Chapter One

A swirl of claims, some contradictory, runs through the endless conversation that Burning Man engenders in its devotees and detractors. You'll hear them over and over again at parties, jubilees, raves, fundraisers, late-night welding sessions, tugboat soirees, intimate desert rituals: Burning Man creates artists; Burning Man is self-indulgent play; Burning Man renews lives; Burning Man destroys lives; Burning Man changes the world; Burning Man is a dangerous catastrophe.

For six years Jim Mason was one of Burning Man's most tenacious and excessive artists, living out all of those dichotomies. He has a wide, babyishly blank face (even when covered in a few days' unshaven beard, as it often is) beneath his dirty blond hair (usually longish and tangled). His characteristic outfit is a dull-silver full-body fire-protection suit, which he has taken to wearing even during those (rare) moments when his catching himself on fire is only a remote possibility.

Mason is not a scientist, but his day job has been written up in Scientific American. He's creating a database of all of the world's surviving languages, a Utopian-linguist scheme known as the Rosetta Project, which is part of Stewart Brand's Long Now Foundation. Brand was one of Ken Kesey's Merry Prankster pals and the impresario behind the January 1966 Trips Festival (the apotheosis, or selling out, of Kesey's Acid Tests), one of the first public ticketed events in America to turn life into a theatrical happening and vice versa, to embrace incongruous and chemically enhanced freaky community publicly as a viable and even holy pursuit. Brand's Trips Festival