Nomad Codes

nautical misreading of the “Floating World” transformed the playa itself into an easy-access creative space, where some bonehead’s blow-up octopus toy helped contribute to the collective hallucination as much as a marvel like La Contessa or those striking jellyfish. Moreover, the playa at night already is a sort of sea: the ocean of the unconscious, of drifting, fragmentary dreams within which one alternately sinks or swims. Or sails, in the case of this gorgeous, slutty galleon, which cut across the open lake bed like the Pequod in pursuit of a white leviathan—a scenario that, blessed be, actually manifested itself that ageless weekend in 2002, when La Contessa played nautical chicken with a monstrous glowing whale whose innards—another bus—were driven by the notorious Flash. The insane and patently unsafe jousting of these two behemoths, glimpsed by me and my pals from a few hundred yards away, was a vision of such fantastic hilarity that it seems incredible to report that the scenario was raised to an even higher pitch of glory by the spectacle, an hour or so later, of the white whale being ticketed by distinctly unamused BLM rangers.
    All gratuitous acts of strong art are magickal invocations, but there is something particularly spellbinding about truly obsessive and basically useless degrees of detail. This is one of the strengths of Peter Jackson’s Lord of the Rings films: the visionary reality of his Middle-Earth was partly a creation of the artisans who designed the props and costumes, and more often than not, added far more detail than the camera would ever pick up. Such excess marked La Contessa ’s making as well, a work of manic devotion. Discussing the immense logistical challenges and passionate volunteer work that created the ship, Cheffins told the San Francisco Bay Guardian that “The idea of the ship is it was a lady that you end up serving, and she took on a life of her own. We all came to feel like servants at some point.” Appropriately, the lady’s most gorgeous feature was her female figurehead (which had already been stolen from the galleon before the ship burned and is presumably still at large). This gorgeous corseted wench, the work of the sculptor Monica Maduro, hung from the prow clutching a lamp, both eyes shut, as if she was leading the ship by feel into some nameless alien landscape that unrolled across the screens of her inner eyelids.
    Many theme camps and art cars at Burning Man are all façade, like store fronts on a western set, concealing the usual mess of rebar and wires. And many more are themed in only the loosest sense, settling instead for the goofy juxtapositions and slapdash irony that form the basic—and often lazy and incoherent—foundation of playa art. But once you boarded La Contessa —after suffering the glowering gaze of some haughty Barbary bouncer—you passed through an appealingly soiled interior bordello before reaching the deck, all without glimpsing anything that resembled a modern vehicle. On deck you marveled at the rigging and sails and the weathered balustrade. Then some grizzled and likely sodomite demanded that you please turn off your fucking blinky lights , a demand considered fussy and elitist by some but that merely affirmed the crew’s commitment to the visionary craft.
    By hewing so closely to historical detail, La Contessa was much more “straight” than your average playa work. I was surely not the only passenger for whom La Contessa instantly resurrected a childhood love of Disneyland’s Pirates of the Caribbean—a ride, by the way, that only fools mock. Like Burning Man, Pirates is a bardo run-through, a sometimes cavernous and claustrophobic cruise through the spectral realms of desire and anarchy and destructive imaginal machines. Think about it: in its original form, the ride ends with a burning city overrun with madmen high on intoxicants, explosives, and lust. Even more inspiring is the character known in fan lore as the “red-headed woman.” We see her first as a portrait in the drunken skeleton’s lair, a spicy pirate queen equipped with a cutlass, and then later as a woman abducted from the burning town, at which point we realize that the whole ride is a tale told in reverse, like a black mass, and that, once captured, the crimsontopped lass exuberantly embraced her sordid new life of high-seas crime, all before winding up as an image to delight the drunken dead. All very La Contessa , would not you