This is the week, long-awaited all year...even more so after 50,000 tickets sold out back in July. The New York Times has jumped on the bandwagon with three stories in two days, including the Monday obituary of Rod Garrett who helped design Black Rock City's spoke-like layout and annual
Center Camps.
Like clockwork and seemingly by its very nature, Burning Man spins off speculation like swirling dust-devils. This year it has ranged off the art section to the business page and even Op-Eds.
So goes the 25th anniversary of Burning Man with the 2011 Art Theme: Rites of Passage. More traffic will fork through tiny towns for the Burn this Labor Day weekend.
For those who've gone before, want to attend, or wish to know what compels pilgrims to trek year after year to the Black Rock Desert in an arid corner of Nevada...we present our revised edition of Desert to Dream: A Decade of Burning Man Photography.
Barbara Traub updated her 2006 opus (since sold out too) with 2 more years, 16 more pages, and two dozen more photos, along with a fitting postscript by her friend D.S. Black.
We're pleased to publish this evolving chronicle of an event which has grown from a happening to a festival to the state's 10th largest city. But it still provides a rainbow of mesmerizing experiences, which differ to the viewer according to the time of day and the shifting sands of happenstance.
Fortunately, Barbara was there to capture these fleeting moments of spectacle and share them with people around the world, in the pages of magazines from Wired to Time and now in the 2nd edition of her book. Once the playa is wiped clean next week, participants and voyeurs can still appreciate the memories of the desert and their dreams they created there.
