By Scribe
These are frantic days for many Burning Man artists, a stressful race to the finish line that is next week's departure for Black Rock City. I got the call from my old camp, Opulent Temple, that they needed some extra minions so I agreed to help out with their impossibly ambitious project: a massive 10-foot tall steel "star" stage (which is actually five stages, all cut and welded from scratch) and a huge open air bamboo dome. I'd already put in a few recent work days on the stage at the Box Shop on Hunter's Point (where I'd spent more than nine months reporting this story a couple years ago), so I opted to head out to the West Oakland Warehouse (WOW) to do some dome work and peak in on some other projects, particularly "Crude Awakening" by Dan Das Mann and Karen Cusolito, who are most widely known around SF as the sculptors of Passage, which now resides near the Ferry Building.
It was like stepping into another world.
WOW is a block long warehouse at 20th and Mandela Parkway, with the side of the building emblazoned with "AMERICAN STEEL." Appropriately, I arrived on my newly refurbished burner bicycle, which I pedaled through a massive warehouse that had been divided up into streets, each street containing several camps of burner artists at work, maybe 20 camps in all. It was like riding through Burning Man, in miniature and indoors. Dan and Karen's huge human sculptures dominated their section of the shop and guarded the entrance outdoors, reverent figures that will be praying to an oil derrick on the playa until they become liberated from their addiction.
But it was the smaller projects that filled out this workspace, the biggest of its kind in the Bay Area (other notable East Bay hives are the nearby NIMBY warehouse and the threatened Shipyard in Berkeley, where lead artist Jim Mason has also been appealing for hands on deck to complete his waste-eating slug Mechabolic).
I found OT's dome crew on the last street, just down from the Neverwas steam-powered Victorian house on wheels, and I truly got a sense of how nuts Syd Gris and crew really are. They were bolting, cinching, and constructing 20 sections of the dome, each one 50-foot long arcs that they had painstakingly engineered over the last couple months. We finished number 14 that night, and they were headed for a photo finish.
Crazy stuff, but an inspiring testament to what people are willing and able to do to realize their dreams.
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