by Brad Listi
It is incumbent upon all Burning Man attendees to provide their own food, water, shelter, and fuel. As such, the powers that be at The Bomb had agreed to rent Lynch an RV for the week. Unfortunately, however, there were no RVs available in either Reno or San Francisco. On account of the festival’s soaring popularity, every recreational vehicle within a three-hundred-mile radius of Black Rock had long since been rented. At the moment, the nearest available RV was located in Las Vegas, four hundred miles south. Vegas had therefore been selected as our official point of rendezvous. Lynch had procured a thirty-foot motor home from what he assured me was a reputable rental establishment about a mile from the Strip. It would serve as our home base for the duration of the mission.
The morning of my departure, there was a knock at the door. A young guy with a buzz cut and a bleached goatee was standing outside, slightly out of breath. He was about my age, and he was holding a large envelope. A local courier. I signed for the delivery, walked back into my apartment, and tore the envelope open. My script was inside, along with a two-page typed critique, or “coverage,” as industry parlance would have it. I sat down on my futon and read it.
Here’s what it said:
The Grandeur of Delusions tells the story of MALCOLM FALTERMEYER (45), a bereaved assassin who comes out of semiretirement to take on DR. HANSEL BAIRD (65), a clairvoyant, wheelchair-bound scientist with designs on taking over the world via mind control. The story starts out in New York before venturing off into the Los Angeles underworld.
In brief:
• An odd assortment of thinly realized characters shows up.
• An adventure ensues.
• Somehow, against all odds and in total defiance of logic, Faltermeyer saves the day.
The script is unfocused, slightly too long, and suffering terribly from a lack of proper tone. The conflict is poorly conceived, and the dialogue is ridiculously, comically bad.
Hansel Baird, the movie’s villain, is more funny than frightening, and his presence as the movie’s dark force is decidedly weak. He makes only sporadic appearances throughout the first two acts, muttering incoherent nonsense about the control of (a) information, (b) weather systems, and (c) “the mindscreens of the citizenry.” If this was intended as comedy, it worked. If it was intended as authoritarian malevolence, well…
At the heart of the screenplay’s failure is its total misunderstanding of its own identity. The movie can’t decide if it wants to be a full-blown action picture or a psychological tête-à-tête between two troubled men…or maybe even a slapstick comedy(?). Some of its most harrowing action sequences are littered with half-brained and ultimately futile attempts at rudimentary philosophy. To say that such nonsense is grating would be as big of an understatement as this writer is capable of making.
In conclusion, the lack of craft and professionalism in The Grandeur of Delusions is the screenplay’s most resonant “quality.” The cast of characters is uniformly two-dimensional and truly annoying beyond belief. In a movie such as this—one that requires its audience to believe in and root for a hero of a decidedly wooden nature—it is of paramount importance that said character possess at least a few qualities of an endearing nature. Unfortunately, this is not the case with this script.
This reader suggests a “Strong Pass” on The Grandeur of Delusions and its author. What’s on the page right now is harebrained garbage and isn’t even remotely worth the time and energy that would be needed to fix it.
—J.T.
I set the coverage down on my bed and stared at it for a while. Then I walked over to my stereo. I put the Mantovani Orchestra on at top volume. Track one. “Charmaine.” Then I pulled a pack of cigarettes out of my dresser drawer and lit one. Then I started packing.
A few minutes later, the phone rang. I walked back over to the stereo and turned the volume down. I looked at the caller ID. It was Lynch.
“Fencer,” he said. “It’s Lynch.”
“I know,” I said. “Where are you?”
“I’m here. Got to the Luxor about twenty minutes ago.”
“How’s everything?”
“Everything’s good,” he said. “It’s hot as fuck outside. I left a key for you at the desk.”
“Perfect,” I said. “I’m packing as we speak.”
“Good. Make sure you bring a lot of warm clothes.”
“Will do.”
“And sunscreen, lip balm, shades. All that stuff. And bring weird shit, too, as much weird shit as possible, whatever you have, whatever you can think of. Super Balls, crayons, bubble gum, temporary tattoos, fake feathers, costumes—you name it, it’ll work. We need stuff to barter with. There’s no vending out there.”
“I know. You told me.”
“Right. So whatever we bring, great. Whatever else we need, we’ll pick up in Reno.”
“Perfect.”
“And bring something to burn, too, for when the Man goes down. On Saturday night, everybody hurls something of supposed significance into the fire. If you can think of something, bring it.”
“I’ll see what I can find.”
“What’s the matter? You sound bummed out.”
“Nothing,” I said. “I’m just tired.”
“Are you feeling lucky?”
“Not really.”
“Good. Give me a number for roulette. I’ll put twenty bucks on it.”
“Nine,” I said.
“Nine it is,” said Lynch.
I wished him luck. We hung up. I walked over to my bed. The coverage for The Grandeur of Delusions was there. I folded it three times and stuffed it inside my backpack. Then I walked back over to the stereo and turned the volume up.
8.
America West flight 355 to Las Vegas, seat 18C. The woman on my right was from Hawaii. She was native and portly. Upon boarding, we had introduced ourselves in a cordial and perfunctory manner. The woman informed me that she was meeting her boyfriend in Vegas, at Bally’s. Her boyfriend was from Montana. Somehow they’d been conducting a long-distance love affair for the past three years. He worked for a technology company and traveled to Hawaii once a month. She worked for the Honolulu Chamber of Commerce and rarely traveled. I couldn’t remember her name.
We were arcing out over the Pacific, making a giant U-turn.
If the plane were to lurch suddenly in the sky and begin plummeting toward the sea, I was going to reach my hand out and offer it to the woman from Honolulu. I was going to tell her that everything was going to be all right in the end, and then I was going to wink at her.
aviophobia n., also aviatophobia, pteromerhanophobia
Fear of flying.
It occurred to me that I probably shouldn’t be on an airplane at the moment. Under normal circumstances, I wouldn’t have been on an airplane at the moment. Instead, I would’ve been back in Los Angeles, continuing my rapid assimilation into the Entertainment Capital of the World. But these were far from normal circumstances.
In an hour, I would be in Vegas. The following morning, Lynch and I would board our recreational vehicle and drive eight hours north to Reno, where we would be meeting up with Horvak and Henry, both of whom, at my suggestion, had become last-minute additions to our operation. Henry was catching a flight from Denver to Reno the following afternoon, and Horvak and his girlfriend, Blair, were driving in from San Francisco. All of us were scheduled to convene at the Super Kmart on the northwest side of Reno at approximately 6:00 p.m., where we would load up on food, water, and various other sundries. We would consolidate our crew into the recreational vehicle, and from there, we would venture off bravely into the heart of the madness.
9.
In the spring and summer of 1986, Larry Harvey was working independently as a landscape gardener, running a small business he called Paradise Regained. As the summer solstice neared, he found himself beset by a strange and undeniable impulse. For reasons he couldn’t entirely explain, he wanted to build a large wooden man and burn him all the way to the ground. And so with t
he help of his friend and colleague Jerry James, Larry Harvey built an eight-foot-tall man out of scrap wood. And on June 21, 1986, they took the wooden man out to Baker Beach, doused him with gasoline, and lit him on fire.
At the time of ignition, there were several people scattered along the beach. When they saw the wooden man go up in flames, they were drawn to it like moths. Larry and Jerry stood in the sand by their flaming creation, dumbfounded by the sudden attention. It was an instant and completely unexpected congregation, spontaneous and wholly unplanned. As the wind blew the flames in one direction, a woman reached out and held the wooden man’s unburned hand. Moments later, a young troubadour with a guitar started singing an impromptu song about fire. Larry and Jerry were moved by the experience.
And the Burning Man festival was born.
Four years later, in 1990, the Man stood four stories tall. Hundreds of people showed up at Baker Beach to watch him burn. To the chagrin of the revelers, some cops showed up too. They informed everyone that burning a four-story wooden man on a public beach was, in fact, a gross violation of the law. It would not be allowed. Larry and his roommate, Dan Miller, stepped forward and made efforts to negotiate. In the end, it was agreed that the Man would be raised but not burned. Larry gave the cops his word, and the cops left the beach.
As a result, the mood among onlookers quickly deteriorated. They had come for a spectacle; now it wasn’t happening. They grew restless. Some grew upset. Some argued that they should burn the Man anyway. Some even got violent. When Larry Harvey tried to calm the unruly mob, one guy even went so far as to try to choke him. It was a bad scene.
In response to this outburst, the Man was disassembled and removed from Baker Beach in haste. It was evident that the spectacle had outgrown its venue.
Burning Man had reached a crossroads in its existence.
In the days that followed, plans were laid for the burn to take place over Labor Day weekend in the Black Rock Desert, an otherworldly landscape some three hundred miles to the east of San Francisco, in a remote corner of northwestern Nevada.
The Black Rock Desert’s most striking feature is a silt alkaline salt pan called the Black Rock Playa, formerly the home of Pleistocene Lake Lahontan, a body of water that covered about 8,665 square miles of northwestern Nevada about 13,000 years ago.
In prehistoric times, lush vegetation and freshwater were abundant throughout the region. Rivers drained off of the Sierra Nevada Mountains and the Modoc Plateau, suffusing the countryside with life. Camels, horses, saber-toothed tigers, and giant mammoth roamed the region freely.
At present, the playa is dry as a bone. Vegetation is far from lush, and there are no more mammoths or saber-toothed tigers—anywhere. The playa is vast, flat, empty, and ringed by large, rippling mountains. It is one of the largest and most pristine desert valley floors in the United States of America, running about forty miles long and twenty miles wide. It is also the second-largest completely flat topographical region in the Northern Hemisphere.
Approximately ninety participants attended the first desert burning at Black Rock in 1990. The Man was ignited by a guy named David Warren, a retired carnival worker and veteran fire-breather. On account of high winds, Warren suffered facial burns during the proceedings. Otherwise, it was a very peaceful affair.
In 1999, the Man burned for the fourteenth time.
More than 23,000 human beings were on hand for the celebration.
10.
The final approach toward Black Rock City was made well after midnight, amid howling winds and sideways rain. Lynch was at the wheel of our recreational vehicle at the time. The vehicle was aptly named “The Searcher.” I was riding shotgun. Horvak, Blair, and Henry were in back, playing cards and drinking beer. They’d been playing cards and drinking beer ever since we’d left the Super K in Reno.
I was half asleep when we rolled into the town of Empire, in Washoe County, just south of the Black Rock Desert. Lynch made a noise and tapped me on the shoulder. I opened my eyes and saw lights in the rain. We were pulling into the parking lot at the Empire Store, the last place to buy provisions before entering the festival grounds. From the front of the store hung a large banner beating smartly in the wind. Lynch leaned forward over the steering wheel and pointed at it.
“What does it say?” he said.
“I can’t tell,” I said.
I sat up straighter in my seat and squinted. It took me a minute, but eventually, I was able to make out the words.
The banner said:
WELCOME TO NOWHERE
11.
It was hard to avoid thoughts of the apocalypse out there. The place looked like a giant crater, reminiscent of the aftermath of large asteroids and large, merciless bombs. The desert floor was flat as a board, a fissured surface of bright white alkaline clay, beaten down by winter rain, baked solid by the sun. A large brown mountain chain rose up all around, the lip of the crater. Somewhere in the middle of it all sat Black Rock City, a spirited exercise in organized chaos, laid out in a careful configuration beneath a wild and wholly unpredictable sky.
Back when I was in college, I’d taken a history course that centered on the invention of the atomic bomb. One of the more peculiar things I learned was that the world’s first self-sustaining nuclear chain reaction had taken place on a squash court. The reaction occurred on December 2, 1942, at approximately 3:24p.m. CST. The squash court was located beneath the west stands of Stagg Field, an athletic stadium located on the campus of the University of Chicago. Enrico Fermi, a university physics professor, was the man in charge of the operation. Members of the University of Chicago football team had helped him to assemble his groundbreaking atomic pile. The pile was made of black graphite bricks and covered on three sides by a gray cloth balloon.
This successful reaction signaled the dawn of the atomic age.
At the time, World War II was raging. Hitler’s armies were roaring through Europe, crushing everything. Meanwhile, German physicists were busy trying to initiate and control a nuclear reaction of their own. They were hoping to transform their efforts into the construction of a weapon heretofore unseen, a weapon of tremendous force and unprecedented destructive power.
reaction n.
1.)
a. A response to a stimulus.
b. The state resulting from such a response.
2.) A reverse or opposing action.
3.)
a. A tendency to revert to a former state.
b. Opposition to progress or liberalism; extreme conservatism.
4.) Chemistry: A change or transformation in which a substance decomposes, combines with other substances, or interchanges constituents with other substances.
5.) Physics:
a. A nuclear reaction.
b. An equal and opposite force exerted by a body against a force acting upon it.
6.) The response of cells or tissues to an antigen, as in a test for immunization.
The official mascot of the University of Chicago is the phoenix.
phoenix n., also phenix
1.) Mythology: A bird in Egyptian mythology that lived in the desert for 500 years and then consumed itself by fire, later to rise renewed from its ashes.
2.) A person or thing of unsurpassed excellence or beauty; a paragon.
3.) Cap: A constellation in the Southern Hemisphere near Tucana and Sculptor.
As early as the 1930s, many of the world’s leading physicists were worried that Hitler and his henchmen would find a way to build atomic weapons. Enrico Fermi was among them. So was his colleague Leo Szilard, and so was a Hungarian-born physicist named Edward Teller.
Szilard and Teller even went so far as to contact Albert Einstein, the smartest human being of all time. They urged him to warn President Franklin D. Roosevelt of the potential danger of a German superbomb.
Einstein responded. In August of 1939, he wrote a letter to President Roosevelt warning him of the ballistic potentials of nuclear reactions. He informed him of the German
pursuit of superweapons and encouraged him to maintain contact with American scientists working to create nuclear chain reactions of their own.
And so the arms race began.
12.
The yellow sun beat down. Clouds swirled. Winds blew. Waves of white dust drifted through the air, covering everything in a thin, persistent grit.
I was sitting in a lawn chair, smoking a cigarette.
A man in a homemade silver space suit lumbered by, handing out candy. He was trailed by a band of naked ladies playing flutes and recorders, their bare breasts painted to look like sunflowers.
An art car rolled across the desert at five miles an hour, a giant blue whale on wheels, driven by a guy in a pirate suit.
Meanwhile, a white-bearded sixty-year-old man blew bubbles into the breeze. He was completely nude and slathered head to foot in lime green iridescent body paint.
Across the way, three elated drag queens jumped on a trampoline, feather boas flying.
Bells chimed.
Fireworks cracked in the sky.
On July 16, 1945, the first atomic bomb was tested approximately two hundred miles south of Los Alamos, New Mexico, in the middle of nowhere. The test site was code-named “Trinity.” It consisted of twenty-four acres of dry desert scrub in the Alamogordo Bombing Range, located in an unforgiving desert landscape called Jornada del Muerto (Journey of the Deadman).
By that time, Franklin Roosevelt had died, and Harry S. Truman had become president.
On July 25, 1949, a couple of weeks before the nuclear bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, President Truman took a moment to scribble the following entry in his diary: