burningman 2006 was the best burningman yet. Alex Baszio, John Stagg and I drove to the event in Alex's Honda Odyssey.
The first night we met J., Michelle and Louise from Ireland, with whom we became great friends.
Mike Whitemiller spent time with us generously, as he did everything - generously. The Americans always prove themselves democratic and noble at once.
Emily, bright, young and beautiful and on her own from New York and Kristen both impressed us with their easy confidence and vivacious intellects.
Stagg endured extremely painful muscle cramps on the first day due to dehydration and the low percentage of body water that Stagg carries which was quickly spent in the dry, desert air of Black Rock City.
Many people later visited our camp to express their condolences and offer Stagg some sympathy in an unsympathetic world. Many also expressed their admiration of his resolution and constitution in attending burningman to begin with. A masochist from a nearby camp even envied Stagg's all too evident agony. There are some things which there is no faking. Stagg thanks everyone who wished him well.Almost all the film I shot was soaked in a luke-warm cooler bath of melted ice water mingled with soy milk and humulin for Stagg. A lot of film ended up looking like the background at the top of these pages, which looked really cool so I scanned it, bookmatched it and put it at the top of these pages. For the salvaged images, I am working on cleaning the resulting scans so do not download these images for your records until I have them all nicely cleaned up.
A minor tragedy compared to the triumph of Stagg overcoming his adversity and a galloping diabetic coma by the intercession of a Playa Angel in a sugar candy bikini from which the groggy and nearly comatose Stagg greedily suckled. A previous burningman laid Stagg out on the Playa with a heart attack.
Well, as Stagg's misogynistic wisdom goes, "the only thing women hate more than you looking at them is if you don't look at them" - my photographs work the same way. Click on a thumbnail to see a larger image.
If we met at burningman, please email me. I would love to hear from you.
