Quin, who was a regular contributor to BURNcast in our hey day, is selling his lower tier Burning Man tickets at face value.
Here's the skinny from Quin:
I need to sell these tickets to Burning Man due to an unfortunate turn of events. However I'd like to send them on with someone who really wants to go and is willing to tell us why.
Is it your first time, are you bringing art, toiling in a cool camp, or have friends in need? Whatever it is write it down, take a picture, paint it or sing it out.
Creativity counts, but I do need to get cash so I can put it towards seeing my family in lieu of going to the Playa. My total cost for these tix was $505.
Best submission gets them. As shown, they come with two survival guides and a Lemon Head jaw breaker candy courtesy of BMorg.
Post your submission below in the comment or send your essay to burncast (at) gmail dot com
Check back for updates as to what happens to these tickets!
Best of Luck!
3 comments:
Greetings, presumed English-literate Earthling!
My name is Scott Nichols-Collier & I'm a musician & writer from Los Angeles, CA. I am, in various present incarnations, a father, a storyteller, bass guitarist, tarot interpreter, pianist, & songwriter. My musical project Idiot Savant is an attempt to fuse the literary leanings of poetry & storytelling with the ambitions of classical music & progressive rock. I am currently studying to complete a degree in anthropology, my guilty pleasure since my teens. (Can you hear the giant sucking wound the CSU system is breathing through right about now? As CSUN is temporarily off-limits, I am taking as many units as they will let an old man take at LAVC.)
My wife Marta Collier is an accomplished musician as well, playing bodhran & pennywhistle in the Celtic rock band Finn MacCool. She is a master of many fine arts, including sewing, gardening, & tarot. For many years she was affiliated with An Claidheamh Soluis, the Celtic Arts Center based in Los Angeles, where she served as treasurer. Through classes at the Center, she learned Irish Gaelic, & eventually taught beginning Gaelic to the students of the Center. She is a wonderful dancer, & a gifted poi artist, & known in our community as a true Girl Scout, prepared for everything & ready to help at a moment's notice.
I've been to the playa five times since 2007. I had friends thru the years try to get me to go to Burning Man, some as far back as 1995, & I'd gotten really good at looking at their pictures & saying 'No!' over & over. In 2007, I gave in & accompanied a group of friends to the playa, living out of my duffel bag all week, adventuring around in the dust, volunteering at Earth Guardians, helping set-up & tear-down Deep Heaven & Smores 'n Amour, & volunteering in the cafe at Center Camp.
Marta is a veteran Burner as well, starting from 2004. She is extremely gifted in the art of taking a situation & making it all better. Camping with her is a science, tuned so well that you'd think you were in our house. We met through mutual friends in the L.A. Burning Man community, & were married on playa by the good Reverend Bob at Two Lanterns Camp in 2009.
The first time we came to the playa together was 2008. We helped organize & build the Black Rock Bureau of Hospitality, a safe chill-out zone for weary Burners on their playa travels. We offered massage services, camaraderie, & hot & cold refreshments, & spent many hours sharing space & stories with people passing by. We also were members of the L.A. Burn Club, & helped construct costumes for the Burn Club's performance in the fire conclave prior to the Burn, which was cancelled when high winds threatened the safety of the Saturday Burn.
Since 2009, we have been regular volunteers together at the Center Camp cafe, taking some of the harder-to-fill shifts & filling them with our smiling faces & good-hearted service. Our favorite shift, in fact, is the night of the Burn- we love being there for the swelling horde that arrives after the Man falls down.
We have not camped with a large camp since 2008, & tend to be more than self-sufficient on our own. Even our most streamlined camps have been able to share tools, food, & space with those around us, or that pass by. We enjoy being able to be of service in that capacity greatly.
We've had a terrible time trying to get tickets to the Burn this year. I applied for a Low-Income ticket this year, but wasn't selected. Marta entered the lotteries, but wasn't selected for a spot to buy tickets either.
Whatever happened in the general ticket fiasco seems to have hit us swiftly & directly- we initially gave up on the idea of going out this year, & put on hold some of our more ambitious camp projects (using our extra carport for a small chill space; building a giant 'adult Scrabble' board; upgrading our travelling solar array to accommodate a small sound system & bringing an amplifier & some guitars to make our own musical contributions; & so on). Admittedly, when we couldn't get tickets in the spring, I said 'fuck it' to any idea of going to the playa this time around, but I see that the myriad of things that may or may not have happened surrounding the distribution of tickets is not the event itself, & that maybe I just had to be a little more assertive in finding a way to get home.
In lieu of plotting a new project for the Burn this year, I've been able to devote more time to woodshedding & gigging with my band in the default world, which has been nice, but as we get closer & closer to the end of August, & our plans to do 'other things than that thing in the desert' fail, I find myself looking around for tickets.
We bit another bullet off of our long-term life plans this summer by installing solar panels on our house, & as I type, the crew is putting the finishing touches on the wiring, so very soon, we'lll be one more step along our plans to be conscious of our life foootprint. But finding something 'different' to do with our vacation time this year has been somewhat of a clusterfuck. Luck has not been on our side. A planned trip to Northern California & the Sequoias was cut short by a leaky radiator. Do I need to mention the close to $1200 we unexpectedly spent on that? You bet that has an effect on how much money we can let out of the belt for tickets.) We took a couple of days off to help set up a small festival which was cancelled when authorities pulled the permits at the last minute. Hel- the last time we planned to go out dancing, we ended up babysitting a friend's bunnies. So we're starting to look at our options for the playa- it's still doable. We have all the supplies we'll ever need, & we're eating the same food there that we'd eat down here, & we'd need gas too to get anywhere else- the only thing we are looking for help on is finding tickets to the Burn.
Marta posted up on a Burner community page looking for lowest-tier tickets, & I was more than a little shocked to see a couple of snarky negative responses to her post, including 'well, if it's just the matter of the $100 you want to save, you probably don't have the money to go & do it right'. (The difference between two top-price tickets & two lowest-tier tickets is rather more significant than $100, by the way.) The sociologist in me is fascinated how 'I got mine!' culture has arisen, so to see people passing judgement on what we have or don't have seems counter to the ideal of the Burn in the first place.
And as far as the tickets reserved for open sale that were instead passed among members of larger-scale camps, that seems to be a simple continuation of that same snarky philosophy: the event will be nothing without the major players. Having been to the playa for the last few years without even going to the main burn, I'll speak for the fact that it's the large AND the small scale equally that makes the event what it is.
I have to say, this was a harder writing experience than I had initially planned. It's a little disconcerting to think there is one person or another who 'deserves' to participate in a wholly, immersively participatory experience. I found myself trying to justify my experience on the playa, which I don't think I'd had to do before. I don't know if I can really say I contribute more than others, or that I bring something to the playa that no one else does. The writer in me acknowledges one question: how does one person have a better story than another? And I wonder if the answer to that is harder to pin down because of the nature of Burning Man is a network of participating contributors. The guy who gave our van a jump on our way out to the highway is as big a contributor to that, in my book, as the DPW who build the city. Even if he didn't do another damn thing all week. Participation & contribution are always relative, I guess.
I thought long & hard about how we specifically contribute to the Burn, & the best answer I can give you: the very same way EVERYONE does when they are there.
I truly appreciate that Burning Man culture is participant-oriented. As a performer myself, I realize performance & creation & participation is vital to the Burning Man experience. On the other hand, so is the observer, or the receptive audience. And if the Burn is all-participation, all-the-time, it's in the fact that performance is a symbiosis of performer & appreciator. If no one is there to appreciate what we do, we're just playing with ourselves, aren't we? My ideal performance space is one where as soon as I am done performing, someone else comes in with their thing, & I can appreciate their work as they've appreciated mine. That's what the playa does, for all of us, whether we're singing loud & proud, or sharing life stories & hot tea, or building a phosphorescent tower for all to see, or coming upon that tower & seeing it the way it was meant to be.
Please help us get home this year.
Thank you very much for your time & consideration.
Love & respect-
Scott & Marta Nichols-Collier
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