Perhaps I am too much of an optimist…

But I’m pretty excited for Burning Man this year, and this is why.

This is the time to jump around all excited at the mutations occurring in this petri dish of an experiment in community. It’s a moment in time – perhaps a paradigm shift of magnanimous porportions. I for one don’t want to miss seeing it in action, whether it rises like the Phoenix or crashes and burns in a blaze of glory, I want to BE THERE!

I believe change isn’t bad. We are a radical bunch. Sometimes that means there’s uncomfortable, radical change. So what if…

What if, dare I say it, this year is the BEST Burning Man ever? What if virgins and vets alike DO SOMETHING OUTRAGEOUS and OMG perhaps DIFFERENT than what we expect?

I entered the Burning Man world in child-like wonder back in 1998 and choose not to deviate. I will continue to be curious and say “What if?” with a positive, open and grateful heart for the past experiences I have been graced to have had and for WHATEVER experiences await me. This isn’t Disneyland, it’s Burning Man. I’m quite excited at the prospect of having NO idea what to expect out there. Kinda reminds me of the good ole days. (And guess what? People brought it and rocked it then too… even virgins…)

I’ve been torn over the past several years: I’ve loved the return of some well loved theme camps who’ve beautifully brought it bigger and better year after year (and respect all the hard work and detail they’ve done- drink!), but I’ve also wondered where the surprise of NOT KNOWING what to expect at all has gone. Has it been a fair trade? I remember my first years going, I didn’t know ANY of the theme camps because so many were new each year. Many theme camps only came one year, blew it up big or made an amazing small splash, then didn’t return the next year (or did something completely different under new names the next year, like my crew of people did). THAT was a great Burning Man experience IMHO.

And dare I say something radical? What if only a small percent of established camps get tickets at all? Why is there an assumption that the other percent with tickets AREN’T going to bring something KICK ASS to the playa? How cynical are we veterans? And what if, OMG, established camps had to band together, in classic barn raising style, (a great opp to build community! Drink again!) to create amazing camps not exactly like their previous iterations? I for one, am friends with several established camps and though I may not bring a theme camp this year, I am more than ready to lend a hand, a hammer and a hug to those who are bringing it.

And why is there some inference that amazing has to be BIG? I still remember Analog PAC Man camp. By far one of the most interactive, fun and creative theme camps of all time that was of a most nominal cost (a couple helmets, some black lights and balloons). We ran around wearing florescent biker helmets, popping glowing balloons with a push pin, people, and it was brilliant and AMAZING!

Apparently, I’m feeling a bit like Andy Rooney today. Sighing with love.

Ready to participate in whatever awaits me. And if your camp needs help or you have extra brain or brawn to help, pre-playa, on playa or after, consider joining Burn 2012 Barn Raising Facebook group and tell us what you need and what you can offer. Participate! Burn 2012 Barn Raising – Build BRC

“Andy Dufresne – who crawled through a river of shit and came out clean on the other side.” Stephen King, Shawshank Redemption

Phew! Thanks for understanding about the delay. There’s surely other changes now too, BUT never fear! I have already researched an even better process for next year, so Sound Camps, take note!

It’s ready for you all! This is some ridonkulous dust music, kids. Enjoy!

2011 Rockstar Librarian Burning Man Music Guide v2.0

NOTE: BE SURE TO SELECT DUPLEX PRINTING TO PRINT DOUBLE SIDED to save trees.

To print a booklet, go to print and select booklet printing. Then in the options select duplex or double sided printing. And then there will be an option (on some computers) in advance settings that will allow you to select Top-Bottom. This allows the pages not to be upside down when printing

Or on other printers, select booklet printing, then under booklet subset, select both sides. And then check the box auto-rotate pages, with binding on the left selected.

Also, here’s your invitation to Rockstar Librarian's Old School Rave At Burning Man!

Am reposting soon. Drat. Patience please. Found a seriously important set of typos – thank you keen burner eyes – trying to fix asap….

We all love them and that damnable UNIMOG of a music machine, but how did all that begin? I caught up with PK of Space Cowboys for the story.

(RSL)When and how’d Space Cowboys come into being? What was the initial vision and how has it changed and grown over the years?

(PK)The Space Cowboys started wrangling the cosmos around 1997. I don’t remember exactly. It was a long, long time ago, in a galaxy far away.

The Space Cowboys were one of the first large-scale sound camps at Burning Man. It started of as a group of friends who wanted to go to the desert, build and run essentially a free night-club in the true wild west. Initially the Cowboys had a large camp on one of the “corners” of Black Rock City, and ran a sound system and barter bar everynight. Big changes happened in 2000 when after meeting the fine lads of SpaceLounge, the crew’s focus shifted. As the two camps merged SpaceLounge continued to build the physical public camp that rocked every night and the Cowboys began work on a novel & radical idea at the time: a mobile sound-system. In 2001 the UNIMOG debutted on the playa, and well the playa has never really been the same since.

Ever since it’s founding the Space Cowboys have focused their on playa efforts into one evening, the Black Rock Hoedown, one of the finest events BRC has ever seen (we are a bit biased). Held every year on the Friday before the burn, with the advent of the UNIMOG the location has changed each year to a different amazing artwork on the open playa.

(RSL)Do you have sound camp veterans in your camp and what camps did they come from?

The old-timers amongst us are either original Cowboys or SpaceLoungers.

(RSL)What music stylins’ should people expect to hear from your boom bass?

(PK)Peeps should expect nothing but the finest in Breaks & House from the Cowboys. Our roster of residents is as deep as it is talented, and the individual leanings of our selectors vary. While we definitely have a funky sound, don’t be surprised to hear funk, electro and even the occasional drum & bass set coming out of the Mog.

(RSL)What is the Space Cowboys signature? What do you feel you do best?

(PK)Shaking your business! True story: At a Mog sound check by our old warehouse, an old man, the proprietor of a nearby shop, came running up and said “You! What you doing? Stop! You shakin’ my business!”

That’s frickin’ hilarious! So, with all the other big sound camps & sound art cars at Burning Man, what makes yours unique and a not-to-miss place to be?

(PK)Oh, you’ll have to come and find out. We wouldn’t be around so long if we hadn’t figured out the secret recipe!

(RSL)This year’s burn theme is Rites of Passage. For many old school electronica fans, the rave was a musical rite of passage for them. Do you remember your first rave and can you tell us about it?

(PK)Rave? I’m originally from New York City. I was going to clubs as a kid. I was Old School in High School!
[And on a side note] A True playa story: I was sitting in an RV with a friend’s ex and he asked me how I got started in this whole crazy thing, and I told him that I used to go to this club in NYC called MARS on Friday nights and we would dance all night in the basement. The crowd was amazing and diverse, there were drag queens, models, artists and big black gay men blowing whistles while the house music would keep everyone together in this amazing moment… I asked him how he got his start as a dj, and he said he started substitute djing for a buddy and eventually took his gig. When I asked where, he said Friday nights at MARS. His name was Moby.

(RSL)What a great playa story. When you think back to those days, who do you remember being the first significant DJ or what track made you fall for electronica? What about it affected you?

(PK)Jungle Brothers. I’ll House You. it made me realize that “electronica” is a ridiculous concept, the boundaries people draw are silly. Was that Hip-Hop or was it House? Who cares? Good music is good music. And to quote an ILS track: “Everybody loves good music.” [Here's a 2011 video clip with Afrika Baby Jam who discusses the group's history among other hip-hop topics on air with Breakbeats & Rhymes Radio.]

(RSL)Who are a few of your camp’s resident DJs our fellow burners shouldn’t miss and why?

(PK)Oh. I’m not going to play favorites. You crazy? Our crew is amazing. With talent like Shissla, Mancub, ShOOey, rrrus, 8ball, Kapt’n Kirk, Brad Robinson, Tamo, Deckard, Zach Moore and others how do you?

(RSL)Is there anything else you’d like BRC citizens to know about Space Cowboys this year?

(PK)Sure we’re going to do a little day thing at our ranch on Wednesday in the BRC Historical District, 4:45 & Esplanade, and of course out there somewhere on the open playa Friday night for the Black Rock Hoe Down. Come find us. [Note: RSL knows where they'll be Friday!]

RSL SUGGESTION #1 – MUSIC FOR THE ROADTRIP HOME
Go to www.spacecowboys.org, www.soundcloud.com/spacecowboys or check the Space Cowboys’ RIPEcast (their weekly podcast) available on Podomatic or iTunes and load up on sweet Cowboy sets.

Robert Moog. In 1965 he spearheaded a radical paradigm shift in music and its creation by inventing the Moog music synthesizer. Others had created computer based syths, but Moog was the first to create a modular keyboard instrument that allowed the musician to adjust timbre, pitch, intensity and fade, and it cost $11,000, a tenth of the price of RCA’s binary code run synthesizer. Then, in 1971, he invented the Minimoog, a portable synthesizer one easily could take on the stage and the road. Here is BBC video footage of the Moog’s 1965 world premiere.

Giorigio Moroder & Donna Summer. Leap forward six years to 1977. Giorgio Moroder and Donna Summer craft a hit dance single almost entirely created on Moog synthesizers and what was to become known as the first completely electronic song: “I Feel Love.” Brian Eno is known for infamously bursting into David Bowie’s recording session for his Berlin Trilogy with Summer’s song.

Bowie says, “One day in Berlin … Eno came running in and said, ‘I have heard the sound of the future.’ … he puts on ‘I Feel Love’, by Donna Summer … He said, ‘This is it, look no further. This single is going to change the sound of club music for the next fifteen years.’ (From Bowie’s Sound and Vision CD liner notes.)

But why bore you with my writing about the significance of the Moroder/Summer collaboration. Here, Alison Goldfrapp narrates an amazing BBC Radio 2 documentary of the birth and significance of this song – Well worth a download and listen.

And if you wish to fully immerse yourself in electronic dance music history, download BBC’s four part series, The Great Bleep Forward: Presented by Andrew Collins. In 2004 along with BBC 6 Music, Collins explores the development of electronic music. Though the video isn’t anywhere online, the audio for the entire four part series is available for free from the Internet Archive. Why not download and listen to these truly intriguing intriguing and fun electronica history lessons on your way Home?

Then, perhaps you’ll find new appreciation for the epic pilgrimage the genre has made while your sparkly booty shakes to those incredible beats out on the playa. Oh, and, if you happen to be hitting decks out there, I’d sure looooove to be surprised by creative samples of Donna Summer’s monumental track.

I have a musical confession to make. I am a choir geek. I sang in high school and in college. (Singing Verdi’s Requiem in it’s entirety was the highlight of my choral ‘career.’) Those moments are entirely too far and few between now. So, I occasionally belt it out at karaoke and regularly sing in the shower or bellow as I drive in my car. I must thank Sister Clarina, my 3^rd grade teacher and the all-school music educator, for giving me the love of beats early on in life. But then again, beats and music surround us. And for but a moment I will travel back musically to feed my inner geek just for this one blog post.

John Cage was one of the original composers to challenge the idea of what music is. He harnessed everyday tonal sounds into music and predicted the future liberation of musical composition based on electronic instruments and music. Here, as part of his The Future of Music: Credo, written in 1937, he predicts the future sound of electronica.

“The special property of electrical instruments will be to provide complete control of the overtone structure of tones (as opposed to noises) and to make these tones available in any frequency, amplitude, and duration.

WHICH WILL MAKE AVAILABLE FOR MUSICAL PURPOSES ANY AND ALL SOUNDS THAT CAN BE HEARD. PHOTOELECTRIC, FILM, AND MECHANICAL MEDIUMS FOR THE SYNTHETIC PRODUCTION OF MUSIC

It is now possible for composers to make music directly, without the assistance of intermediary performers. Any design repeated often enough on a sound track is audible. 280 circles per second on a sound track will produce one sound, whereas a portrait of Beethoven repeated 50 times per second on a sound track will have not only a different pitch but a different sound quality.”

Let’s visit a modern day example which proves Cage’s prediction with haunting exactness, and it happens to be a track that also took the playa by storm in 2009.

 

And if you so desire, here’s a more in depth podcast with history about and music from Pierre Henry, John Cage and Karlheinz Stockhausen. Or perhaps you’d be interested in listening to John Cage’s 4’33″ and the story of it’s composition.

Ok, and because you’ve been so good, here’s a little something by Disorient’s DJ Arrow Chrome to get you shaking your burn booty.

 

 

 

 

Burning Man’s Rites of Passage theme this year got me pondering in a lyrical, booty beat sense. Late last night, when I couldn’t sleep due to a certain accelerating compression, I got up and nostalgically flipped through the various Rockstar Librarian Burning Man Music Guides of years past. The epic musical playa moments showered over me. First, I thumbed through the 2008 guide, and the page naturally folded open. “Root Society: Thursday, Fort Knox Five, Bassnectar.” My memory’s bass boom hit me, and I was back atop the metal spire, devouring the playa eye candy below. Then, I heard the familiar bass chord before I recognized the song. Upon recognition, I belted out one of my deepest belly laughs to date; tears of delight rolled down my cheeks. Here, among hot, furry bunny booties and chiseled, tribal gods, the dome filled with Dolly Parton’s soprano voice, singing.

Yes, it was an epic, silly playa moment that wouldn’t have flown anywhere else. Then, Bassnectar killed the decks for the next two hours. I was in dancing bliss. A big, jaw-hurting perma-grin, caused only by natural high, filled my face. Nothing could bring me down, not even my need to defend my small but earned dance space in the air against grumpy newcomers who griped and barked at me to get down. All I could do was dance harder and laugh out my verbal rejection against such bitter angst. “Why are you so mad? Don’t you know where we are? We’re at Burning Man. Burn-ing Maaaaan.”

Tell me! Were you there, too? Or should I immediately call and schedule an emergency appointment with my therapist?

(UPDATE: Thanks, Backwerds, for hooking me up with Fort Knox Five’s ‘Live on 4 decks at the Belly Up Aspen’ DJ set with said Dolly song @ 37 minutes in! Phew! Therapy delayed a bit longer.)

And then *FLASH* I was back, in my dimly lit bedroom, guide in hand. I set it on my bedside and cozied up for what turned into the happiest, dream-like sleep. Though I didn’t remember the details this morning, I’m certain I visioned booty shaking and bass beats. And now I can’t help but reminisce back on the music. So, join me throughout August as I share my completely subjective opinions (and I hope yours, too) coupled with intriguing musical facts, interviews, songs and sets to either take you back or catch you up on the musical rites of passage of electronica.

 

In June I attended Oregon’s Regional Burn, SOAK, and presented an Adult Storytime event where I booktalked great lit and informational books on erotica available at your local public library. Who knew your public library had such sexy inspiration? Discover titillating titles to educate, pique interest & spice up the bedroom, bathroom or kitchen table.

Now that I’ve piqued your interest, I wouldn’t dare leave you hanging. So, I’ve created a delectable booklist for you to download. Ewww! Summer reading never sizzled so much!

Enjoy!

 

I’ve settled back into daily home life but can’t seem to kick this travel bug. So I have fleshed out a breadth of alternative hospitality exchange organizations that might inspire you (and me!) to adventure a little further in the coming years. So, what’s stopping you from planning your next expedition?

Couchsurfing.org, With it’s 2.6 million members and over 1 million worldwide couches available at any given time, this is organization is your best shot at finding a place to rest your head and enliven your heart, even in Antarctica, where, currently, 98 hosts await your request. Clearly, the organization’s use of emerging technologies and down right fun and easy user interface with simple, interchangeable language translations inspired throngs of people to join and participate since its founding in 2004.

Servas International, the original, real deal. Founded by US peace activist Bob Luitweiler in 1949, this international organization builds tolerance and world peace one traveler and host at a time. Servas’ membership process seems a bit outdated compared to similar organizations as potential members must apply to join then be interviewed. But then again, 60 years of amazing connections make it worth mentioning and giving mad props.

Hospitalityclub.org Founded in 2000 by Veit Kuehne, This project may appeal to you because it’s entirely non-commercial even though it boasts less than half the members of Couchsurfing.org.

HomeExchange.com This fee-based company begun in 1992 connects you with one of the other 40,000 worldwide homeowners who’d like to house swap with you for an average stay of 1-3 weeks. This 2009 article interviews founder Ed Kushins.

Intervac Home Exchange Begun in the early 1950s, this non-profit boasts members who are typically affluent and between the ages of 35-60. $99/yr membership fee.

Home Exchange University A home exchange site for people ages 50+. This is home exchange for mostly couples without children who have the time and flexibility to travel anytime throughout the year. The site has a handy Home Exchange 101 section to help answer newbie questions.

Know Your Trade is a useful home exhange portal site, not affiliated with one particular home exchange site but partners with various companies to offer one stop searching for home exchange. The site also includes great exchange tips and an article on various free home exchange sites.

Want to Take It Up a Notch?

These volunteer organizations exchange work for lodging and food.

Help Exchange (ests. 2001) Want to volunteer on a ranch or a sailboat? Then join this fee-based company ($29/2 years) to find your next serious adventure.

Global Volunteer Network (est. 2000) connects people with communities in need by becoming a portal for local volunteer organizations and potential volunteers worldwide. Come on! Don’t you want to volunteer at Thailand’s Elephant Refuge and Education Centre? One downside: a $350 application fee for 5 years access to the site and it’s amenities may be steep for some of the most richly traveled, yet financially strapped volunteers.

WWOOF (World Wide Opportunities on Organic Farms est. 1971) One of my new Brazilian friends couldn’t stop telling stories about her experiences with WWOOF New Zealand. She volunteered on an organic farm and learned about local, sustainable farm techniques while tilling the soil and getting to know the farm family. Volunteers work for food and lodging. (WWOOF charges a $30 membership fee to help defray administrative costs.)

PLEASE, tell me about other similar organizations or companies you’ve heard of or experienced. Now, back to the elephants…

 

 

So, now that I’m back from Brazil, I just have to delve deeper into a few topics. The first is electric tango. Yes, it’s been around for a while, but with Brazil wooing me and promise of Spring and Summer flirting with me, I couldn’t help it, I fell in love. So, I have most dutifully labored my tympanum to bring you a quite subjective short list of yummy electric tango. Yes, that’s a genre, a RSL genre. I’m a fan of yummy music. Call me too happy to use such descriptors as “filthy” or “dirty.”

Tell me what you think of my recommendations and if you’ve got some additional taste tunes to share.

Otros Aires, Tricota, 2010. (iTunes) With his third album, Otros Aires walks the seductive tightrope between modern and traditional avant-garde tango.

Tanghetto, Emigrante, 2010. (iTunes) A masterful melding of tango’s passion with electronica.

Federico Aubele, Berlin 13, 2011. (iTunes) Mix ambient with a strong tango beat and Spanish guitar and you’ve got a delicious feast for your ears.

Pink Martini, Hang On Little Tomato, 2004. (iTunes) (and their other albums are nothing to smirk at either). A little plug here for my hometown peeps, not exactly tango, but they’ve got a sweet twist to the world beat mix going on: sexy, sweet, playful and sophisticated. Yes, you may have heard them, but when was the last time you took them for an auditory spin? I’ve been lucky enough to see them many times in concert. They are a great live performance and work hard to entertain their audiences.

 

Oh, and since I’m mentioning sexy, smart tune makers, consider the original bossa nova meets new wave remixes of Nouvelle Vague with their quirky, 2004 self-titled work (iTunes) (or one of their other 14 albums.)

Now off to Pandora, Grooveshark, lastfm or your other favorite music genome site and sensually feast on the tango groove during a sumptuous supper for two. It’s Friday after all.