Author: Sam Whiting / Source: SFGate
Larry Harvey, an Oregon farm boy who lit a wooden skeleton on Baker Beach in San Francisco, igniting the cultural force that is Burning Man, died Saturday.
A messianic figure known for wearing a felt Stetson and smoking Marlboro Lights, Harvey was the founder and guiding light of the annual Burning Man bacchanalia in the Nevada Desert, which attracts 70,000 campers the week before Labor Day.
Harvey, who last appeared in public March 29 at the opening of a Burning Man art exhibition at the Smithsonian in Washington D.C., died after suffering a massive stroke on April 4. He was 70.
“We resolutely held out for a miracle,” Marian Goodell, CEO of the Burning Man Project, said in a statement. “If there was anyone tenacious, strong-willed and stubborn enough to come back from this challenge, it was Larry.”
He was surrounded by family members in San Francisco when he died peacefully Saturday morning, Goodell said.
What started on the Summer Solstice, 1986, with maybe a dozen people torching an 9-foot effigy at the beach has grown into a year-round $30 million-a-year enterprise with 70 full-time employees at its San Francisco headquarters and satellite art events everywhere.
As chief philosophic officer and Burning Man project president, Harvey was plain-spoken and good-humored about the spiritual command he held over his disciples, who call themselves “burners.”
To the end, he designed and scripted the annual art theme, and when he gave his annual keynote address on the playa, he was listened to with deep rapture.
“People out here build whole worlds out of nothing, through cooperating,” Harvey said in 1988, during a speech in which he encouraged the burners after an early Burning Man festival to go back out into the mainstream and live each day as if they were still in the desert.
“We’ve been civilized from the beginning,” he said. “In the desert, it’s a baroque city like Paris or Rome.”
Burning Man takes place the week leading up to Labor Day, in a mystical and completely temporary metropolis called Black Rock City, which probably functions better than Paris or Rome. There is a street grid, neighborhoods, a police force, competing daily newspapers and radio stations, cocktail parties, dinner dances, and high opera.
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The founder of Burning Man, Larry Harvey, has been hospitalized after suffering a massive stroke, organizers of the arts festival said.
Media: KTVU
As the event has gotten more mainstream and ticket prices more expensive, an unavoidable class system has evolved. Silicon Valley millionaires are the middle class, just like in San Francisco, and billionaires at the top of the heap, are in luxurious motor homes with generators cranking out the air conditioning.
Harvey’s own camp, named First Camp, was original and understated, with 70s-style RVs. The toughest invitation to score at Burning Man is for the nightly dinner at Camp One. The meal is prepared by a celebrated chef and guests sit at long tables, with Harvey in his hat usually at one end. Everybody is expected to pitch in. Google co-founder Sergey Brin was supposedly spotted there last year washing dishes.
It is all part of being a participant. There are no spectators at Burning Man. For the price of a ticket, which ranges from about $200 to $1,200, you are expected to be part of the show. If you need an introduction to Burning Man, the San Francisco Public…
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