind on my nightly art jaunts onto the open playa, but did it anyway. An aging bad boy like me encounters only sporadic trouble meeting women even in unfriendly L.A. so I wasn’t as tongue-lolled consumed with coitus as my saucer-eyed playa brothers. Besides, each of the pinpoint lights out in the deep playa represented a distant mystery best unraveled in meditative solitude. Besides the Temple and the Man, the Flaming Lotus Girls’ giant bejeweled neurons drew the most activity, with art cars shaped like alleycats, passenger liners, grasshoppers and covered wagons gathering for all-night fire and dance parties. The Holding Flame (a walk-in box with a flaming ceiling), the string of blue balloons that floated without visible tether, the giant Rubik’s Cube, the 40’ Raygun Gothic Rocket that gleamed like a 1947 Astounding SF cover, the dance party roaring between gouts of flame at the Towers of Shiva, all wowed the crowds, but the truly bizarre stuff was much further out. Time for Money was a quizzically abandoned parking meter stood in the middle of nowhere and Darwin on The Pot was a stand of authentic-looking fake portapotties that I’m surprised survived so many rude hands and baulked bladders. My favorite was the Mormon Cricket Crusade, a chilling piece of science-fiction plopped on the far outskirts of the festival near the trash fence. Visible from a distance as an unearthly sick-green monolith, closer inspection revealed a colony of foot-long insects marching in formation only to seem to turn six legs up and die in the merciless Terran atmosphere. Tufts on the creatures’ legs and antennae moved creepily in the nighttime breeze and the hive itself pulsated, an artful trick of colored light that completely unnerved a posse of bike-riding kids that appeared during my inspection, sending them shrieking off across the playa. The deciding factors keeping me from a week of Kwai Chang Caine-like crosslegged contemplation in the deep desert night were, ultimately, the authorities. Numbers out of BMORG indicate only fifty or so peace officers attended Burning Man ’09, but only a fool trusts even an official count from somebody else’s hallucination. I saw them prowling the deep playa with doused lights, walking through backstreets in uniformed pairs and in the plainest of plainclothes slathering passersby on the Esplanade with ludicrous Hicksville come-ons to go get high. Rumor had it there was a competition going between departments to rack up the most arrests and the cops’ behavior supported the scuttlebutt. They fanned out and ranged across the festival, driving straight toward snapped Bics the same way their four-footed brethren leap at truffles and I saw more than one ugly arrest. The last straw came when having to lose some paunchy bristle-pated fellow who followed me a couple of dozen yards after I’d (foolishly) toked up on the open playa. It being Burning Man, the unfriendly-looking man could well have been just one of those over-affectionate guys you hear so much about and merely wanted to give me a creepy hug and an “accidental” pat on the ass before hitting me up for booj. My Virginia-bred reticence shies at such familiarity, so I threw him a thumbs-up and mouthed “Tally-ho!” before strolling into the deafening dance-dance hullabaloo at nearby Soma, gladhanding and kissing the ladies. The warmth of my people was gratifying, the look on the guy’s face exquisite and the elation of emerging out the other end of the throng priceless. Frustrated beary lover or no, he gets props for gifting the adrenalin rush. Hillbilly paranoia having set in, I stayed in the city from then on, where I soon found a few boltholes for hassle-free toking, mindful that BRC is a maze even to veteran Burners. Navigating it, I found innumerable old pals, one much-missed ex (to whom I was happy to shoulder 100% blame for our breakup) and a delightfully naked lady rightfully glorying in the name Sexy Russian Woman. The erotic code of the playa insists males keep hands off until invited, so women (and femme-identified gay males) decide who makes the steep grade to the RV boudoir and who’s left with a smile and peck. My first meeting with SRW (on the Esplanade in broad daylight, no less) followed this classic, courtly pattern, but Gypsy Goddess was more in the order of unfinished business. A onetime Playboy model (one of those “Girls of the Fill-In-the-Blank” shoots done back when Guns ‘N’ Roses was all the go), GG deserves the Olympian appellation more than most other playa goddesses, since she materialized out of alkali air to remind me of our (sadly brief) acquaintance at the ’06 Burn. Our scandalous time together this year is one more reminder that, at Burning Man, nothing is ever over. If there’s anyone else who can attest to this, its Burning Man’s founder and eminence-front, Larry Harvey, who was holding forth in the Beacon’s office one afternoon when I arrived home fresh from GG. Tall, stocky and bluff, he reminded me strongly of the union miners I grew up around, even though he’s as verbose as a writer and theory-loving as any tenured professor. I thought about lobbing a rude question about cops into his libertarian flow, but he’s been dealing with them since his first Man was burnt on Baker Beach in 1986. Harvey spoke grandly of a Permaburn and a year-round settlement for our goofy kind, which is as good a way of dumping entrapment-happy police off our backs as any. A credible threat from BMORG to move the festival (worth millions annually to the local economy) to California or New Mexico might well do the same trick.

Funeral for a Friend, Bacchanal and Atonement: We held the on-playa memorial service for Caleb “Shooter” Schaber on Friday at the Rue Morgue. An immensely talented journalist and longtime Burner, Caleb’s suicide had a woeful impact on our narrow world, leaving his many friends to contemplate senselessness in a place where the world seems almost too right. Shooter’s pals from the Beacon, along with hard-drinking comrades from Department of Public Works and fans of his two-fisted prose all shared stories about his cussedness and love of the Burner life. I was called on to say a few words and read aloud Robinson Jeffers’ “Be Angry at the Sun,” concluding with the Gonzo credo—

Let boys want pleasure and men
Struggle for power, and women perhaps for fame,
And the servile to serve a Leader and the dupes to be duped.
Yours is not theirs.

Outside the Rue Morgue, the sun was indeed setting and the Party rolling into terminal high-gear. The Rocket was the scene of a spectacular fireworks display and the Man burning the night after was as insanely giddy as ever, as thousands of crack-out revelers did the obligatory three-times-around the flaming heap. Attendance figures showed thousands more had already left for home, worn out by indulgence, evil weather, cop-dodging and the prospects of a long journey home. My own wall was hit at the Temple Burn on Sunday. That afternoon, I’s made crude memorials for Robert Quarry (a brilliant and witty film actor, his Count Yorga, Vampire screened at the New Bev just before I left) and Mike Thomas (character makeup artist on the original Saturday Night Live; he designed the Coneheads), two recently-departed friends and masters of many a revel. I was proud to have heard the chimes at midnight with both men, but less so of the sudden trickle of tears that fell in the dust before I handed the crude wooden blocks over to BRC Rangers. Both burned, along with all the other expressions of pain, regret, anger, sympathy, memory, jollity, cosmology funneled into ash and sprayed over the late-night sky. For a few achingly tender moments, the Party stopped. There was a dense, cathedral-like silence as we each pondered our separate gods and griefs, weighing our sorrows against our joys, when a small Om rose up and we all joined it as the three-story structure hissed and cracked and swayed. Finally, the Temple collapsed taking the whole last year and what remained of Burning Man ’09 with it. One beery voice shouted “Goodbye, Shooter! I’ll always remember you, whether I want to or not!” That was it. I squeezed Francis, Deb and Elisa, bumped knuckles with Mitch and took the first ride home at dawn, leaving the playa with two cheery fellows named Troi and Marius. They raved of girls, bitched about cops and spoke wistfully of the peace and freedom of the playa all the way back to L.A. Troi loaded me out in Boyle Heights sometime around 10 p.m. Monday and I promptly collapsed into a 14-hour coma.

Coda: A Hipster Frenzy of the Mind: Some of the looks the three of us got at various rest-stops might’ve been surly, but L.A. was unaccustomedly warm and friendly when I left the house late Tuesday afternoon. I’d spent the previous few hours bumping into walls and gurgling down coffee by the bucket in an effort to remember something I’d sworn to do upon return. Finally, memory stirred and I wobbled a slow, elliptical path to Amoeba Music. Favored with a couple of look-what-the-cat-dragged-in glances from staff, I weaved toward the Oldies section with shoes slapping tiny clouds of playa dust with every leaden step. Os Mutantes, a longtime favorite, was about to give it up and the aisle was crowded with eager fans, but I shouldered to the Ds, plucked a CD of That’s All by Bobby Darin from the racks and made for checkout. I have little idea of what was going on outside my skull at that moment, but within, all was a blaze of spotlights, cufflinks and Richard Wess’s matchless horn arrangements, as the One True Hipster belted out just for me—

I said Jenny Diver … whoa … Sukey Tawdry
Look out to Miss Lotte Lenya and old Lucy Brown
Yes, that line forms on the right, babe
Now that Macky’s back in town …

If store vidtape caught a splay-footed blond geezer-punk trying to shuffle-off-to-Buffalo out the doors, I wouldn’t be at all surprised.

—Ron Garmon