In the afterglow, it all seems like a dream.

And so much of it is utterly dreamlike. The steel ladder with 108 rungs, rising from the alkaline anvil of the Playa into the radiant sky; the giant Unicorn with its jeweled eye, breaking from the flat expanse of earth; the woman with a purple hat and giant tricycle, offering ice-cold milk and homemade cookies to the dust-covered vagabonds on the seemingly infinite plain.

So much has been said about Burning Man, and every experience is so unique,
that the thought of writing about it has never occurred to me. It’s like trying to draw a tesseract – a four-dimensional object – in two dimensions. My experience in Black Rock City is all about stories, conveyed not on the page but in urgent or sleepy tones, tinged with wonder or disbelief, told over gritty-eyed breakfasts or dinners by Coleman light, fingers tracing accidental semaphores through the fine layers of dust on coffee cups and tortilla chip bags…

My own stories from the Burn are as personal as dreams. It’s difficult enough to convey them on the Playa itself, let alone to all of you out in cyberspace. Let’s just say that one makes a lot of wishes, and says a lot of prayers – and the stories we tell are often about how those wishes come true, or how certain signs and symbols indicate that they may, someday, be fulfilled. Like the Tin Man from Oz, I left Black Rock City with a big rubber heart around my neck, its soft red valves pulsing with a rainbow of LEDs…. But scattered amongst the thicker themes are countless other encounters; some of them my own, others conveyed by my dusty pals. (After a while, it’s like the borderline between memory and imagination; you can’t really remember what you actually saw, what you heard about, or what you dreamed of. Writing that makes me think about Aboriginal dreamtime, which displays a similar alchemy.) A few examples:

The man who blindfolded his eyes with duct tape, and walked the Playa with a cane and a “Guide Me” sign. (To up the ante, he spent an afternoon manning the Kissing Booth.) The dominatrix with a whip, who led a giant insect across Black Rock City on a leash. The art car shaped like a giant giraffe. The camp where you made a big pizza, and “delivered” it to anyone you met on the playa. The big, boisterous ladies from Texas, serving goblets of wine from a convertible covered in glowing grapes. The fire-filled footsteps leading to an enormous steel sculpture of Mother and Child, a cascade of flame joining their hands. And the Grand Hotel Ashram Galactica: Black Rock City’s first “luxury hotel,” with an eager-to-please concierge poised in a gorgeous Moroccan tent where dried figs, vodka, and buckets of ice waited on the lobby tables.  (more…)

                               
The three or four of you familiar with my more obscure works may have picked up a copy of Future Perfect: How Star Trek Conquered Planet Earth. Written with great expectations, the book fizzled when my gleeful publicist at Viking – a huge Trek fan with posters of Kirk and Spock on his walls – quit in an unexplained huff a couple of months before the 1999 release date.

One of my favorite characters in that book was Ronald D. Moore, a Star Trek: The Next Generation and Deep Space Nine producer (he also co-wrote, with Brannon Braga, the Trek films Generations and First Contact). Moore added immeasurably to the Star Trek universe; he was, by popular estimation, the “Margaret Meade of the Klingon Empire.” But he left that world with a bad taste in his mouth, after running afoul of Braga on Voyager. I’d wondered what had become of Moore – until I read John Hodgman’s recent New York Times Magazine story about the new Battlestar Galactica series on the Sci-Fi channel. Somehow, the ship – and show – had slipped right under my radar.

Last night, my friend Mark Wagner (who painted the fabulous Wheel used in Strange Travel Suggestions) and I bought a LoCoco pizza, and watched the whole three-hour Battlestar Galactica mini-series in a marathon of edgy ethereal madness.

Even with my high expectations—I’m a huge fan of Moore’s work—the show is amazing. It’s dark, edgy, old-fashioned sci-fi, a cheeky blend of high- and low-tech with frequent nods to 2001 and Blade Runner, a subtle touch of Trek around the edges. (more…)

The mind-boggling profusion of the Spring has elbowed its way into Summer. Went for a hike at Tennessee Valley recently (easily accessible from the connector road from Highway 101 to Stinson Beach), and was astounded to find that there were nearly as many wildflowers as there had been after the rains of April. It’s a fabulous time to get outside, and walk at a good clip through hillsides covered with pea blossoms, ceanothus, Farewell-to-Spring, and a host of other blooms I’ve never seen and can’t name.

Drove out to Yosemite about three weeks ago and took two long strolls in the unseasonable heat. I think of myself as an ocean person, but there are times when those waves and whorls of granite, scraped and sheared by the retreating glaciers of the last Ice Age, give me a similar feeling: a familiar awe for the enormous forces animated by the Earth’s molten core and slow, steady rumble around its axis. Yosemite Valley, as ever, was mobbed; but I took the shuttle bus up to Glacier Point and hiked down the Panorama Trail, spending long moments lost in the rainbow mists that dance over Vernal Falls in the hour before sunset. (more…)

Osaka is so humid, the women carry umbrellas. There are 80 ads in each subway car. Stuffed animals are plentiful. Wandering in the sweltering heat down the throbbing streets of Shinsaibashi, I have to stop and marvel at what Japan has become. The’s not a trace of calm or spirituality visible in the frantic mess of plastic and humanity, the answer to every appetite cobbled together into an unholy hybrid, like something out of The Fly. Everything seems to revolve around commerce, cuteness, and coupling; it’s a place where the strobing lights can send even a normal person into an epileptic fit, a land with a service industry so eager to please that even the toilet seats blow water up your ass…. (more…)

After a quarter century in the business, it’s wonderful to visit a country I’ve never been to before. Somehow, Portugal had never made it onto my radar; so when the opportunity arose to visit the famous Oceanário in Lisbon — one of the world’s greatest aquaria — I jumped right in.

 It’s a very 00′s thing, visiting a country specifically to see their aquarium. Let’s face it: as much as one might like fish, and I like them a lot, an afternoon is about as much finned fun as you can stand. True, it helps if there are penguins, and otters; but even their antics, which mainly involve posturing and kelp, add only an hour or so to the mix.

My point is, no one (unless they live next door, in Spain) travels to Lisbon for a single afternoon. And so, with boundless curiosity and a ridiculous amount of luggage, I arrived for a four-day visit, hoping to pack the equivalent of a Fulbright-length residence into one long, extended weekend. (more…)

        Okay, Cyberpals, looks like we’re up and running … literally as well as figuratively. Makes crazy poetic sense that this brand-new website, created with the help of the masterful Bradley Charbonneau, unfolds mere hours before yet another hasty departure — this time for Telluride, Colorado, where I’ll lend my decidedly non-filmic talents to the high-altitude hijinx of the MountainFilm Festival. 

    Which leaves me in a typical pre-road quandry: to pack, or to write?

    In this case, the Middle Way won’t really work. Many people assume that, since I travel for a living, I must be an expert packer. Nothing could be further from the truth. Despite obsessive "packlists" upon which pre-determined numbers of thermal socks, computer adapters, and Zantac are crossed off with a felt marker, the packing process takes hours, and always culminates in a familiar sense of despair: once again, I’ll be carrying something heavy around the world. (more…)