DUANE: 

And what it is, is a 28-foot tall giant octopus. It looks like a demented windup toy and its legs go up and down and spew fire out the tentacles, and the head on top has eight eyes that come in and out, and the mouths, four mouths that open. So it has total animation kinetically to make it come alive. 

So when you build a machine you want to make something that people can connect with, and whenever you put a face on something, they go right to it. They go to the eyes and the mouth and they see, it connects that character in a real way to the people.

STUART: 

Hey, everybody, welcome back to Burning Man LIVE. I’m Stuart Mangrum and I’m here today with a Burning Man artist that, if you’ve not seen his work on the playa, you’ve probably didn’t have your eyes open. He has created a piece of, ah, of mobile sculpture, or two pieces; We’ll get into that. 

I’ll just read this quote from Chef Juke of our DMV Department of Mutant Vehicles Council. He writes to the show that “the DMV gets feedback from many, many Burning Man participants, and much of that is about one mutant vehicle or another. While we do not profess to have favorites, – we love all mutant vehicles – I can say without reservation that I believe that while there are many, many beloved mutant vehicles out there, El Pulpo, in both of its incarnations, is the most beloved.”

Duane Flatmo, you have created the ride at Burning Man that is more famous than Burning Man itself. Thank you for showing up and joining us.

DUANE: 

Oh, thank you. Thank you.

STUART: 

And I understand it’s a busy day for you. You’re calling in from the parking lot outside a sporting goods store, where you are going to go get your fishing license and disappear up into the into the California hills for a long weekend. 

DUANE: 

It’s in a lake, Ruth Lake. We’ve got two kayaks. I had a friend of mine pass away and he willed me his kayak. It’s one of those beautiful Malibu – it’s got the pedals, you know, you push on the pedals. It’s a beautiful kayak. So I’m going to go try it out.

STUART: 

It’s actually a water bicycle!

DUANE: 

Yeah, yeah. And it’s just what I love doing. Recumbents you know, that’s the way.

STUART: 

Have you ever sculpted anything out of recumbent bikes? I’ve had this vision for a long time of maybe a Viking long boat, with like three or four or five recumbent bikes all welded together in sequence.

DUANE: 

Well, you know, there’s this thing up here in Eureka. It started in 1969 by Hobart Brown. It’s called the Great Arcata Ferndale Cross-Country Kinetic Sculpture Race. It has got some of the most ingenious people building unusual ways to get across water, sand, mud, gravel, every type of terrain you can think of. It’s a three day race, 42 miles, and I was in that for 33 years straight and helped get it started, working at it to make it happen. I retired about five years ago because I started going to Burning Man; it was too much to do the kinetic race and Burning Man. Because I’d spent six months on a machine just for the kinetic race.

That race is so awesome. That’s where I kind of got my chops learning how to weld, how to build; engineering ideas, pushing outside the box, and just being around a lot of like-minded people who we, we kind of competed, so we pushed each other to higher levels. I remember someone saying a long time ago, if you want to get really good at something, hang around people that are better than you. And that’s what I did. I hung around people who really taught me a lot just by me observing, and talking, and hashing over stuff, over a cold beer, a little puff, you know? The ideas start flowing.

STUART: 

I’m a big fan of that program. These are human powered vehicles that have to actually float as well as go down the trail, right?

DUANE: 

Yeah, yeah.

STUART: 

Luckily at Burning Man mutant vehicles don’t have to float. Oh, wait a minute; except maybe last year. Wouldn’t it have been a bit nice to have had, like, something like a hovercraft maybe, or something?

DUANE: 

Oh, man, that would have been good. 

One thing about it is that you have to carry everything on board also. So when I was building stuff for the Kinetic Race, I was building everything really light. This was really important. I was building stuff so that it would float, and we would take off one pound. If there was a piece of steel that we really didn’t need for three days, we cut it out and gained like ten ounces. And we got these machines – you can only build them so big because the weight would be so much you couldn’t even get it to float. 

So when I got to Burning Man, it was like I broke through and I could build anything as heavy as I wanted. El Pulpo is thousands of pounds. I remember going up to the machines when I first started building for Burning Man, and I would look at something, I’d go, oh my God, that’s too heavy. And then I thought, no, it doesn’t need to float anymore. 

On sand you get a bike that you’re flying down the road on these little thin tires. But when you get to the sand you have to have tracks. So we built certain tracks through the sand, and building all those things to go over those terrains really pushed our engineering brainwaves in a direction. And we’re always thinking like that. 

It ended up getting us on that show Junkyard Wars. Me and my two friends at the Kinetic Lab were asked to send a little clip in of us. They said, “Just send it in because we’re already going to get you on the show. You guys are a shoo in,” because they had seen all of our stuff. And the first season of Junkyard Wars, it showed the United States, and we went down. They flew us to London and we stayed there a month doing three episodes. We took second place!

JUNKYARD WARS: 

Whatever they build, June, her partner Ken and Captain Flatmo will make sure it looks a million dollars. 

STUART: 

Now wasn’t there also a Chinese version of that show that you participated in?

DUANE: 

Yeah. One of the people who competed was Mr. Sun, they called him; S U N but they pronounced it ‘soon’. And he owned a fabric company in China. You know, they did silks and all kinds of stuff, so he had a lot of money. And he decided after the show that he wanted to do one in China, and he put out the word, we sent off a tape, photos of what we would build, all of our passport numbers, everything.

STUART: 

Right. Because China. Yeah.

DUANE: 

Yeah. And 16 teams from all over the world, Yugoslavia, Hong Kong, Wales, England, Australia, New Zealand, all these machines showed up. They gave each team $2,000. And you built a machine, and on a certain date, you had to have your truck ready to be shipped to China. And they’d sent a giant truck to our shop. They picked it up and we’re like going, “Oh my God, what are we doing? Is this really going to happen?”

And next thing you know, all my team – we had 16 people – they flew us all over there. And in between events that we did there, we were there for 20 days, they would take this to the Summer Palace, to Tiananmen Square, to all these, Confucius Mountains, where all the temples are up, on the mountains where you gotta walk, or take a gondola, and we just saw so much stuff in China, it was just a culture shock. Amazing. I think we took seventh place. We got a special award for our design. But we had to leave the truck there.

STUART: 

Is this the truck called Rapid Transit? 

DUANE: 

Yeah.

STUART: 

Rabid Transit. It’s got, like, a cage on the back full of rabid animals.

DUANE: 

Yeah, I use that name again because I had done it in China ten years ago. And when I went to Burning Man, I just said, hey, I’ll call it Rabid Transit, also. 

But the one in China, it was funny. They told you, we’ll ship you over here, but when it’s done, you got to leave it here. You can’t take it home. And so I just picture this giant — I built a really monstrous machine, really crazy. And I could just picture some guy out farming his land with this big diesel truck with these giant animals on it.

Our trucks had to go through an obstacle course, we went through truck pulls, and we also went bowling and had, like, 15-foot bowling pins. We had to drive our trucks to the bowling pins and, and then we had to stop on a line in the end to see how many pins you knocked over.

It was just a hoot. They hit all these schools and these kids and to watch the whole thing. I remember just sitting at the truck drawing these, drawing little pictures in my sketchbook, and giving them to these kids. They were all swarmed around the truck. And we’re just trying to communicate, you know. We’d get one person who can interpret. It was just a great connection.

STUART: 

Did I hear you say that you also did a mutant vehicle of the same name at Burning Man?

DUANE: 

Yes. Well, we did El Pulpo for like two or three years. I started going, okay, people are gonna maybe get tired of this. I don’t know. Let’s just take the chassis and build a new machine on top of that chassis and go out for one year, and then we’ll come back and put El Pulpo back on, so we made it interchangeable. You weld bolts on the machine where you can attach it, and you build a new thing on top of it, a new carapace on top of. And people liked it. It was kind of a little more daunting and kind of scary. I love monsters with teeth. I love sharp teeth. And we brought it out and then the next year we didn’t bring it. We brought El Pulpo back, you know? So that was pretty fun doing that whole thing.

STUART: 

Okay, let’s go back to El Pulpo, because for the one person listening who’s saying, “What are they talking about? Is this some octopus thing?” Can you just give your stock description of El Pulpo for somebody who’s never opened up an article about Burning Man and seen it?

DUANE: 

Well, what it is, is a 28-foot tall giant octopus. It looks like a demented windup toy and its legs go up and down and spew fire out the tentacles and the head on top has eight eyes that come in and out, and the mouths, four mouths that open. So it has total animation kinetically to make it come alive. 

STUART: 

Oh my god.

DUANE: 

It started really in Mexico. I like to build sculptures out of junk. And I was going – we have a house in Mexico where we stay three months out of the year when it’s really cold in Humboldt County.

STUART: 

That’s right. Down in Nayarit, right? 

DUANE: 

Nayarit! Beautiful place. It’s hard to come back here sometimes. 

And I get a white bucket and go on all the roads, pick up pieces. And I built this idea I had in my head about building an octopus that ran on a cam. And I just kept building on it for two months. And I remember my partner Jerry said, “Ahh, what is that? That’s dumb.”

When I finally got it done, it was just so beautiful, and it ran just like El Pulpo runs, and I could hand-crank it. So we brought that back and we built a large version of it. 

So when you build a machine – I learned over all these years at Kinetics – you want to make something that people can connect with. And whenever you put a face on something, they go right to it. They go to the eyes and the mouth and they see. It connects that character in a real way to the people. If it was just an octopus, it had no eyes and mouth on it, it’d be boring.

When I first came out to Burning Man, I thought one thing I didn’t see a lot back when I started, back in 2007, they weren’t making a lot of the sculptures have movement; that ran off motors or people pulling on cables or, you know, like a marionette type thing. And that’s when I thought I’m going to do that and that’s going to break us apart from just a stagnant machine that was going along like a parade float instead. So it became alive.

STUART: 

That notion of El Pulpo having kind of a human visage, having some humanity to it, I love that sort of lovable monster vibe. And it seems like children do too. You’re quite a hit with the young folks out at Burning Man, aren’t you?

DUANE: 

Oh, yeah. You know, they have the kids town over there, you know, in that one block. And we always go over and visit the kids one day. We just show up, we pull in, and I’ve always got some song on. I put on songs,. I have a whole list on my iPod, which I use for all my music, and I have little funny songs. So like when we go to the kids town, we’ll put like “Tie Your Mother Down” by Queen or we’ll play, you know, “We don’t need no education!” 

STUART: 

Right. 

DUANE: 

And little, little songs that the parents look at us like, “Oh that’s funny. Okay.” But we love the kids. Gosh, kids, you know and they don’t get scared of that because it’s so big and so high up, so they don’t feel threatened. They just look at it in awe, you know, they’re just like, they can’t even digest it, it’s so massive, you know.

STUART: 

I’ve seen some drawings of it. I imagine you must get some fan art and gifts and fan mail from people. Tell us about that.

DUANE: 

Oh my God. Yeah, we get I have a whole collection of drawings and people out there that are doing artwork that are artists that are going around depicting all the parts of Burning Man. And then we get little kids, parents that send their kids drawings to me with kooky little drawings of El Pulpo, you know, with flames.

And, kids, like, they don’t want to be scared like, gorey scary, like movies that really scare. They like Monsters Inc. You know, there’s that big monster in there with sharp teeth, but he’s lovable. El Pulpo’s kinda like that. We’ve been told, um, it’s like one of those dolls, you know, those dolls you squeeze and their little ears pop out and the eyes pop out, and it’s kind of a rubber thing, and and some reason they get past the teeth and the scariness. I think it’s digestible for kids, you know?

STUART: 

Yeah, it reminds me of another lovable monster genre, growing up in Southern California like I did, you must have been influenced a little by Big Daddy Roth, by Ed Roth, the hot rod artist.

DUANE: 

Yeah. One of my heroes. R. Crumb. I’ve met R. Crumb a couple of times and hung out.

STUART: 

Oh, really? I was going to say it seems like there’s a little bit of an underground comics vibe to looking at your whole body of work. 

DUANE:

Yeah. 

STUART: 

You know, all of your kinetic sculptures and leading up to Pulpo, what else? What other influences do you want to shout out?

DUANE: 

I was inspired because we lived in Huntington Beach in Santa Monica, and I used to go to Disneyland all the time and Knott’s Berry Farm. My mind would just be going, I’d come home and build my own Matterhorn in the backyard out of wheelbarrows and stuff. My mom would always say, “You put all this away when you’re done.” I would just empty my dad’s garage with all the junk I could find and do these big Rube Goldberg thing. 

But I was really inspired, I had a “Keep On Truckin’” poster above my bed in high school, because R. Crumb was the big thing and Big Daddy Roth, of course, I built all the models, Rat Fink. That’s what started me drawing big bug eyes and monsters and stuff. My mom used to always say, “Why can’t you draw nice things?” I’d get out of church, ya know I’d have, we’d go to church every Sunday when I was growing up, and I’d come home and draw all these monsters and demons and everything and listen to Black Sabbath. My mom’s like, “That’s horrible!”

I had a mural class up here that I taught for 12 years. I taught kids murals, at-risk kids who got in trouble, had to work community service hours off, and the California Arts Council paid me and worked weekends with kids. For 12 years I made a regular paycheck. And when I was up here working with these kids, I met Jesse Crumb, who was R. Crumb’s son. He lived up here.

He’d come by on his bike. And I remember seeing the Crumb movie and he was in it, and I said, “Hey, wow, it’s great meeting you.” And I took him around, showed him a bunch of stuff. We’d hang out a couple of times here and there. He’d come by the Kinetic Lab and look at what we were doing. 

And he was getting married. I got invited to the wedding. And there’s Robert Armstrong, who is one of my favorite artists, and R. Crumb, they’re sitting there playing music. They were playing a saw and a dobro guitar. And we’re sitting right here, you know, talking to R. Crumb, who’s one of my heroes, you know. 

And I told him, you know, “I had your Keep on Truckin’ poster above my bed all through high school.” And he goes, “I hated that! I hated that poster.” He said, “They ripped me off. I ain’t got no money from that. I signed a contract that they X’ed me out of all the money out of that. So I didn’t like that poster.” “Well, I liked it.” So it’s fun meeting him and getting to talk to him. I gave him a little book of some of my drawings and said, “Here. When you’re on your plane back to France, look at this if you want.” It’s funny because, Jesse, I said, “How’d your dad like that little book I sent him?” And he goes, “He looked and he really liked it, but he called you an art jock.” 

STUART: 

What?

DUANE: 

I don’t know, what does that mean? I’m really going at it all the time or what, you know? So I’ll take ‘art jock.’

STUART: 

Yeah. You’re a virile, a virile artist. The murals, though, I didn’t know that you taught murals to kids. That’s really amazing work. I have seen some of your murals, and I got to say, some of them kind of go beyond your usual, you know, tourist destination mural. I’m thinking of the Bigfoot mural in Willow Creek; it’s pretty surreal. Bigfoot is not running through the woods. He’s like shaping lumber and helping build a house?

DUANE: 

That’s right.

STUART: 

Where did that idea come from?

DUANE: 

Well, I was up in Willow Creek, and that’s where they filmed that famous footage, and it’s Bigfoot gas, Bigfoot store, Bigfoot this and that, you know, the whole museum up there. And that’s where they filmed that footage of Bigfoot walking along the river there. You know, the one you always see? That was filmed right here.

STUART: 

The knuckle dragging Bigfoot with big swinging arms

DUANE: 

Yeah, he looked pretty good there in that picture. Ace Hardware asked me to paint a mural, and they said “We’d love to do something with Bigfoot.” So I thought everybody says Bigfoot’s scary. And you got to go out and hunt him and track him down and find him. And nobody ever sees him, you know, of course. And I said, “Well, I think Bigfoot was out there when, I think he hid because when society took over and all the civilization came in and built everything around, he just moved further back in the woods. But, at one point he worked with the Native Americans. It’s a big Native American area up in – the Wiyot Tribes and the Hoopa Tribes are up all up in that area. And I got how they dressed and what they looked like and what kind of stuff they did, and I put them, and regular pioneers, and had Bigfoot working right with them side by side, like, “We’re all friends, man. We’re shaping this frontier together.”

And then finally, Bigfoot said, “Screw this,” just like a lot of us say, “I’m getting out of the city. I’m moving to the country.”

STUART: 

Right. Unplug. Get lost. Go dark.

DUANE: 

Yeah.

STUART: 

I wasn’t aware that you had so much art that I’ve actually looked at and held in my hands. Lost Coast Brewing? Oh my God. How many of their beer labels have I appreciated while turning them upside down into a glass, particularly that shark? 

DUANE: 

Yeah.

STUART: 

the Great White. It’s pretty iconic. 

DUANE: 

Yeah. If you look at that label real close, you’ll see a little severed hand on the beach. I left that nobody notices it, because I put it near shelves and stuff. I did Downtown Brown, Great White, I did Winterbraun, and I did Alley Cat Amber. And then I also did Indica Pale Ale.

STUART: 

They’re pretty iconic, I gotta say. I would always put like Ralph Steadman’s beer labels in that same category, right?

DUANE: 

Oh. Flying Dog Brewery. I love Ralph Steadman. I mean, he’s amazing. I also do Fox Farm Soils, all their soil bags.

STUART: 

Right. So every indoor grow in the Western United States has your art, somewhere in the room.

DUANE: 

You must have gone to my Instagram, then seen some of my stuff.

STUART: 

I did, I stalked you a little bit before we talked, and I just kept coming to the conclusion that it’s just really weird that we don’t know each other. Maybe we do, and we just forgot. But, I mean, I grew up in Southern California too. My mother-in-law actually lives in Big Bear.

DUANE: 

Oh my gosh. Really?

STUART: 

Yeah. Our paths must have almost crossed so many times.

DUANE: 

Did you go up on the weekends in Big Bear? A lot of the people from L.A. go to Big Bear on the weekend. And then after they’re all gone, we call them Flatlanders, they would go back down the mountain and we’d go out Sunday night after everybody’s gone, we go out and tackle and kill snowmen with baseball bats. It was just like something fun to do. Of course we were drinking at the time, you know.

STUART: 

Of course. I’ve never been into snow sports. I think snow is kind of unnatural, and didn’t actually touch it until I was 16! But the summertime is up there. I remember going up for Old Miners Days.

DUANE: 

I was in that. Oh yeah.

STUART: 

When they would like race burros through the streets? That was some real crazy shit.

DUANE: 

Yeah, they were great. And that was when I started dressing up like a cowboy, and I had a bandana, and I put a patch on my eye like I’m some old miner. It was fun. That was a fun gig. 

STUART: 

Hey, I want to talk more about costuming, because one of the other things I ran across in going through you was this amazing Tonight Show episode with Jay Leno?

DUANE: 

Yeah.

STUART: 

You come out on this crazy circus bike, you play this flamenco guitar with a hand mixer. Actually, Vav, can we play that? Let’s stick a little bit of Malagueña in here. 

JAY LENO: 

Who is the most interesting person you met?

TOM GREEN:
It was a tough choice but we decided to bring back kinetic sculptor Duane Flatmo!

Duane congratulations for being the most interesting person in California. 

STUART: 

What really knocked me out, Duane, was the outfit that you’re wearing. You’ve got a giant head mask, very Cubist head on, and you’re wearing this long, sort of Piero clown silks with the word ZULU across the back. Where did you come up with that costume? 

DUANE: 

I had to wear something on the show, and I wanted to look, I had something to go with that head. I built that Picasso head a long time ago. I used to teach mask making to kids. It’s all built out of cardboard, papier maché and fur. I would build these outrageous costumes that had strings you could pull on, the eyes would wink, and the mouths would work; really detailed stuff. And when they asked me to come on the show, they said, you know, “ride your bike on and do the bit” because they picked me as ‘California’s most interesting person’ is what they called it, and Tom Green was the host. He came up to my shop up here and did a bunch of filming and stuff. 

And that ZULU outfit, it was a graduation gown. You can find those real cheap and then you can make them into costumes. I remember painting ZULU on it because I love the ZULU floats in New Orleans. The floats out there, they were just really outrageous. And then when I was going on Jay Leno, I thought, well, I’ll wear that. That’s kind of nice, you know? And I had a pair of weird boots. 

But I was so afraid. I invented that little bike, “The Badass” we call it. It turns so tight, and it takes a little while to learn how to ride it. But I was so worried I was going to fall on the stage. So I had practiced that like three or four times, doing a loop loop and then putting it down. That bit –I used to do open mic comedy at this place called the Old Town Bar and Grill, and I came up with that bit, and everybody wanted me to do it because it would bring the house down at the end of the show. That’s the last bit.

So I got to audition. They were doing auditions down in our local mall for America’s Funniest People, which was Dave Coulier from the Full House show, and Arleen Sorkin. They were the hosts. I went down and I auditioned and I got on the show. And then they said, “You could send this to David Letterman, maybe, and sometimes they take you for stupid human tricks.” 

So eight months later, I get this call from the Letterman Show: Can you be on a plane tomorrow morning to do this bit in New York? And I say, “You bet, man. I’ll be there in a heartbeat.” So I got to go on the show. And then, I got picked to go to a theme park and do an ad for them. And then I was on the America’s Got Talent, and I did it, I opened on Telemundo TV.

STUART: 

That was the same bit you were doing your flamenco? Flamenco guitar on Telemundo? 

DUANE: 

Yeah.

STUART: 

But opening for Carlos Santana. How is that possible?

DUANE: 

It was so amazing. They said they called me and they said, “Hey, we’ve seen your routine and we’re doing a show on Telemundo and we want you to come down to Universal Studios. We’ll put you up in a hotel. We’ll pay you 600 bucks.” That’s standard rate for talent is what they pay. I could have joined the…

STUART: 

The Union, the Guild, the SAG.

DUANE: 

Yeah, I could have become that, but then you had to pay like $1,200 a year or something. But anyway, they said, “Oh yeah, we’ll pay all this.” And so, and I go, “Well I’m not sure I want to do it.” And they go, “Well you’ll be open for Carlos Santana.” And I went, “Okay, I’ll be there in a heartbeat!”

He’s one of my heroes. I played in bands. I’ve been in two major bands where we play like ten years in one band, 12 years in the other, and we played rock and roll. I played guitar since I was nine. I never knew if I wanted to do music or art. I was doing both. You’re either going to do a little bit in both categories or you’re going to do a lot in one category.

So I decided art was where I was going to make more money than trying to be a musician and do rock and roll. I was writing songs, and we are playing for Harley Davidson rallies, Billy Idol, rock and roll. 

But that routine is just a little guitar, and when I went on The Tonight Show, Adam Sandler was there, Rod Stewart, they signed my guitar for me. And then I got to meet Santana and he signed my guitar and took a picture with him. 

STUART: 

Beautiful. 

DUANE:

Out at Burning Man I see the most amazing people. Amy Poehler was our machine. The Prince of Denmark was there with his bodyguard shooting fire.

STUART: 

Not Hamlet, but the real Prince of Denmark. Okay. Yeah.

DUANE: 

The real Prince of Denmark. He just became the king now. So he just recently became the King of Denmark. And Les Claypool, we see him out there and he plays; he’s come by my house, and he went out to dinner with us up here. And Susan Sarandon, of all people. It just opens up to so many people come on the machine. And I love when I can let them play the buttons and they just feel the power of it, because there’s nothing like pushing these buttons and feeling that concussion. When you’re in it, you feel the concussion on your chest while you’re hitting that, and it just, you feel like you’re on the top of the world. I mean, it’s just amazing.

STUART: 

So one more costume question. I’ve seen some pretty fabulous outfits on the ride, on Pulpo. Is that the work of your partner?

DUANE: 

Mickey does her own beautiful costumes. That’s what she does. She designs costumes and outfits, and she’s a full, amazing fine art painter. She’s just a total artist in a different realm than me. I’m kind of more kooky and weird, and she’s more serious, and she’s amazing. 

But the costumes we got, a couple of us, when we brought it out the first time, we’re all just wearing ball caps and boom, we got hit in the head by the tentacle. We banged our heads on metal. It’s all metal so it won’t catch on fire. And so I said, “We’re wearing helmets from now on, guys. Safety helmets.” Okay. And we all got black helmets. And then in those black jackets are fire retardant, so you can have something, if something fell down from above and landed on it, so wouldn’t catch our shirts on fire. So those are actually not costumes, they’re more uniforms.

But it really has a neat look. You know, it looks like we’re really working the thing and like maybe we work out in the oil fields or something, you know? I love the look as we stand out from everybody else in all these wild costumes. And I always only give people on the team those outfits. That’s because if someone’s in at Burning Man sees something wrong, they know who to go to. We are all wearing black.

STUART: 

It’s the operator’s uniform.

DUANE: 

Right, right.

STUART: 

So there are two El Pulpo’s in the world. Tell me why you decided to, and what that process was like to, let go of El Pulpo Mecánico and create El Pulpo Magnífico.

DUANE: 

I had built that in 2011 and Mark Switzer, Swizzy, they call him, he’s a Burner out there now, he had a shop. I rented the shop from him when we built the first El Pulpo, really funky, but we just barely made it to go out to Burning Man, and we did not publicize it. I like to not show progress shots and all that stuff. Everybody sees it before you get there. I like to surprise people. And so we came out there the first year, people were just blown away.

And we didn’t, we had never put it together because our shop wasn’t big enough to put it together in. So we just had the pieces. We knew they fit. So our first time to ever put it together was at Burning Man. So we put it all together and we got back 25 feet with the buttons and we go, “Okay, here we go,” a little shot of whiskey, we each got a cigar going, and we were out there before everybody arrived at Burning Man.  And we hit the buttons. We just – our knees buckled and we all almost – we just were screaming laughter. We all yelled, “We created a frickin’ monster!!!” 

That’s what we were called… The first year, we weren’t called El Pulpo Mecánico, people just called us ‘that effin octopus.’ “Have you seen that effin octopus?”

And so we did it for six, somethin’, oh, 2011 to maybe 2019. And someone offered me, it was out in Austin, Texas,hey were going to start a theme park with art cars out there called Land of the Giants, and it’s a motor speedway, it’s a Formula One motor speedway, you know, and the guy had money and he offered me a huge amount of money, like retirement kind of money. And I’ve been working all my life as an artist, didn’t have a great retirement set up. And I was always hoping that I’d have some gig that came along and was, I was able to get some good retirement savings aside.

And when they offered me the amount we had already been looking at El Pulpo going, “God, we built this out of rusty metal,” which is a very neat looking patina, you know, but it’s not very good for lastability. So it started falling apart. And every time we’d take it on the road, we’d come back and things were broken, and we’d have to re-weld. But it was all rusty. So welding to rust is just a hassle. And we had it in good condition. And we got it in good condition to give to these people. But then the deal, they kind of didn’t get the thing going and the deal kind of fell apart a little bit, because I didn’t, we had an argument about the money. They kind of cheated me out of a pretty good chunk of money. It was a fiasco. 

And when we left Austin, we didn’t feel very good. The team and I said, well, you know what? We’re going to build a better one. We’re going to build El Pulpo Magnífico, and let’s build it. And everybody at Burning Man started, “Well, that guy sold out. He sold out for that.” And then other people would say, “Oh, oh, it’s terrible. An artist is actually making money. Oh, you guys, that’s so terrible, isn’t it?” 

Burning Man’s never given me a penny, at all, for any propane, for art installation money or anything because I’m an art car. They don’t do that with art cars. And I always liked staying that way because I wasn’t committed to, “Oh, you got to pick these people up. You got to be at the ARTery at 10 o’clock. You got to go out to this wedding, and…” I just wanted to be on my own, and raise the money to pay it. And we did that all the time. El Pulpo was a separate entity that we bring to Burning Man. It’s not like a Burning Man thing, that they own. 

So, when I sold it, I took that money, I took just a small chunk, and built the whole El Pulpo Magnífico, which is better. It’s cleaner. All the stuff that I wanted to work out in the old machine, I built it better so it lasts longer, lighter, easier to put together. And we surprised people cause nobody thought El Pulpo was ever going to come back. And I called Chef Juke at the DMV, and I said, “Hey, I don’t want anybody to know I’m bringing this. Can we keep it a secret?” You know, if they show the committee to approve you, then they go tell everybody, “Hey, look what’s coming.” I didn’t want that. So we signed up as Fred. And we drew up a …I did a crayon drawing of a hump with flames coming out of it, and someone running away from it, and I said, that was our… That was… 

STUART: 

Okay, Fred.

DUANE: 

Our CAD computer died, so we had to draw it and they all didn’t know who Fred was. And when we got there, nobody really knew that was coming. And a lot of people said, “Man, you pulled a coup, man! I don’t know how you pulled this off!” But Chef Juke was part of it. He kept it a secret really well. He’s so great.

I never thought I’d ever get money like that for anything I’ve done.

STUART: 

Did you sell him the extended warranty? Because it sounds like it was falling apart when you let go of it.

DUANE: 

No, I did not!

STUART: 

It was not certified pre-owned? 

DUANE: 

As is. And I own all the rights to merchandise and everything, and the name. And I’ve got a copyright on the machine. I did all the footwork on that part of it; signed a great contract.

We just got my website done. It’ so… It turned out so great. There’s galleries for El Pulpo Magnífico and Mecánico. You can see all the pictures of what it took to build it, and how we put it together on each of those. You can see all the people who’ve been involved with the machine over the years. 

And a shout out to my team. And I want to say I couldn’t have done it without Jerry Kunkel, 45 year friend. I’ve done all the Kinetic Races with him; a mastermind. And I’d like to also thank Will Smart who helped….he’s kind of taken Jerry’s place. They’re both really smart. I wouldn’t be where I am without their smarts. I got the art, he’s got the physics and electric, all that kind of stuff.

STUART: 

Flatmo is an unusual name, Duane. Where does that come from?

DUANE: 

My dad was born and raised in Norway. And he was ten years old when the Nazis rationed all their food on their farm. His name was Oystein Flatmo. And Oystein meant rock and Flatmo meant flat land. He loved America so much. And he changed his name to Rocky once he got here, because Oystein was rock, stein is rock.

He was a painter, a house painter. I learned painting by going all the jobs when I was growing up with him. And he taught me so many things; how to make do with what you got. That’s one of my big things. And I just loved him; my, my rock. He taught me so much. 

The minute he became a citizen in America he got drafted into Korea! And so he went to Korea and fought, and had an honorable discharge because he got hurt. So that’s where the word Flatmo comes from. I’m really proud of it. It was great having a dad like that. 

STUART: 

Wow.

DUANE: 

He would tell stories about the trolls and billy goats gruff. That’s when I started drawing all that stuff, all those mountains that had heads in them, and faces; rocks, rock formations. It was always fun.

My dad just loved this country so much. He would hate it when he’d see someone burning the flag, or there were people protesting the government. He would say, “God, I work so hard to get to this country, to see that flag being burned.” And I said, “You know, dad, it’s really hard, but, you know, that’s why we have this freedom. We can do that stuff. And as much as you hate it, there’s a lot of Americans who don’t like it either, and so you just need to accept it and move on.”

That’s where I kind of got a lot of the way I treat people. My mom and dad were both really supportive of me when I was growing up. They took me to art lessons, music lessons; always if I was doing something weird. Here’s something I did. 

STUART: 

Sure.

DUANE: 

I was probably in eighth grade, and I saw the light was coming in, and we had a three story house in Big Bear, and I saw the light come in in my brother’s room, and it was hitting something and it was reflecting. I thought, God, that’s weird. 

So I went, got a hand mirror, and I held it, and I shot the light source over to the stairway. And then I thought, “Oh!” So I went and got all the mirrors in the house I could find, as many mirrors as I could. And I got in the window of my brother’s bedroom up in the dormer, and I banked the mirror and taped it to the wall, and I shot it down to the stairway. Then I ran down there and I shot another mirrors down the stairs, and I shot that light source on all the mirrors all the way down to the basement. My mom was down there and I was shining this light in her eyes, and she’s like, “Where’s that coming from?” And I said, “It’s coming from the third story.” And she said, “Why did you do that?!” 

I don’t know why I did it, I just because I could and I wanted to, you know. I’m always coming up with ideas if I can, you know some that haven’t seen yet or something.

STUART: 

I want to know about taking this thing on the road. I understand that El Pulpo has been out there visiting other Burning Man events. You went to Love Burn. How did that go?

DUANE: 

Love Burn was awesome. It was, they do a great job there. There was about 8,000 people.

STUART: 

Yeah. That’s the regional event in Florida, pretty close to Miami.

DUANE: 

Yeah, it’s the bridge that goes over to Miami, the Virginia Key Island. And they rented the whole island. It’s so different than Burning Man. It’s not this long expanse where you can go out to nowhere. It’s intertwined in all these jungles and palm trees and that kind of a look. 

Then you could walk right over the beach and, you know, Christopher Schardt, his machines out there on the beach. At night, you can just sit under his big butterfly, the Mariposa. And there’s big floating lotuses made out of aluminum that are powered by propane. They’re lit up at night. Big shows they do out there. It’s just a wonderful attitude, and the people were great. And I think they want to have us back. And they’re even talking to Mike Garlington, I put them in touch with Mike, to maybe do their temple next year.

STUART: 

So, very cool.

DUANE: 

He’s in talks with them. Yeah.

STUART: 

Somebody said something about maybe hitting a power line. What happens when a 28 foot tall metal monster engages with high voltage?

DUANE: 

So here’s what happened. One of the guys at the who was kind of one of our liaisons at the place, he said, “There’s a lot of people camped at the other end, but you can’t make it there because your machine won’t go along the beach there. It’s too high for the terrain.” And he said, “But there is a road. If you go out the exit and go down the road just a way, you only have to go a little ways on the highway,” which we’re not street legal, “you turn in this road and it’ll go straight down, there’s wide road, big road…” 

Well, I didn’t know there’s power lines over it. And we come around the corner and right as I hear my one of my guys – we had 14 people on board, 200 gallons of gas, of propane, which we shut off when we’re driving, so it was shut off. But I hear this “POWER LINES” and I slam the brakes and we hit two big power lines, which are real potent ones, and one coaxial, which is a telephone wire. And that thing went across the head and dented the whole head of the machine in, and the eyes wouldn’t work anymore and the mouths. They were all just, nothing lined up. 

STUART: 

Oh no. 

DUANE: 

And we were hooked. The mouth was hooked on the wire like it grabbed, like it was eating the wire. I tried to back up, but there was no way.

Well, sparks flew the minute we hit it. Sparks just poured down on the machine and everybody jumped off and here’s the weird thing: All the DJs at the festival, they’re all playing music, it’s like 12 midnight, you know, and everybody’s dancing… it all went black. 

All the DJs and all the dance and stuff. For about a half hour. The generators kicked in and they got back online. But we also hit, all the lights went out on the bridge to Miami. All the lights we put out… They hit the circuit breaker and it died immediately. It was all grounded immediately. 

And when they came out, the two fire trucks came up. Nobody died, so they left, you know. And then the guy from the electrical company came out. He said, “Oh, we’ll get this up. I’ve never seen anything like this before. Like this giant octopus is eating our telephone lines!”

STUART: 

That’s like a Godzilla act, not an octopus.

DUANE: 

It looked like it. Yeah, it totally looked like it.

I’m sitting there and I’m just like, I’m devastated. My team wanted to talk to me. I said, “I’m going to sit here by myself. I got to digest this and really think about what’s going on.

And then one of the operations manager, James, he comes flying up in a little golf cart, and he’s saying, “Where the F is Flatmo? Where’s Duane?” and I felt like my mom was getting me, I was in trouble with my mom. And I said “I’m right here!” And he just was so livid. Then he calmed down and said, “Hey, I’m sorry, are you okay?” I go, “Well, I wish you had asked me that at first and then got into the tirade, but…” 

Everything was fine. The guy came out, he said, “Look, we’re just going to lift that wire up. You’re going to back out. You didn’t didn’t hurt the wires. They didn’t break. They didn’t go down there. Just you just got caught in them and we’ll get you undone.” So I just backed right out of that and went back over and shot fire the rest of the night.

STUART: 

Hahaha!

DUANE: 

They didn’t charge anything, and nobody got in trouble because he said in hurricane season he fixes so many lines like this. Tree limbs get in them. And so that was a bit weird. 

We’ve gone to Insomniac EDC at Las Vegas three times. We’ve been to San Ber’dino three times at EDC, and then we’ve done Telluride Fire Festival. We shipped it out there. And then we went to Calgary, Canada, at Beakerhead, which was an engineering event. And now we’re going to Santa Cruz, at the Regional Burn. 

STUART: 

Oh, yeah. unSCrews. 

DUANE: 

And Sean Orlando, you know, he of course he has artifacts logistics. And he ships our machines. So he his truck is what brought it all the way out to Florida and back. It was like a six day journey.

STUART:

Yeah, I was curious about that. Does it all fit in a container or?

DUANE:

No, it will go into a container. No, it goes on a big 48 foot lowboy pulled by a semi truck. And we drive the machine up. It’s all stripped down, all the legs and the head and everything are… We have just the right places to put them on that truck and we can fit it all. So it’s a big to do. Then I fly eight people in to go put it together, and work it all weekend, and then we fly them all back home and then we unload it here. It’s a lot of work. You know, people ask us, “Hey, can you come to our barbecue tomorrow night?”

No, you can’t just drive this thing!

STUART: 

“Come play my party! Come play my party, Duane!” If your party happens to be in the Black Rock Desert at Burning Man, maybe, right? 

DUANE: 

Yeah.

STUART: 

Are you going? You gonna go this year. What do you think?

DUANE:

I’m going this year. Yep. It’s been nine months since I had… I had a liver transplant, which is an amazing thing, a miracle, really. I’m feeling great and up to speed. 

STUART: 

Wow. Glad to hear it. 

DUANE: 

Oh, yeah. I’m so thankful. I’ve had such a great life and I’ve always done good stuff, kept the trolley on the tracks. And then this thing came out and I just did everything the doctors told me. I haven’t drank any alcohol in like nine years. I eat some edibles. You know, they said you can eat all the edibles you want, you know, and so. 

STUART: 

Well, okay, then, I won’t bring you a beer when we see each other out there. 

DUANE: 

They have zero zero beer now. 

STUART: 

OK.

DUANE: 

All the companies are making these zero zero IPA. Nonalcoholic means 0.5. Zero zero beer means nothing. And I get this 12 pack for ten bucks, and it’s a white can, it looks like the White Album by the Beatles. And, it’s really pretty tasty if you want the beer flavor, which I love, you know.

STUART: 

All right Well, I’m having a beer flavored beer with you when we see each other.

How did you get out there in the first place? I’m just curious who talked you into it.

DUANE: 

Burning Man. Okay, I don’t know if you know Shaye for President. 

STUART: 

Yeah!

DUANE: 

Okay. Shaye was one of the Rutabaga Queens at the Kinetic Race for many years and lived up here. And we knew each other really… Yeah. Shaye Harty. She’s a wild one. And I love her. She gave me a free ticket, two free tickets, to Burning Man and said “You need to go to this.” 

I had been collecting information on Burning Man for 20 years. Once I heard it was out there, I just was like, “WHAT?” And I was scared about it. I was worried about going there, and kept collecting every article, and every photo I would see in magazines, I put in this little packet and I said to myself, you know, “I’m never going to go there unless I have something to bring.” People kept seeing my kinetic sculptures up here, and they kept saying, “You need to bring those to Burning Man and we’ll pedal them around.”

So Shaye gave me the ticket and we went out there, me and my friend Bob, without our wives, without anybody, to scope it out, to scout it, in 2007.

And when we saw the Steampunk Treehouse, Tom Seppi, and Sean Orlando, and Jay Kravitz. I got to meet them. I went up. I was blown away. The steam engine train comes up, hooks up, and they play the whistles in that thing with the steam from the… and I was just like, “Oh my God. That is so amazing!” And we saw the Monkeys by Peter Hudson, got to meet him. And then we saw the oil derrick, the Crude Awakening, and that was like the biggest explosion I’ve ever seen in my life. 

STUART: 

Oh yeah.

DUANE: 

So we were hooked and we came back, told all of our friends and wives, “We’re going next year, and we’re bringing a group!” I brought the dragon that was in the Smithsonian show for Burning Man. I brought my dragon out there, which I’m going to bring this year to Burning Man. I’m getting it fixed up again. 

STUART: 

Okay. 

DUANE: 

Yeah. So I’ll have that and the El Pulpo. So we’ll have those in camp.

STUART: 

Outstanding. What else are you working on? What are you dreaming about for the next iteration

DUANE: 

I want to redo Rapid Transit. All the animals are in the shop, and I just need a truck, and I need to start working on these demented animals that are doing stuff that … I did it one year, it had a fish swimming in the front, and it had a big bat on top and goats. And I want to add raccoons in trash cans that pop up out of trash cans, shoot fire when they get out, and then they go… they have little glowing red eyes. And just every kind of animal you think about when you think of road kills and stuff like that. You got possums, skunks, rats, snakes, you know, all those weird animals. Tasmanian devils. Armadillos. 

That’s what I want to do next. But lately I just been doing, I did a few designs, I did a sticker design for a company, and I just recently did a shark logo for somebody. So I do little jobs like that, but mainly since I became 65, I started getting my Social Security check each month. I toned down on all my work. I just said, why work so much? I’m just going to build my contraptions and all my stuff I want to build. So that’s what I’ve been doing lately, is having kind of a free, open palette to just do whatever I feel like, you know? And it’s really fun.

STUART: 

Well, if you’re not having fun, what the hell are you doing? I always say.

DUANE: 

That’s right.

STUART: 

Well thank you. It’s been really fun. My guest was Duane Flatmo, the creator of the legendary El Pulpo. I’ll see you out there in the dust before too long, Duane.

DUANE: 

Yep.

STUART: 

Thanks for your time.

That concludes another episode of Burning Man LIVE, the fully decommodified production of the 100 percent non profit. Burning Man Project, the guardian, steward, and progenitor of the crazy, amazing, awe inspiring culture that is spread out from our little thing in Black Rap City out into the larger world.

I want to thank everyone who helped put this episode together. That would be Vav-Michael-Vav, Tyler Burger, Molly, Actiongirl, kbot… 

And I want to thank you, dear listener, well, for listening, but also for telling a friend and maybe leaving a review for us on one of those podcast download sites where you like to get your podcasts. We got a lot of stars, we could use a few more numbers behind the stars. So if you like it, go ahead and take a minute and tell people you like it. 

You can send us emails at live@burningman.org. You can check out our archive of past episodes, transcripts, and other goodies at live.burningman.org. You can donate if you feel the urge at donate.burningman.org. Every little bit helps. 

And that’s about it for this episode. 

Thanks, Larry.

---

more