MOSHE: 

Burning Man, rightfully, I doff my cap to it, it wants to become modern and respect the change of society. But I don’t think it translates. And I don’t think that Burning Man will find a way to become infused with what is going on in society. Its vitality is that it is this sort of relic of a time when experiencing things that have no meaning are incredibly meaningful. How it gets weird again is, for me, finding these moments of meaning.

STUART:  

Hey, everybody. Welcome back to Burning Man LIVE. I’m Stuart Mangrum and I’m here again with my friend Actiongirl, Andie Grace. And today we are going to talk to a long long-time Burner, who’s also a well-known standup comedian and the author of a terrific new book, Counterculture Vulture that includes a…

MOSHE: 

Subculture Vulture

ANDIE: 

Subculture

MOSHE: 

Subculture Vulture

ANDIE: 

Subculture Vulture

STUART: 

Count-fru-fru-sub Vulture. Anyway, he’s got this cool new book.

MOSHE: 

Oh, we’re not going to take it again. I like this even better. Yeah. Fuck it. 

STUART: 

It has a chapter about our thing in the desert. Who knew that this fellow was also a Burner, among other things? And I’m pretty sure, this is a first for this program, but Moshe is a recovering alcoholic hearing child of deaf Jewish parents. Welcome, Moshe Kasher.

MOSHE: 

It would be wild if it was not a first for this program. I’m a, I think, the first guest on your show that is a 24-time Burner, used to work here, hearing child of deaf adults, one of whom became a born again Hasidic Jew (and I had to pretend I knew how to do that every summer vacation), turned standup comedian, and then was also a rave promoter, a rave DJ, a clean and sober ecstasy dealer. Am I missing anything? Sign Language Interp… It’s gotta be a first, right? It must be.

ANDIE: 

Well, there was that one guy that one time.

MOSHE: 

Oh yeah. That one guy.

STUART: 

Yeah. Identity is such a complicated thing, isn’t it? And thank you for writing a book about six different identities from the six subcultures that perhaps you had to foot it. I want to talk about the one that we all have a foot or a toe or a head in. Let’s start with Burning Man. The beginning of your Burning Man experience was way back in 1996. A 16 year old rave kid; how the hell did you get there? And what happened when Moshe met Burning Man?

MOSHE: 

Well, you know, I got onto Michael Mikel’s weird Cacophony miscellanea mailing list, at some point in my life. 

ANDIE: 

The Rough Draft.

MOSHE: 

Yeah. I just sometimes will receive these like packages of insane fliers and weirdness and just stuff that he’s pulled out of a trunk, I assume, covered in dust with gems inside of it. And he sent me one of my prized possessions, which is a ticket to Burning Man 1996, which is now prominently displayed in my office. And that was the year of insanity, and the first year that I went. 

I was like a 16 year old, clean and sober rave dirtbag, and I heard “There’s a rave in the desert…” That’s it! That’s what I heard. And that was enough at the time for me to pack up a 1991 Ford Escort with five other dirtbags from the rave scene. And we drove in, and we bought, you know, way too little water. And I remember we drove up, and the security apparatus, the gate at Burning Man was just a man and a canned ham trailer with a gun, I think. And he walked up and he must have been high because he goes, “Okay, there’s four of you. That’ll be blank.” I remember it was $65 at the door. “Folks. Think about this. $65, endless tickets available to you at the Gate.”

STUART: 

But that was in 1996 dollars, so I don’t know what inflation has done to that.

MOSHE: 

That’s right. So in 1996, for the listeners, $65 was $65,000. You could buy a house in Vacaville.

ANDIE: 

That’s basically the math. Yeah, that’s it.

MOSHE: 

And I remember he looked in the car and he goes, “Okay, there’s four of you. That’ll be…” (however much that is), and I was like this little rave kid, but I was also like in AA, and had just like adopted this, I was 16 years old and sober about a year, and I just adopted this very annoying moral code that I had learned about in AA.

So I go, “Actually, sir, there’s five of us,” and all of the raver kids who were not in AA looked at me like, “You fucking narc! What are you doing? This guy missed a whole raver!” But we paid our $65 apiece, and we go, “What do we do now?” And he said, “Reset your trip-o-meter and drive straight for eight miles. And at the eight mile mark, turn right. You’ll see.” And that’s all we did. 

We reset the trip-o-meter and drove straight into a dust storm, and it was like the world behind us melted away. And at eight miles, we nervously turned right, and about two miles later, we encountered, what I very quickly realized, I didn’t know what it was, but it was definitely not a rave in the desert. It was some other thing that I had absolutely no context for. And it was a life changing archway that I walked through.

STUART: 

‘96, Yeah, that was the year everything kind of went to shit, wasn’t it?

MOSHE: 

Literally.

STUART: 

And part of that was because someone had decided that the rave camp was too loud and we put it, what, a mile or two miles away from the rest of the camp, so you were actually in a rave camp Burning Man, not in the other Burning Man.

MOSHE: 

Actually, I think I was camped in the city, and I think that it was a mile away. We called it the techno ghetto. And, you could drive. If you can believe this fair listener: I believe there were three rave camps, it might be four, but there was no more than four, and they were all facing each other. It was in a circle and all the sound systems were facing each other. 

So if you stood directly in the center of the four camps you would hear this just cacophonous nightmare of jungle coming from one camp, a camp called Spaz; psychedelic trance coming from another camp, that was Goa Gil and his psychedelic trance denizens. If you’ve ever been to a psychedelic trance party outdoors, it looks as though the participants have not arrived at the party, but have rather emerged from the ground underneath the party, like from below.

ANDIE: 

Sprouting like mushrooms.

MOSHE: 

Like the mushrooms that they are on.

ANDIE: 

That they are eating. Yes.

MOSHE: 

And then Wicked, the Wicked soundsystem, the kind of famous house music crew in San Francisco. And that was Jeno and Garth and Marky and Thomas and superstar DJ Dmitry from Deee-Lite. That was where the techno was. That’s where the dance music was. And it’s because the crusty old Burning Man Cacophony Society dinosaurs had begrudgingly sneered at these ravers that were infiltrating their cool culture-jamming fuck-fest in the desert, and were like, “You can come, but you will not be fully welcomed. You can be sequestered outside of the city.” And that turned out to be a major disaster that first year that I went.

STUART: 

It was a disaster either way you’ve sliced it. But it’s interesting that you made your own Cacophony out there of some big sound camps.

MOSHE: 

That’s right. We had our own Cacophony Society. It didn’t comport to the one that we had entered into.

STUART: 

Screw you guys. You wanted Cacophony. We got Cacophony.

ANDIE: 

We made a literal cacophony for you. Stand right there.

STUART: 

I love the research that you did for this book, Moshe. I actually learned a lot about things I didn’t know much about, or thought I knew about, like Hasidic Judaism. And I also loved the Cacophony event that stood out to you out of the Rough Draft was the same one that got me up off the couch and turned me into a Cacophonist. It was the clowns on a bus, right?

MOSHE: 

That’s right. It’s the most succinct way to understand what the Cacophony Society was trying to do. They set up clowns at all of these bus stops along one bus route in San Francisco, and you would be just a random commuter on your way to work, and all of a sudden a clown climbs on your bus commute to work, and you go, “Oh. Hey, look at that clown. How funny. That’s so sad that he can’t afford a tiny car to get to work. But he’s just like us. He’s taking the bus to work.”

Then you get to the next stop and another clown gets on, and then you get to the next stop, and another clown gets on. And by the time you’re close to work, there’s a whole freakin’ cadre of clowns and you’re sitting there, you square San Francisco resident, are sitting there thinking, “What am I looking at? What is this thing?” 

To me, that is the feeling that Cacophony Society and that Burning Man at its best moments is trying to engender, that kind of jaw drop without explanation, and without a need for explanation. Random, my life has been disrupted in a way that feels both meaningless and incredibly meaningful at the same time.

STUART: 

And these clowns pretend to not know each other. It’s wonderful. 

Now, in the book you refer to your first Burning Man back when it was still very much a Cacophony event in 1996 as being a “waterboard of wonder.” But then, you know, you also write that Burning Man is moved, I love this, from a place where weirdos came to feel normal, into a place normal people came to feel weird.

Does that mean you and I are normal now, or is there still some weird out there that you can perceive?

MOSHE: 

No. See, that’s the cool thing about being old school. You can affect an air of detached “You don’t get it, man.” That’s the whole point of this thing. 

I was doing an event the other day and Nick Kroll, who came to Burning Man with me one year, was saying, “You know, I got there and I realized that dressing normal wasn’t cool here.” And then I said, “Yes, that’s true, except there’s a third level, which is where you start dressing normal again because you’re so cool, that even, you can’t even be bothered. You can’t be bothered to dress up like a Burner. You’ve spent a decade dressing up like a Burner. So now you’re sitting in your regular, your default world clothes looking at everybody else going, “I remember when I wore costumes too!”

But I don’t, I think that – to answer your question sincerely about being normal, I think I finally understand the mission of the Burning Man Project. Burning Man is not a real possibility. You cannot utopitize the world. It’s not possible. Burning Man cannot make the world Burning Man. You know, I was talking to Nick about the same thing that he came up his first Burn this thought that we all have. He was like, “What if this could be life?” And I go, “We would start to kill each other on week two, DAY ONE, week two.”

Burning Man is not a real utopia. It is an experiment, and I think it’s what they meant by that ‘temporary autonomous zone,’ it’s an experiment in temporary false utopia, that hopefully you get a kernel of, that when you go home, you’re not living in utopia, but your soul has been shifted into the utopic zone. You’re different. 

It’s a lot like taking psychedelics, you know. There’s this famous idea that my friend Duncan Trussell was talking about, all the early psychonauts, Ram Dass and company, they had this quote, like, “When you come down, who does the dishes?” Okay, we just traveled the astral plane with Mother Ayahuasca, but now we’re back in our apartment. Who does the fucking dishes? You have to come back to the real world, but you’ll hopefully come back to the real world, having been shoved to the left a little bit. And that’s what happened to me the first time I went to Burning Man. It’s not that life became Burning Man, it’s that I took a little spark of that thing and brought it back home with me and became a different guy.

ANDIE: 

Going further into that, you didn’t just go, and take that experience, though, you started volunteering. You started getting involved with it. How come? Why? Why did you pick the Gate?

MOSHE: 

There’s a few ways to answer that. Every world that I traveled in, each of the segments in my book is like one part history of that world and one part memoir of my time in that world. Every time I went into one of these worlds and they changed me in this profound and permanent way, my next reaction was like, I want to own this world. I want superpowers. I don’t want to be just some guy walking around. I want superpowers. 

And so that’s one way to answer it. When Burning Man changed me and this really big and profound and permanent way – and I think this is a manifestation of ego to some degree – I didn’t just want to be a Burner. I wanted to like drink Burning Man and become, make manifest the thing in my own body. 

But the other answer is really simple. I was actually for a long time content to just party, but my friends one by one started to get picked off by Burning Man work. All of a sudden I had no friends. Everybody was working at the Gate and I was like, I don’t wanna, why would I wanna work? I want to go rave and party and hang out and flirt with people and… 

Then when I got to the Gate, what I realized was there — and I think this is what people that complain about the Gate and they maybe don’t understand — it was the most distilled leftover for me — I mean Gigsville has some of this and other crews have some of this, but to me, it was the most distilled vestigial leftovers of that original Cacophony Society culture-jamming energy. It was the funniest place I’d ever encountered, and it was funny enough and weird enough to spend 15 years up there.

ANDIE: 

You must have some stories about what kept you coming back to be a mile away. I hear you saying the camaraderie and the chaos and the energy of it was compelling and funny. Tell me why.

MOSHE: 

The book is about my life as like a world straddler, and the Gate is, to me, the straddling of two worlds, and that’s part of what I really love about it. The Gate is not Burning Man, but it’s also not the default world. It’s this kind of liminal, and I know that people don’t experience it this way because they’ve been in a 16 hour traffic jam and they dropped acid at the top of the road thinking that the party had started, and only to realize that the traffic jam had started. But for me, the space in between this bizarro, fractal-ated, mind-fuck, Mad Max-ian, Ishtar art fest, whatever it is that’s happening at Burning Man, and the trappings of the real world, the way that the Gate is in between those two things is the way that I got to be this sort of psychedelic TSA agent. I loved that shift. I loved watching people transform. 

The Greeter. That’s Burning Man. You’re in Burning Man, But the Gate is a netherworld. And I think that the energy of the people that work there reflects that netherworld energy. And I think the frustrations that people have at the Gate reflect that netherworld energy. I, controversially I think it’s cool that people are often really pissed off at the Gate because it’s like this birth pang. It’s like this final cramp where the tongs of Doctor Man are coming in and pulling your little head out of the womb, and you’re about to be reborn.

ANDIE: 

Oh, God, it’s true!

STUART: 

I agree that that spirit has been consistent. You know, I think back at the guys who founded the Gate crew, people like Boggman and Abernathy.

ANDIE: 

The guy with the gun.

STUART: 

Yes. Two guys with guns in a ‘canned ham trailer.’ They kind of looked at themselves as like Charon on the River Styx.  

MOSHE: 

Yes!

STUART: 

But they weren’t going to row you across. They were just going to point you, and maybe give you a compass point to follow.

MOSHE: 

1,000%. And I have seen… What I loved about raves, and what I needed about raves, was it was this just love fest. And at the time in my life, in my personal development, that’s what I needed. Raves are actually a caricature of love because everybody literally ingests a drug that makes them feel like they’ve experienced love for the first time. I was clean and sober, but I was as high as anybody in that scene. And I needed this caricature of love to like   pull me out of the kind of depths of darkness that my life had been before that. 

But then when I got to Burning Man, it was this combination of love and comedy that really is who I am. It’s not just good vibes and hugs and beauty. It’s also like terror and ridiculousness and danger. Some of the things I saw at the Gate were the funniest things that I’ve seen at Burning Man ever. And they are memories that I love so much. 

There was a desperation of people who had come from so far away, having done so little research. You know, they would show up without tickets. When we ran out of tickets, things got a little darker up at the Gate. It used to be fun. When there were unlimited tickets, there was a game that the Gate would play. We would search in a vehicle, and if we stuck our hands into a fold up couch and felt like a dreadlock, we’d be like, “Ah ha! Got one,” and like pop a hippie out of a couch. And we woul d play this game where, depending on how cool whoever it was that we found was, we would sell them a ticket at the Box Office. We called it the asshole tax.

If you were like, “Dude, you got me. I don’t know what I was thinking. I just really feel the call,” then we would go, “Okay, face value. Tell your friends in the didgeridoo community that we will catch them if they try the same thing.” But if they came out and they were like, “Fuck you, man. You’re just a cop. It’s wrong of you to be charging me at all,” then there would be a commensurate tax that would get added with each snarky remark until finally the tickets became exorbitant.

And that was fun, you know, and sometimes we would even see people that had made it in and we go, “I remember catching you and I don’t remember you buying a ticket, but now you’re in the event, and maybe you won the game. It’s not my business you’re inside.” 

But now that tickets have begun to sell out, the game goes away and it becomes a kind of a sadder experience. Most of the people we interacted with up there had been scammed or had just decided to, like, drive 10 hours without reading a website and see what the ticket situation was.

And I remember one time these kids came from, I think it was Oklahoma. And they showed up. They’d driven all the way in like the Buick LeSabre, and they were just like, “We don’t have tickets, but we’re here for a miracle!” And I’m like, “We ran out of miracles five years ago. There’s no miracles available.” And they were like, “Please, we got to get in. We feel the call!” And we were like, “We can’t help you. There’s nothing we can do.” And they’re like, “We’ll give you our car,” and we go, “WHAT?” And they’re like, “We’ll give you THIS car. We have the pink slip. We’ll sign it over to you right now!”

Within 20 minutes they were walking their bags into Burning Man and the Gate had a brand new art car. And I would say within 20 minutes of that, that Buick was literally, I’m not joking, upside down in the dirt at the Gate party, crushed on open playa. It was the quintessential ‘This is why we can’t have nice things’ moment, and the Gate crew spent the next five days picking up broken glass out of the Gate. But we had a new art car. It was called “The Hella Awesome” and we drove that thing for years.

ANDIE: 

Oh, my goodness.

STUART: 

Yeah. Those stories do get sadder these days. You know, a couple of years ago, there was a whole planeload of folks from China, I believe, who showed up. They thought they had tickets. They were counterfeit tickets. So their trip to Burning Man, yeah, ended at the liminal space called the airport and they were turned around. But, yeah, they never crossed that line.

ANDIE: 

Rough.

MOSHE: 

The River Styx has run dry, my friends. Sorry. You’re going to have to spend the weekend in Reno. By the way, it wasn’t always people desperate to get in. One of my other favorite stories up at the Gate was a guy showed up from I think North Carolina, in a big, beautiful bus. And there was about 16 people on the bus. They all had tickets. Everybody had tickets, including the driver. This guy had a pine tree, a living pine tree, in the back of the bus. All 16 people got out. We processed their tickets. But the leave no trace rules at the Gate were ‘no live plants.’

So I said to the guy, I go, “I’m so sorry, but you can’t bring live plants in here. The people that run this event are afraid that the detritus will fall off and change the ecosystem, or whatever it is.” And he goes, “Well, I got to bring her in.” I go, “Well, okay, well, I can’t let her in. I’m not allowed to let her in. I suggest perhaps driving back to Reno and getting a hotel room and you could put her in there.” And he goes, “Are you kidding? I can’t leave her alone for a week! That’s why I brought her here!” And I go. “Okay, well, look, dude, I can’t let you in with this tree. That’s just my job. I don’t know what to tell you. You can either do what I just said or you can, I guess, drive back to North Carolina.” And he goes, “Okay, well, I’m driving back to North Carolina.” And he starts up his bus and he does a U-turn and begins to drive back. And as he drove away, I go — I couldn’t help it — I go, “You know, man, I think you really need to reexamine your relationship with this tree.” And he yelled back, “You know, I think that’s not any of your business.” And I realized, you know what? He’s right. It really isn’t my business. Whatever him and that tree are up to, God bless them.

I just really admired… To me, you know, that weirdos go to feel normal, normal people go to feel weird? To me there’s a level of weird that’s like way beyond where we’re operating at. We think we’re weird, and then you meet Tree Guy and you go, “Respect, brother.” Whatever that is, you don’t need Burning Man, Burning Man needs you!

ANDIE: 

Aspirational.

Well, so you volunteered at the Gate for 15 years? And then you stopped volunteering. But you continue to go to Burning Man, is that correct?

MOSHE: 

Well, this is what happened for me in world after world. And this is something that I think happens to a lot of people that decide to volunteer at Burning Man, and that just decide in general to make that shift over that invisible line from participant to professional.

It’s a really natural thing that happens when you go into a world that changes you and makes you feel like alive in this different way, where you wanna, sure you want to own it and have power and social status, and that’s real, and that’s normal and it’s human. There’s also a beautiful part of it, which is like you want to give back to this thing that gave so much to you. You want to be a part of the infrastructure because you want to pour something into the river and not just drink from it. The sad thing about that is the moment you cross that invisible line, you start to see some of the uglier parts. It becomes more of a job. And the magic almost immediately – I mean, magic goes away no matter what. If you stay a participant forever, it’s still never going to be as magical. 

There’s a sad feeling you get when you see like a fire dancer, a contact acrobat doing like a four story fall on some aerial silks while his head is on fire, and then he lands, and you go “Ugh, this again?!?!” You should never have that feeling. But you can definitely have that feeling if you go to Burning Man long enough.

STUART: 

That is the ‘jaded fuck’ feeling.

ANDIE: 

Yes, it is a mixed feeling indeed. 

STUART: 

We’re familiar with that. Yes.

MOSHE: 

I’m sure you are. 

So that happened on a deeper level by working at Burning Man. For me. Maybe this doesn’t happen for everybody. But I think the running out of tickets thing really added to it. I remember this moment where I caught this old school kind of like festival hippie. He had been waiting for a dust storm, and the dust storm came and he ran full speed with his gray ponytail flopping behind him, and his hemp sandals on his feet.

And I saw him and I started running after him. So we’re running. We’re kind of neck and neck in this dust storm, looking over. And I go, “Stop! Stop!” And I stopped the guy, and we went and we sat down and he’s begging me, “Please, man, just look the other way. Let me in.” And I was like, “I can’t do that.” And then I just realized I don’t care; I just don’t care about this guy not getting into Burning Man or stopping this process. I started to realize the work wasn’t fulfilling for me, the volunteering wasn’t fulfilling for me. And I started to feel like a bit of the thing that the hippie had been yelling at me. I started to feel a little bit like a cop. Somebody needs to do the job at the Gate. And I don’t think people should be allowed to sneak in. But I also just didn’t want to be the guy stopping people anymore. I didn’t want to be stopping a grandfather, busting him and making him feel pathetic. It just didn’t feel righteous to me. 

So I was faced with this dilemma because I’d already walked 15 years into this like ‘how the sausage is stuffed.’ How do I go backwards? How can I un-evolve myself? How can I pretend that I don’t know what I know on this side of the line? 

I started this experiment, which is I want to like jump back into the experience of Burning Man from a… I’ll never be the kid that was laying down on open playa feeling like the energy of the earth vibrating in from the beats of DJ Dmitri and the stuff that I’d just seen. That’ll never happen for me again. But I did this really, for me, cool experiment of forcing myself into the position of participant. I put my radio up, and all of the things that I used to, like, get from feeling like “The Man” at Burning Man and I started inviting people who had never been before and following them, like a big rig trucker drafting on the truck in front of them. I would try to like get some of the like, fumes of that person’s experience. 

It hasn’t worked totally, but it’s worked enough that it’s kept me going. And so now I am just Burner #64,573 and damn it, I like it this way.

STUART: 

Well, even if you never go back to being the rave kid, might you go back to being the young man who did a reverse robbery of the Center Camp Café?

MOSHE: 

That was early days. That was my second Burn. Yeah, We all ran in ‘Pulp Fiction’ style with ski masks on. I don’t know if this would go over as well in the era of mass shootings.

STUART: 

Well, we don’t have a café anymore. But still, go on. Ski masks. And you’re all calling each other Honey Bunny…

MOSHE: 

What I would do these days, is I would run in with guns and a ski mask and put the infrastructure of the café back into Center Camp. I would do a reverse robbery of the actual coffee shop because I miss the coffee, damn it.

STUART: 

Bringing in a giant espresso machine.

MOSHE: 

That’s right. Yeah. We would just back one in. 

ANDIE: 

I’m with you on this one. I’m in. Let’s do it.

MOSHE: 

Yeah, we ran in and we did a reverse robbery. We were throwing money at people and gems. We jumped on the counter and we’re like very Pulp Fiction style. And then we ran out and took our masks off and then jumped back in line and we’re like, “Hey, what just happened?”

I feel like the question, “What just happened?,” that is the most quintessential Burning Man question. That is what you’re hoping for. It’s not “I raved last night and that DJ was sick,” although that’s great too. It’s that feeling of like, “What did I just witness? What thing just occurred?”

ANDIE: 

Yeah. It’s an eight day sustained course of “And then I’m like, ‘Wait, what’s that?’”

MOSHE: 

“Wait, what’s that?” will give you an adventure. Every year, guys, I’m sure you relate to this, every year is the year that I’m going to look at The What Where When Guide. I’m going to make a schedule. I’m going to go to a workshop. I’m going to do some holotropic breathing. I’m going to learn how to do puppet making. I’m going to do it!

ANDIE: 

The eye-gazing workshop.

MOSHE: 

Yes, I’m going to do the eye-gazing workshop. I’m going to find my orgasmic bliss… and never… I never can do it. It’s always about walking down the street and going, “Wait, what’s that?” following it for a little while, then going, “What’s that?” and then following it for a little while. That’s the experience that I have to surrender to myself. I’m never going to plan. I’m always just going to see what awaits me.

ANDIE: 

Well, there’s one thing you don’t do out there, though, and sober Burners don’t get a lot of airplay. I want to talk about that because I am too an ex AA and I had a departure from it that was not nearly as grand as yours, but not dissimilar either. So I want to talk about your experience as a sober Burner and a fresh one at that. How did you maintain your resolve? Did you find other sober Burners at first? How did that work for you?

MOSHE:

Well, first, I should say that all of my experiences in the psychedelic world, in the rave world and Burning Man, pretty much every sexual experience I’ve ever had, pretty much every healthy social experience I’ve ever had, has been sober. I got sober at 15, so I don’t have a context. I feel like I’m lucky in that I don’t have a context of being in these spaces and going, “God, this was, I remember when…” You know, “I remember when this experience was this plus molly.” I just don’t have that. And so I think it’s been a little easier for me. 

But I also feel like Burning Man seems like a great place to do drugs. But it’s also a pretty great place to be sober. I’ve never felt this experience of “God, this isn’t weird enough. I wish it could be just a tad bit weirder.” I’ve always felt satisfied with the weird level that I’ve gotten there. 

I do remember my first burn as a, I think, I was maybe a year sober and the Man in ‘96, it was just on a pyramid of hay bales, and there was a bulletin board in front of the Man — I think it was in front of the Man. This was back when a bulletin board was actually functional, could be functional. There were only 8000 people there. 

And by the way, there were 8000 people there, and all the real jaded fucks who’d been there already for a decade were going “8000? This is unsustainable!” And to be fair, that year it definitely was. 

But there was a sign on there that said “Friends of Bill: Meet at the Man at 6.” And I did. And I remember the guy, I think his name is Chris, he was a friend from Oakland AA. I actually knew the guy. And that meeting that year was just me and Chris sitting there on the Man base, which was hay, and saying, 

How are you? 

    How are you? 

You can do it. 

    You can do it, too. 

And then walking our separate ways. 

And then came Anonymous Camp. And then came every good AA meeting, or every good offshoot of that. And now I think there’s eight or nine different clean and sober camps. 

And it’s just like anything else, you know, it’s just like any other subculture, or any other world: it’s grown and become vibrant. I remember the first time I did Shabbat at a camp at Burning Man, it was 50 people and just some rabbi from Chicago who had decided to try to do Shabbat. And last year I went, and if you go there, I mean, it looks like Moses is climbing up Mount Sinai. There’s 2000 people there. There’s Jewish priestesses in all white doing like an incantation and pretending they know American Sign Language to do the prayers. Everything has grown, and so, part of what I try to examine was not just the “Oh God, this thing has changed in this bad way,” but it’s also changed in a really cool way.

The scale of Burning Man has grown in this really profound way, and sobriety is included in that and everything else. And there’s a beauty to the scale. Even as it becomes more like, “Oh God, what is this? This looks like it costs $60,000 to build.” It’s also, “Oh God, what is this? I can’t believe what I’m looking at.”

ANDIE: 

And you can find a meeting in any, like, 24 hours a day out there practically at this point.

MOSHE: 

Absolutely. And like I said, I wouldn’t recommend Burning Man to a person with 30 days sober, but I would definitely recommend Burning Man to anybody with 30 years sober, because it has changed the way that I view sobriety, too. 

All of these worlds that I operated in are interconnected and interrelated. You were saying like these, Stuart, these sort of disparate worlds that I stepped into. But what I’ve come to realize examining my life is that they’re all like a puzzle piece that creates the man that is me, and I wouldn’t be me without all of these different pieces.

STUART: 

And if they’re going to come together anywhere, it’s probably in Black Rock City where, as the saying goes, “There’s a camp for that,” For just about everything.

MOSHE: 

Well, that’s right. If you can think of it, there’s a camp about it. Burning Man in particular is the one place in my life where all of the subcultures that I’ve occupied can exist in the same city, in the same space, at the same time. Burning Man is at Burning Man. I don’t know if you’ve noticed this, but raves are Burning Man, and they’ve even bigger than four camps these days. There’s deaf camps and sign language interpreting camps. I can do a Shabbat dinner. There was a comedy club there last year. I can literally, in one night at Burning Man, do all six of these universes. And that to me, that kind of waterboard of wonder. That’s what it’s about. It’s like this gavage of experiences.

STUART: 

I had to go to the dictionary and look that one up. Gavage.

MOSHE: 

Gavage. That’s what they do to the ducks for foie gras. 

STUART: 

It sounds so much classier in French than force feeding, but everything sounds classier in French.

MOSHE: 

By the way, if you really want to get gavaged, you can get gavaged all night long. There’s a camp for that.

ANDIE: 

There’s a camp for that.

STUART: 

So, you know, you mentioned the ASL interpreter camp, and by the way, I think they’re still looking for more volunteers, so if you were ever into another volunteer role that might be a good one. I’ve got a deaf photographer on the Documentation Team who always needs somebody to pair up with him and he’s fun.

MOSHE: 

That’s a good suggestion, actually, because how do you go backwards in volunteering too? I mean, that would be the next sort of iteration. Okay, I’m still a Burner. I’m not going anywhere. Could I give back to the community because my ‘give back to the community’ feels so identitarian and connected to being a Gate volunteer. Maybe this is the year that I draft on the experience of a different version of volunteering. I like it, Stuart. I like what you’re talking about.

STUART: 

They say ‘once you take the black, you can never look back,’ but that’s just a saying. That’s not true.

MOSHE: 

That’s right.

STUART: 

Hey, one of the things that you write in the book, you had a long, I think, page and a half description of all the things Burning Man is and isn’t which reminded me very much of the Burning Man Buzz Phrase Generator that we came up with back in 1996 to confound the media. One of the things you say it’s a new kind of religion, which I just wanted you to think about that, since you are experienced in quite a few religions. What do you mean when you say that it’s a religion?

MOSHE: 

I think that it’s pretty obviously become the core kind of moral framework for a group of people. Moral is maybe the wrong word, maybe it’s immoral or amoral framework. I have a degree in religion and I was raised in an incredibly religious milieu in a very strange way, in that my dad was like a born again Hasidic Jew, and I was a pretty much secular kid from Oakland who would, when my dad won visitation rights, fly back to Brooklyn and essentially cosplay as Tevye of the Milkman for six weeks a year.

STUART: 

So you would ‘take the black’ every summer!

MOSHE: 

I ‘took the black’ very early on!

I volunteered there as well. 

But you know, one of the things that I think the American… Okay, we’re about to get philosophical. You guys ready? You guys ready? Buckle up!

ANDIE: 

Born for it.

MOSHE: 

I think that one of the things that the American experiment really failed at, was in our desire to chip away difference. That was a real desire at the turn of the century. And it’s connected actually to my the chapter on deafness. A big reason that American Sign Language was stamped out in the deaf education modality for 100 years was because of oppression definitely, but that oppression was filtered through this desire to end the immigrant difference that was occurring in American society. You had all these immigrant groups, Italian-Americans, Polish Americans, Chinese-Americans, and they all were sequestered in cultural, kind of, zones. You know, you had Chinese newspapers and Italian-speaking community centers, and there was a movement in America that said, “No, we don’t do that. This is the melting pot. Get rid of these differences. Everybody’s the same. Everybody’s American.” 

Now, one of the byproducts of that experiment was that all of the rituals and all of the customs — not so much the religion, but the religion of the Americas became kind of like homogenized and Americanized — that these rituals and customs got lost over the years.

You know, you go to Europe and you see like these weird Burning Man-esque things occurring in the streets, but it’s a part of the culture. And so the hippies, and by extension the Cacophony Society and the Suicide Club and our early progenitors, they recreated — and you see this in hippie culture, they’re recreating this kind of homebrew of improvisational religious ritual. “Oh, we’ll do a didgeridoo and we’ll light nag champa, and we’ll have a Buddha, but we’ll also have Hindu imagery, and we’ll take acid and…

STUART: 

And do hot yoga.

MOSHE: 

Yeah, hot yoga. Yeah. It always ends in hot yoga. 

And so that’s what the Cacophony Society I think was trying to do, was trying to recreate this feeling of wonder that had been stripped away by this American experiment of functionality. And so Burning Man is the iteration that it ended in. 

And people worship Burning Man in a way that is not even close to dissimilar to the way people ritualize a kind of traditional religion. They believe in it. We have a moral core. We have these principles that we live by. We have these customs. We have lore and mythology. We have prophets. We have Michael Mikel and Marian and Larry Harvey, who’s gone now, but we see his imagery. We have an idol that we worship!

Is it a religion in that people all believe the same thing? To some extent, yes. Is it a traditional religion? No, but I don’t really see the difference in a person that says “I am a Burner. I live according to the 10 Principles. This is who I am.” So in that way, yeah, I think it is an American religion, and I don’t think that’s a bad thing.

STUART: 

Well, you know, I asked Larry Harvey that question once on a stage and his answer, I’ll never forget, he said, “Burning Man is exactly like a religion, except with no higher power.” It is very much a secular humanist religion if it is a religion at all, right?

MOSHE: 

You’re telling me God himself said that?!?!

STUART: 

You mean our Ramada Ding Dong? Yeah.

MOSHE: 

Our fearless leader? One of my favorite stories is about the time we fucked Larry’s burn. It was about the Inner Circle Pass.

ANDIE: 

I really wonder how close I was standing to you on that particular night.

MOSHE: 

I’m sure you were right there. You seem like the type that might have enjoyed it. Or maybe not. I don’t even know. I remember. There’s this perk that some of the staff gets; I don’t know if this is a deep, dark secret, but people see you in there. It’s called the Inner Circle Pass. It allows you access to get really up close to the burn.

It’s a really cool experience, and I’ve earned it over the years, two or three times, and I’m always really honored when I got that. And that is one of the sacrifices that I made when I stopped volunteering there. I don’t think I’ll ever get an Inner Circle Pass again, but I also hustled for it. 

I got in illicitly three times. The third time, the funnest time, certainly, it was a group of some of the terrible people at the Gate. This was in the early years of the Inner Circle Pass, and they didn’t have a holographic imagery, it was just like a picture of the Man. 

They had a laser printer brought in from Reno, and they printed out copies of the Inner Circle Pass. So many of them. Too many of them. And they were just handing it out to people. By the way, the Gate would never do anything like this these days. The infrastructure at the Gate is very responsible and very respectful of the process. 

ANDIE: 

Plus there’s a hologram on it these days, and that’s really harder to print.

MOSHE: 

Plus there’s a hologram! 

So they’re passing these Inner Circle Passes out that had been like hand-laminated by like lighter. I mean, they just put like a lamination page on top of it were just like burning…it was awful. But it worked. We all got in, but there was like 100 people inside the inner circle that didn’t belong there. 

And then they would do this trick, which is a classic trick: you take the pass of the friend that had already gotten in and then walk out and walk another person in. And eventually it was just like, people were just going out into the crowd and getting like a random cute raver, and just going like, “Hey, you want to see something cool?” and then bringing them in. So there’s this gigantic group of people that do not belong in the closest thing to box seats that Burning Man has.

And we’re just in there, we’re these clowns from the Gate. We don’t belong there. And all of a sudden the Man lights on fire and Larry Harvey stands up, he always did this, he would stand up when the Man would was light on fire, and like light a cigar and his, like, silhouette is like this perfect Marlboro Man silhouette with this hat, you know, smoking a cigar like “This is my thing.” And it looked pretty dramatic. 

And all of a sudden this group of just assholes start going, “Hey, man, sit down old guy. Sit down. Down in front, Swordfish…” That was his radio handle. They go “Swordfish down in front. This isn’t Coachella. You don’t have VIP seats.” And he’s looking back like, “Who the fuck is telling me to sit down at my event?” 

I’m sure he was very annoyed, but to me that was the essence of culture jamming. We had fucked his Burn. How do you fuck Larry Harvey’s Burn? To me, that’s the most Burning Man story that there is, even though it was very rude and annoying. Somehow at the very sphincter of the entire event, these little jerks had found a way to annoy Larry Harvey’s Burn during the apex of the entire event. That is a moment that I will never forget.

STUART: 

It is a proud, old, Cacophonist tradition, ask me one of these days about Smiley, the neon smiley face.

MOSHE: 

I remember that face.

STUART: 

If you blinked, you missed it. But Larry didn’t miss it. He actually threw his hat down on the playa and started stomping on it. He was that pissed off.

MOSHE: 

We’re in a rare group, Stuart: People that have made Larry Harvey really, really mad.

STUART: 

I can’t begin to tell you the number of times I have. He was telling a long, rambling joke at a function of ours and I stepped on his punch line. I didn’t want to hear this joke anymore. It went on for about seriously, like five minutes.

ANDIE: 

As a Larry story will do.

MOSHE: 

I can tell you, I realized as a standup comedian, which is how I pay the bills, I tried for many years to bring my art to Burning Man, cause I thought that’s what you do. You know, when you’re an artist out in the world, you bring the thing that you do into this world and you offer it. 

For years I grinded against… It is the worst environment for telling standup jokes in the world. Everybody’s high. Everybody’s a heckler. Nobody wants to hear what you’re doing, they want to participate. And I think it was the moment that there was a naked woman – I was trying to do standup at Center Camp, something that I had done for years. I tried to do… a naked woman crawling on my leg, rubbing on me, screaming “I’m a Dadaist” while I was trying to perform stand up, when I thought “I don’t think all art belongs here. I think I’ll just keep stand up for the default world.”

STUART: 

Well, heckling has been elevated to a higher or sent to a lower art form there. I’m not sure what.

ANDIE: 

And we don’t do grants for it yet, but we could.

MOSHE: 

Heckling Grant. That’s a great idea. 

STUART: 

I love it. I love it.

MOSHE: 

I think she was right. This is her world, you know? It’s not my world. You’re not supposed to sit here and listen to me craft my jokes. You’re supposed to rub on my leg and scream “I’m a Dadaist.” That’s more Burning Man than what I was doing.

ANDIE: 

Well, so you have been doing a lot of podcasts recently, and I noticed that when Burning Man comes up, people are always shocked, and you get all kinds of responses. Where do you shower? You know, how do you do this? What’s the biggest misconception about Burning Man, the one that annoys you the most?

MOSHE: 

What annoys me the most is people that have decided how lame Burning Man is now, and have never, were never there then, and have never been. It’s like,”Oh yeah, I would love to go, but I know it’s bad now.” You weren’t there when it wasn’t bad and you’re not there when it is bad. You don’t know what you’re talking about. That bugs me. 

But I would say that the most powerful misconception from this year, and I thought it was a really powerful moment, this year I was up there and the rains came. What happened when the rains came? I remember I was getting all of these messages from people back home going, Are you okay, what’s going on? 

And then I read a headline on CNN that said, “President Biden has been briefed on the rain situation at Burning Man.” And I go, “Okay, I think we’re living in a fake news story. We’re inside of one. I’m in one.” And I got a comment when I posted a picture of me in the mud. I was describing the reaction to the rains of Burning Man this year as “God-level schadenfreude.” It was an ejaculation of joy that finally the Burners were suffering. 

ANDIE: 

They’ve just been waiting and waiting for their moment to shine. Yeah.

STUART: 

For that other shoe to drop and get stuck in the mud.

MOSHE: 

And this woman in the comments goes “It’s so good to see the suffering of rich people who are cosplaying as poor people.” And I thought that’s funny. That’s a good roast. But it was wrong. Burners are not rich people cosplaying as poor people. They are weak people cosplaying as survivalists.

And so for me, and for the Burning Man community I saw, this was like this was the ultimate opportunity: a minor weather event to prove to ourselves that these two decades of pretending to be survivalists actually had some function in the real world! 

I saw this year as an absolute joy, and not only was it joy, I don’t know if you guys experienced this, it felt like time travel. It felt like all of a sudden this event that I had watched shift and change and become more infrastructure based and more tech savvy and WiFi and driving around – it was traveling back in time from a digital festival to an analog one. All of a sudden I had this experience this year, like, this is what it was like in ‘96. Yeah, it’s a little different, but I’m getting to know the people in my neighborhood, and there’s this joy at just being here. 

I hate to break it to the haters because I want them to be able to have this anger and schadenfreude. But what I saw was people enjoying Burning Man in a way they hadn’t in decades, because it was different. It wasn’t the silks guy falling going “This again?” It was, “Wow, this again!” This feels different and it feels familiar and nostalgic at the same time. So I loved it. And I’m sure you guys did too.

ANDIE: 

Yeah, hard agree. Definitely. I remember Brian Doherty was camping with me, and he was using a cane to get around. He wasn’t walking all that well, but during the storm, he found this bar of people that he just really liked talking to. There was nothing different happening there than was happening in our camp. I’m going to try not to take it personally that he didn’t want to just hang out with me, but he walked back to camp to get another layer and walked all the way through the mud back across town to just hang out with the most interesting people that he found.

MOSHE: 

Well, that’s what Burning Man was for me at the beginning. Yes. It’s spectacle and wonder. Definitely. Yes it’s a complete mind busting sort of experience of being shifted into this different dimension. But it’s also, especially when it was ‘the weirdos come to feel normal,’ it was this annual gathering of the most interesting people from around the world. And you would go, “What are you about?” And it wasn’t, “Oh, I’m a programmer.” 

And by the way, I’m not anti tech. I think Brian Doherty makes the case and I try to make it in my book too, that tech has always been there. It’s not that tech has changed Burning Man, it’s that tech itself has changed. And tech used to be one of these subcultures where weirdos came from, and then they took over the world and they became these kind of sort of normies. That’s what happened. It’s not that tech arrived and poisoned the well. It’s that tech poisoned its own well. 

But it used to be this experience where every person I met was like the weirdo from their community. These people, beyond the things that I saw there, these people that I met were the weirdest, coolest, strangest… They more than they more than the art installations fucked my burn in the most beautiful way.

STUART: 

So how do we make it freaky again? How do we make it safer for weirdos?

MOSHE: 

You know, I kind of think that shaking your fist at bygone eras is a fruitless endeavor. This is what happens. This is what happens to every subculture, every scene; it happened to punk, it happened to the raves, it was inevitable and bound to happen. For me, you know Gigsville is still there, and I love that about them. I try to squeeze what I can as an old jaded fuck. I don’t want to be jaded. 

I can tell you something I hate. On staff there is a vibe of like, “I hate Burning Man, I’m here to work. This is my Burning Man.” I fucking hate that. What, you like labor? That’s what this is? You could have done this job at a literal mall. You’re a psychedelic mall cop. You could have just stayed there. I don’t want to be so jaded that I pretend that I hate the whole thing. I want to find the wonder that’s still out there.

You know, there’s this Hasidic idea, which is that the job of the human being is to find these hidden points of light that are kind of obfuscated by the ugliness of the world, but your job on Earth is to go pining for these little mystical points of light. And that is the work that we’re supposed to do on Earth. I’m not a particularly mystical guy, but I think that’s my job at Burning Man, is to like find the wonder that’s still there. 

Will it ever be what it is? I don’t think that’s possible. Is there still stuff that’s hidden Black Rock City that will blow my mind and make me feel that feeling of wonder on a small level that I felt when I was 16? I think so. If I ever feel like those points of light are gone, I don’t know why I would still go. 

Another thing that I’ve been thinking a lot about: Burning Man is this creature from a different era. I have noticed that it’s trying, the infrastructure is trying to become this modern experience of a counterculture thing. But contemporary counterculture is about collective society in this way that Burning Man, I just don’t think it translates. Burning Man is about this experience of meaninglessness having great meaning. And society now, young people now, are all about systemic problems and the interrelatedness of all sort of societal forces.

And Burning Man, rightfully, I doff my cap to it, it wants to become modern and respect the change of society. But I don’t think it translates. And I don’t think that Burning Man will find a way to, like, become infused with what is going on in society. Its vitality is that it is this sort of relic of a time when experiencing things that have no meaning are incredibly meaningful. That for me is how it gets weird again is, for me, finding these moments of meaning.

STUART: 

That and making connections with other human beings that aren’t based on seven second videos. It’s finding the other weirdos, right? That’s why I keep going back every year no matter… I mean, you’re right. It’s so different every year. There’s no way to compare my Burning Man of the 90s to my Burning Mans of last year. But every year something happens that blows my mind. Every year I meet one person whose mind was blown. As long as that keeps happening, I’m in it to win it.

MOSHE: 

And every year I experience something that makes me say again, “What just happened?” 

STUART: 

Right.

MOSHE: 

That still is there. I just have to look a little bit harder, and it’s worth the work. And Burning Man is not what it was, but it’s still the craziest thing I do all year. 

STUART: 

You might want to come this year, Moshe. Our theme, you know, is all about wonder and try to freak people out. It’s “Curiouser and Curiouser.” You going to come on out?

MOSHE: 

Of course I’m going to come. I mean, listen, the other reason I keep going is it’s much like a tween on Snapchat. When you have a streak, it reminds you. It goes, “Hey, man, it’s been seven days. Don’t forget to post tomorrow. You want to keep your streak going.” A big part of the fact that I keep going to Burning Man is if I don’t go to Burning Man, I will have stopped my streak. I don’t consider the pandemic years to be streak breaking. So I’m at 24 in a row. I can’t not go. I got to get to 25 and 26 and beyond. And someday I’ll convince my wife to let me bring my daughter, and then she’ll keep the streak going and I’ll be able to draft on her experience.

STUART: 

So your Burning Man, we’ll have a 25 year diamond anniversary.

MOSHE: 

That’s right. Do I get to watch?

STUART: 

Sure. 

ANDIE: 

I think you do.

STUART: 

You get to watch.

MOSHE: 

There’s a camp for that. Go watch!

ANDIE: 

You can watch others get, what is it, force-fed? 

MOSHE: 

Gavage 

STUART: 

Gavage Camp. I’m sure there’s. I’m going to look through the What Where When, and sure there’s going to be a Gavage Camp.

ANDIE: 

I don’t recommend it. I really don’t. I mean, no, of course.

MOSHE: 

If it doesn’t exist, let’s start it. We could start Gavage Camp. 

ANDIE: 

You know, it’s always about finding new ways to appreciate and understand the culture. And I think you’re onto something there.

MOSHE: 

And by the way, that’s life, too. You know, it’s not just Burning Man that gets rote and feels like it’s changed. It’s everything. Every single society, every single culture, every single thing has great ugliness, great, boringness, great change that you don’t like. It’s very easy to shake your fist at life and go, “Everything’s changed. This sucks.” I mean, look around. Have you read the news? Things aren’t great. But there’s always those little points of wonder and joy that are out there if you go looking for them hard enough. And I think more than anything, Burning Man has taught me that. A quarter century at Burning Man has taught me that wonder exists and it’s worth the work to go find it.

ANDIE: 

Well, and I bet if there is something better, it’s probably still going to be found in Black Rock City.

MOSHE: 

That’s right.

STUART: 

That’s a great place to go out, Moshe. But there’s one paragraph or so out of the book that I love so much, I’d love to have you read it. You have a copy of the book handy?

MOSHE: 

Yeah. Hold on. Boom.

STUART: 

Read us the ending to the Burning Man chapter: We are impermanent.

MOSHE: 

Oh, I love that one, too. Yeah. Well, because I’ve thought a lot over the years. You asked about religion earlier. I think one of the interesting things about the Man Burn or about Burning Man in general, but about the Man Burn, and more more broadly about the religion, quote unquote, that is Burning Man, is that it doesn’t have inherent meaning. In real religion, the meaning is broadcast to you. This is the meaning, you know. Christianity is THIS. Islam is THIS. Burning Man, it means as many things to as many people as experience it. 

And I wondered, what does Burning Man actually, if anything, mean to me? And what does the Man Burn, if anything? Our central ritual, our central iconography, is to gather around… I mean, it is called Burning Man. And what does the Man Burn mean to me? And it does mean something I’ve realized over the years. This is what the end of the Burning Man chapter says about that: 

“On Saturday night, every participant in the city gathers around the Man to watch him immolate. The burn itself is wild and savage. His arms, which have been at his sides all week long, are raised in a dual salute to the city that has formed around him. Fire dancers flame at his feet, a thousand of them. 

And then suddenly from inside his body, a bright orange flame. It builds and licks his body, growing, fireworks shooting from every part of him, a display more dizzying and pyrotechnically overwhelming than you’ll ever see on the 4th of July. Then massive gas bombs explode again and again, engulfing his body in black and orange fire as everyone, all 70,000 of us, scream in a frenzy.

Then, quiet. The show is over and now it’s time to watch our North Star disappear. A hush takes over the crowd as we wait for him to fall, that Man on fire.

Guy Lombardo sang ‘Enjoy yourself, it’s later than you think.’ We are impermanent. We die. We immolate. All of us is a person about to catch fire. Before the flames come we try to live a comfortable life. But with that comfort, it’s easy to miss doing much of anything. Life promises nothing but death. While we are here, I want to live a life that’s filled with oddness and wonder. I want to see things that make me feel excited and scared. I want to meet people that do things differently. I want to stare at the lights. I want to participate.”

STUART: 

Thank you, Moshe Kasher.

MOSHE: 

Thank you for having me. And I will see you guys at the Burn!

ANDIE: 

See you there.

And that is all the time we have for today on Burning Man LIVE. Thanks to our guest Moshe Kasher and his book Subculture Vulture, A Memoir in Six Scenes. Thanks so much to my co-host Stuart Mangrum, the rest of our team, Vav, Tyler, Molly V., kbot, and Allie. 

Thank you so much for bringing Burning Man Live to the people free from interruptions and advertising because this is Burning Man. If you’d like to support Burning Man and creativity and culture around the world, you can do so by visiting donate.burningman.org. I’m Andie Grace. Thank you for listening. 

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