Hot Topic
On the show that will air tonight at 7:30 (and be repeated Friday night at 10:30), I interview Burning Man founder Larry Harvey. I knew next to nothing about this annual festival before I started preparing for our conversation -- nothing except a vague sense that participation would require the denial of comfortable bathroom facilities. But the more I read about Harvey and Burning Man -- starting with their informative website, and continuing with the very helpful comments that some of you left on this blog -- the more questions I wanted to ask him. Because it turns out that the easy, simplistic notions about Burning Man -- naked people! running around! in the desert! -- can easily distract you from the profound community-building ethos at the core of this project. I hope that viewers get a glimpse of the passion and intellect beneath the wry and laid-back surface of this visionary guy. ...
Also, there's a "Wandering Josh" segment in which I got to hang out with some amazing artists in San Francisco as they prepared their gigantic pieces for Burning Man. Continuing a trend in which WJ producer Paul Sullivan has clearly been trying to kill me, I attempted to climb up some razor-sharp wire inside an enormous blue head, and then used a very scary tool called (I think) a plasma gun (though, sadly for my son, not a plasma lightsaber) in order to impress members of the Flaming Lotus Girls art collective. ...
And now, apropos of nothing (except that it shares the title of this little blog item and it's been happily running a lot in my head lately), let me parenthetically mention that the song "Hot Topic," from the first album of the group Le Tigre, is incredibly catchy. That is all.
8 comments September 26th, 2005
