Tribe of Los Angeles

Ubie!

Article about our own dear Kevin and Gigsville's Uberman

"But that’s okay with Rolly. He loves his resurrected messiah."

Anniversaries, Fresh Earth Where We Played and a Girl Named Alice

My last night in Pittsburgh before I return to LA. My brother Shaun and Sara's First Anniversary...my parents' 40th. My 20th year High School reunion.
We all went out to eat. It was a wonderful night. Rett came. When everyone had gone, we drove to a nearby bar and told stories...

"I've been thinking so much about the past that when I recall today's date it seems like the distant future"

There are touchstones of homecoming...rituals that occur over time. You don't plan them they just become.

Ten years ago after my 10th reunion, Phadrae who mispelled her name and was my girlfriend, came with me as I took her to the school that I grew up in. It was called Bairdford and they closed it in 1979. My brother's class was the last to go through. A panel was loose. That's all it took.

Inside was a crypt of memory. The desks, long since removed from the classrooms, rusted into each other in what was once the dining hall. Nothing else was touched, but everything had changed. A rich loam-must scent permeated the air. The tiles now curled upwards like thick bark as rain sifted down through Mr. Cessareti's ceiling to grow mushrooms in what was once 4th period. Upon the stained floor littered with the paint that fell like leaves, I stood in my first classroom. Sixth row from the door. Three back. This was were I sat...This was where I sat...

Lost here and there would be a mitten...a drawing...a letter... Things that never made it out. In the lowest room vines boiled in through the boards and glass to stamp in perfect imagery the room of the teacher who made me cry...

In the hall of desks I read the names of my classmates into a recorder, the sounds echoing into silence. Phadrae and I were over less than a month later, her face indelibably linked with a place and time that haunted my dreams even until this day.

The dreams were all the same...Though the story changed, one aspect remained constant: I had returned home and they were restoring the school into new and beautiful form. They occurred with such frequency that for the first time ever, I began to confuse my dreams with reality. "Yes, that's right...I had just dreamt it..." The night of Homecoming I told the story and that I was going to give what had become a place of remembering a call.

Then maria told me. "They tore it down. Last week."

I thought I'd dream about her again, but I didn't...

After the reunion I went with Mom to see my Uncle. He had replaced the furniture. It had been three years since Grandma died. It was time to make the house his own now. Tasteful and elegant, the new sofa and chairs claimed an identity much needed. But that was only one reason we had come by. "Do you want to see Grandma's things," he asked? Of course I did. In her room the bed was now gone, but now boxes filled the small space...along with a chest of drawers. "She kept everything you gave her." She did. In the top drawer where nothing changed was a rosary I found for her in Sienna. It was one of my last gifts for her. Then mixed with tokens of affection the decades blended backwards and backwards into a history. Inches away I was a teenager, then a child...

It was my last card to my Grandfather. He died of cancer in 1974.

Further back then before I was born and the old grew young again


It was like the dream once more and the drawers gave up their stories that no one living could remember.
The letters became French and the faces were so proud and young...
And that's when I found her....







My Aunt Anne, now the matriarch of the family, knew all the names and faces. She is the last keeper of family memory. She knew all of them. Except her...





Who was your keeper, Alice?

Sorry...all of your soldiers are gone...
So I put you here. It's all the keeper I can be.
We all have our ghosts. Thankfully most of mine are kind.
See you back in LA...
-Kevin

Of Deserts and Resurrections

It was a journey ripe with challenges...Never before had our community gone through so much in getting to and surviving the desert at Burning Man...both emotionally and physically. The day I arrived, a week before the event even started, I developed and abcessed tooth. My jaw swelled to the size of a baseball and I was in agony. Thankfully friends equipted me with enough Vicoden and Percoset to numb a small pod of whales. I got a ride to town (more than an hour away) to get antibiotics, but no dentists were available for the length of the event. I had to live with it. Then it was a litany of disasters... My friends' trailer exploded just ten minutes away and lost the entire belongings of five people. Tents, clothes, food, everything. For one friend it was all of her clothes...Then there were blown engines, blown transmissions, broken fingers, broken relationships...and on and on it went. Gigsville was off to a very very rough start.

But the spirit of my friends prevailed. Humor and generosity transformed and everything was compensated for. There was a final blow yet to come however... As some of you have read, we were building our own "man" bigger than the Burning Man in the village. "Uber Man" he was being called. A kind of 'man of the people' who would be approachable and have personality and not be subject to the now beaurocratic process of art/grant approval from the organization. He would be ours...and at 63 feet, be 2/3 taller. Throughout this year long process of developing and building him, God had blessed it the entire way....and I had no real idea why. Every piece of resource and talent appeared and on the Sunday
before the event we raised him to cheers all around.

"Ubie" before the raise
Then things went terribly wrong...there are a number of reasons why this happened, but there's no need to get into any of that. Suffice to say that moments before he got cabled down, a massive gust of wind grabbed him and in sick slow motion we watched the product of a year of planning and work come crashing down in a sea of bent metal, dust and shattered neon. Thank God no one got hurt or killed.

"That's it...he's dead," I heard people say. Then the tears of everyone came. They worked so hard...and I felt it was all my fault. I led them here...and now this... How was this part of God's plan? Did He lead us here just for a lesson? A punishment? I didn't understand...I tried to call up anger, but it never arrived

Then we looked him over. He may have been bent, but not broken...not one weld so much as cracked...without being hyperbolic...he was fearfully and wonderfully welded. In minutes there was mention of other metal to be had and we had purchased extra neon. Then it made sense. God didn't want a simple raise....He wanted a resurrection As I stood atop our fire pit (made of a gutted van) with a megaphone (and admitedly some scotch) rallying about how Job never gave up and something about not hearing any fat lady sing, my mind did some math. If the repair schedule played out as I imagined...he would be raised back up on the third day... And that's exactly what happened. It seemed every creative force at Burning Man came out to support. No less than four crane drivers volunteered to help. The work began the very next day. The bent metal was pulled out and we cut out the bends, resleaving the missing parts with larger guage metal and rewelded him where he fell. My friend even volunteered the salvaged metal from his burnt trailor to replace the cross-bracing. I had never been so proud of a group of people in my life... And on the third day after witnessing my friends opperating in the glory of their gifts, the head crane opperator of Burning Man came out and personally oversaw the raise.

He was lit that night to the 2001 Theme...and as a special gift, they projected my face onto the screen. It was a humbling and beautiful moment...and you bet I shouted out about the God of Resurrection. There were cheers. My friends and the people of Burning Man cheered about God and the Resurrection...

"Time For Pie"
To add extra symbolism...Ubie's smirk came from the neon rib of the actual Burning Man Saturday night after they burnt the Burning Man, everyone returned to Gigsville for the "Last Man Standing" party. we projected people's own faces onto Ubie and hooked up a karaoke machine so everyone could sing.... ridiculously glorious.

It rallyed till dawn. From across the desert he was the lergest thing out there...and our beacon home.
I now saw God's plan unfolded. In a both emotional and humorous way God revealed Himself in a language that the attendees of Burning Man could relate: A resurrected figure that became personal and indentifiable to everyone. He wasn't an impersonal distant figure that was the Burning Man...He was "Ubie" our friend and beacon home. I had the honor of giving God the credit and have done so in every interview that came from it. But God's name was not done being lifted up. Just before sunrise on Sunday morning, our members of Tribe and guests gathered in the middle of the city to worship.


(That's Mistersite on the right)

Prayer and a reading from Mathew (Rev. Rebecca)...communion followed


Then what I had prayed would happen, did. People began joining us...the man in the red hood started singing an old Gospel tune, the people on the art car behind danced with us as the Spirit lead us in creating praise lyrics on the spot. My Lord....No words of thanks will ever be enough for what you did and are doing.... God's name has been planted at Burning Man...and that fire is spreading. Thank you all for your prayers....

Burning Man Aftermath and Preliminary Reflections

So... after the harrowing 20 hour drive from Black Rock City back to LA, we've finally returned from the playa!  (You've probably guessed from the lack of blog posts from the playa that I couldn't find a computer there.)  Kevissimo's probably going to stay another few days to see to the Uber-Man, and Howard is still en route, but the rest of us have made it back in one piece, albeit about two pounds each heavier from the dust that covers us and all our possessions and very, very tired.

About Burning Man itself... well, as a virgin burner I have to say that the veterans were right to say that it can't be described, only experienced.  I could tell you all about the incredible art, about the close feeling of community, about the people we met and the bonds we formed, but ultimately that isn't the whole story.  It's much more complicated than that, an interweaving of expression and art and survival and friendship and family-hood that is well more than the sum of its parts.

From a Christian perspective, it's a very interesting environment.  My reflections are of course based on my own spiritual position, but I'll share them here, and you're free to agree or disagree as you're wont to do.  There really isn't anything overtly Christian at Burning Man, though many burners will express a profound respect for the person of Jesus Christ while really disliking many of his followers, a sentiment with which I find myself sadly agreeing far too often.  But there's a great deal of spirituality in many forms - the most stunning and visceral display of which is the Temple, on which people write or leave mementos and memories of passed friends, wishes, confessions, deep thoughts, and other very interesting physical and verbal artifacts.  To be honest, it's among the most sacred spaces I've ever entered... and much of the expression there is just about as theologically distant from Christianity I've ever encountered.

My main observation of Burning Man is that most burners really don't understand the heart of Christianity.  (I would also argue that many Christians don't either.)  Many have such deep and traumatic wounds from people who called themselves Christian, or only encounter Christianity in the form of blowhards like Falwell or Robertson, that they blind themselves to the very real message of Christ and his very real body - despite the previously-noted respect for the man Jesus himself.  But what I've found there that I haven't found elsewhere - and especially in Christianity - is an openness to talk, to dialogue, to have the kind of exchanges where I can say I'm a Christian and my conversation partner can say she's a Buddhist, and we can connect over similar experiences and similar feelings and the things that happen on the playa itself.  There's a willingness to listen there that I just haven't encountered in many other places.

Playa con Dios was, well, a start.  We tried and failed to have daily meetings - which was a disappointment to some but par for the course on the playa, and probably was well more than made up for by the number of very interesting and deep conversations we found ourselves involved in throughout the rest of the day.  The Sunday dawn service had a few visitors, and was followed by a wonderful impromptu gospel music/hand drum jam session.  All told, it was, I think, what it needed to be.  Next year we'll come back more organized, more seasoned, and more ready for a lot of the challenges we faced this year.  Such things, in my experience, tend to be like bulbs that burst out of the ground and flower beautifully in what seems only like a moment, after long seasons of waiting.

Cameron and K'Mo, among others, took many pictures.  Once we've got everything together, I'll post some here.

--jimmy5

Leaving for Burning Man!

In about 8-12 hours, five of us (5, Dave, Patrick, Eric, Cameron) leave for the playa!  We'll be caravanning with Patrick's SUV, a camper-trailer, and my hybrid.  Pray for us as we travel tonight and tomorrow.  On Thursday, we're joined by Rev. Rebecca, and on Friday by Rob and Selena; pray for their travels as well.

While you're in the praying mood, also pray for us as we're on the playa; pray for our daily Playa Con Dios services, for our camp, for the people God brings to us and brings us to, for Burning Man in general.

I've heard there's wifi on the playa, but I'm not bringing my computer because I fear the dust's effects on it... if I do manage to get to a computer with access and am in the mood for having contact with the world, I'll post from the playa; otherwise, I'll definitely have a report - and maybe pictures - sometime in the week we get back.

Also, in case you needed reminding, please keep the people of New Orleans and the surrounding area in your prayers as they weather the hurricane and its aftermath.