Earlier this month I had a thought-provoking conversation with Richard Estes, the host of a UC Davis radio program Speaking In Tongues. We talked about Burning Man and the recent suicide of Paul Addis:
SIT: Let’s just start with — as you noted in your article Paul Addis committed suicide I believe on Saturday, October 27th.
KO: Right.
SIT: And he did so by jumping in front of BART train, certainly very evocative for a lot of people here because we ride BART and we’re very familiar with it. Who was he and why do you consider his death to be noteworthy?
KO: He was an artist and I think an activist, certainly in his own mind and very involved in the Bay Area in various ways especially in the art scene. He had also been part of Burning Man since even before it began as a member of the Cacophony Society, which is one of the groups that their culture and activities created an origin point for Burning Man. So he was with Burning Man before there was even a Burning Man and he stayed with it through its earliest years when it was a temporary frontier city and he became disillusioned with it as it became more and more organized, especially in the late 90s after some more rules were put in place due to some tragic accidental deaths on the playa.
So they started putting more rules in place, so he wanted– You know, it’s a classic frontier story of someone watching the city they helped create become more orderly than they want. Of not being a frontier anymore but instead being a metropolis.
Photo by Elaine released under a Creative Commons license.
