Since leaving Burning Man, I’ve spent a lot of time thinking about the role that principles play in a society, and what to do when people don’t live up to them.

Burning Man attracts more than 70,000 people each Labor Day weekend to an inhospitable dry lakebed called “the Playa” in northwestern Nevada. Burners marvel at incredible art installations, boogie to electronic dance music, and create and engage in hundreds of different participatory experiences at camps with a staggering variety of themes. These activities range from walking the catwalk after picking out a new (free) outfit at a pop-up thrift store to hanging from bungees attached to a geodesic dome.

But this year, there was another unexpected activity: waiting out two-and-a-half days of rain and the thick mud it formed on the Playa’s surface. News networks ran breathless stories about how the participants were “trapped,” and interviewed people who fled instead of listening to the requests to stay until the lakebed dried out again.

What really happened, and what lessons can we draw from it given that the event is trying to create a particular type of culture?

The non-profit organization that runs Burning Man was chartered in 2011 to better manage the event, and promote its principles throughout the year. It is very clear about its theory of a good government for society, and that vision is basically libertarian. Among its 10 key principles are “radical self-reliance” and “community effort.” Many of the other principles have to do with the event itself, including a focus on its gifting economy, the immediacy of experiences people have there, and leaving no trace of participants’ presence on the Playa.

For those of us who take these principles seriously, the two days of mud were simply a challenge to be embraced and overcome, even enjoyed. “You get the Burn that you need,” a common saying about the experience goes. The vast majority of people who came this year took the opportunity of the massive rainstorms to connect more closely with their campmates, to create clever art from the mud, and/or to keep on partying their faces off through the deluge.

There’s a growing contingent at Burning Man of newer folks, though, who seem to see it as another version of the Coachella music festival—even though it is held in a patch of desert that might be the most inhospitable place for human life in the lower 48 American states.

I ran into two such party people as the storms were rolling in, and the ground was becoming impassable. “Pretty soon it will be every man, woman, and child for themselves,” one of the women warned me. “This happened before, and people were stuck here for 10 days.”

This precise kind of weather had not, in fact, happened before (at least not since I first came in 2000), and people were not, in fact, stuck for 10 days, nor were we at all likely to be. But two things struck me about her sentiment.

First, in spite of all of the pervasive propaganda around the 10 Principles, the woman had absolutely no idea where she was. Over the course of the next three days, I was overwhelmed with the generosity of the people who were constantly checking on their neighbors, opening up their StarLink WiFi for people to contact their families, or offering an unending stream of food, water, and booze to strangers that became new friends. (Even though very few people actually needed anything since most of us took the radical self-reliance part seriously.)

Had the woman simply asked for anything, she would have gotten more than she needed from a giving community. But she didn’t. Instead, like thousands of others, she and her friends fled or tried to, turning a fine, even fun, situation into a risky one. After folks who waited out the mud finally exited when it was safe to do so—generally no more than a day later than they were planning to leave anyway—they passed a Prius half submerged in the mud. Its driver had ignored all the warnings to just chill out and have fun with what life was presenting us with, and the result was a ruined $30,000 vehicle.

As it’s been reported, the people who fled were generally among the most well-off. I’m looking at you Chris Rock who apparently thought the event was going to descend into cannibalism after one day of rain. Many of those who stayed were the Burners of relatively modest means who make up a big chunk of the event’s attendees, people who spend some or all of their disposable income for the year on a week or two’s escape from the “default world.” And my experience has been that people with disabilities are the very picture of radical self-reliance on the Playa. But a minority of primarily able-bodied well-off folks did panic and the world picked up on that panic, magnifying it.

The second thing that struck me was how much the people who run Burning Man stuck to its view of a good society, especially the fostering of radical self-reliance of the denizens of the Playa. All of the information that we were given over the radio for the better part of a day was to “shelter in place and conserve food and water.” We were eventually directed to find more information on a website that most people couldn’t access.

I do think that the folks who run the event could have put out a less sensationalistic announcement that would have cut down on the panic. “Shelter in place” makes sense as your verbiage if there is an active shooter on the loose or if a tornado is on the way. Less so for what to do during a rainstorm that creates some thick mud. They could have reassured people and told them to reach out to their neighbors if they needed anything.

But the people who run Burning Man are very, even willfully, bad at different elements of event management, including entrance and egress to the Playa and communication during the event. Perhaps this is an intentional call for people to practice those principles of self-reliance and community effort on their own, without their “government” giving them any more additional specific instructions on how to do so when the mud hits the fan?

It got me thinking: What is the obligation of a government to its citizens when the terms of the social contract, so to speak, are so clearly laid out but not followed by many?

In terms of the event itself, I believe Burning Man could do at least a little more to ensure that it has prepared attendees. If you fled the Playa this year, you probably should not have been there in the first place. This may seem to be a violation “Radical Inclusion,” the first principle of the event, and people argue for the importance of acculturation of those who are not long-time Burners into the ethic of the place. Asking people to attend an online seminar or ensuring that they have enough water when they enter the event, however, would not be a major violation of this principle. I do a lot with the Scouts, and the event can probably help folks traveling to this inhospitable wasteland to be at least as prepared as the 11-year-olds that we send to sleepaway camp.

But here’s the rub: societies generally cannot and really should not choose only self-reliant people committed to community effort as their citizens.

This leaves us with the challenge of what to do given the extreme humanness of humans. Libertarianism, like communism, is an interesting theory that is problematic in practice. You can have all of the principles you want, but some people make idiotic decisions and these decisions can have tremendous negative consequences for themselves and those around them. And even though this rainstorm did not actually qualify as a disaster, we clearly need governments that are capable of responding to true crises in a more organized and effective fashion.

Pondering all of these things, I stuck it out to see the climactic “Man burn,” which happened two days late, on Monday. It was a tremendous moment of catharsis for those of us who stayed to see this 70-foot-tall art installation go up in flames after a massive fireworks display. Only the following morning, muddy and tired, did I make my way out of a desert of possibility and back to a world of practicality. In this world, governments generally attempt to take care of us rather than holding us to a standard of self-reliance that most people are not even trying to achieve.

But I hold on to the dream of Burning Man’s governing principles.

You may have heard that Burning Man was a disaster but I “got the Burn that I needed.” The compassion and community spirit modeled by those who stayed behind will remain an inspiration to me. As for those who fled, I will stay curious about how societies can work to help people achieve more self-reliance and avoid panic, in crises both real and imagined. And I will keep working on rebuilding trust in a society that believes that even the minor challenge of a couple of days of mud will quickly lead to people turning on—and potentially eating!—each other.

The post Finding a Good Society in the Mud of Burning Man appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

We formed a board and thought that we would run a jazz festival. The city encouraged us to use the newly-minted convention center. From this vague wish, a good idea and an even better music festival, now in its 26th year, was born.

Our group was completely grassroots, but we had the enthusiasm necessary to mount a festival. Though we planned the event for mid-August, we were neophytes and did not spend much time organizing. By early June we realized that while the convention center was technically free, every chair and table would cost us money. And potential sources of income—such as sponsorship and beverage income—would not belong to us because the convention center would take those funds.

So we decided to make the bold step of bringing the music outside to a park and offering it for free. At that time, performances in city parks had to be offered for free. We chose Plaza de Cesar Chavez, which was located in the city core and surrounded by hotels. There we would have some beverage income, since the concessions would belong to us. A local beer distributor gave us our initial sponsorship. And then 10,000 people showed up to help us inaugurate the San Jose Jazz Festival.

Since then we have grown to 13 stages; we also use clubs, hotel facilities, and other streets. Last year, 45,000 people showed up. We’ve taken advantage of the good weather and the downtown location to generate a feel that not many festivals have these days. The Plaza de Cesar Chavez is still the focus of activity—and the location of the main stage.

Joe Bonamassa on stage at the San Jose Jazz Festival in 2008. Photo courtesy of Paulo Philippidis/Flickr.

And the festival has expanded in ways we never could imagined, fostering new generations of musicians and audiences, and providing free music not just for our event but also year-round.

The growth is a reflection of the festival’s popularity and of our work building community. Our volunteer base has increased from 30 the first year to over 600 now—with various groups contributing time for everything from beverage sales to hospitality crew. The festival has become intertwined with the local business community. Extending the festival from two days to three helped hotel business during what would otherwise be a very slow week, and all the stages we established in clubs, meeting rooms and restaurants helped businesses with customers and sales. We also created the club crawl: On Friday and Saturday nights we offer free performances at 12 different hotels, restaurants, and clubs.

Musicians, both local and from out of town, have embraced the festival. We typically get eight to 10 requests from overseas acts to play here. To keep the festival fresh and exploratory, we work with a number of unpaid co-curator community members who keep tabs on promising new musicians in blues, jazz, Latin, and salsa.

We’ve also started three programs to develop young musicians and audiences: the High School Allstars, Youth Summer Camp, and Progressions, the last for kids in kindergarten and up. The Allstars, a year-round big band comprised of students who audition, perform twice in different settings. The Youth Summer Camp, which precedes the fest, features a group of students selected from the camp sessions; they play on the main stage Sunday morning.

Blow that horn! San Jose Jazz Festival, 2009. Photo courtesy of Monica P.C./Flickr.

We have found it difficult, with schools out of session, to tie in educational activities around the summer fest. So seven years ago we spun off a winter festival, featuring individually-priced shows at various venues in February. This timing gives us opportunities to organize additional educational activities with local colleges and schools when they are in session.

While San Jose has a sleepy feel, the festival has an urban street vibe that involves a lot of dancing. Closing off city streets allowed us to program the types of music that encouraged dancing, and the asphalt was much better for dancing than the grass in Plaza de Cesar Chavez. The dancing has in turn made the music more diverse. It’s now about 20 percent jazz; the rest is salsa blues, rhythm and blues, big band, youth groups, Latin jazz, funk and soul.

Each year we have added one or two stages, encouraged by the attendance and our desire to expand the types of musical offerings. In 2008, 18 years after we started, we decided that we could not afford to throw this big party without charging money. So we got the rules changed for downtown parks and charged $5. The price has increased to $25 this year—still modest compared to similar events. Each time we raised our prices, we lost about 10 percent of our audience. But the income grew, so we could increase artist fees, and the sophistication of the audience grew with the diversity of the music and the increases in the stature of the artists that we were able to program.

The San Jose Jazz Summer Fest, as it is now called, draws fans and musicians from around the world. It is almost an unstoppable mix of good times and opportunities to find new, younger (or older) but not established artists. The few headliners draw crowds of course, but the mix encourages exploration of geography and talent.

As the organization has grown, so has our desire to program free music in the community throughout the year. We now routinely work with clubs and restaurants to help them find talent, consult with others free of charge, and program a few shows when we can. Over the course of the year this amounts to over 100 mostly free performances. Our staff is very small, with just two full-time people, and three other year-round staff members, so our ability to build more connections is limited by the number of staff members we have.

On the other hand, if we had more money, we might not have been able to maintain our community feel for a quarter century.

The post The Happy Accident of San Jose Jazz appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

You heard it here first: The next bubble to burst in California, perhaps even before Silicon Valley and real estate, just might be the festival bubble.

The festival economy is growing so fast that it runs the risk of overheating. Even after expanding from one weekend to two in 2012, and increasing capacity this past year from 99,000 to 125,000, the Coachella Arts and Music Festival still managed to sell out in just three hours. Its cousin, Stagecoach, is the world’s biggest country music festival, welcoming up to 75,000 people each year over one weekend in Indio. Coachella and Stagecoach are even spawning spin-offs, like last fall’s Desert Trip (AKA “Oldchella”) and the massive new Arroyo Seco Weekend, headlined by Tom Petty, debuting later this month at the Rose Bowl.

And those are just the big-ticket festivals. This summer, Californians could spend every waking moment attending festivals—hundreds of regional events and thousands of community ones celebrating our arts, our foods, our cultural heritage, or some combination of all three—and still not get to all of them.

Festivals aren’t new here. Our state has shaped and been shaped by major festivals, from the Monterey International Pop Festival during the Summer of Love, to the 1996 Organic Festival in San Bernardino National Forest, which helped launch the rave scene. But today, festivals proliferate for very practical reasons: they match the promotional needs of so many California institutions and communities.

Festivals provide the ready-made audiences that our creative industries require to support artists and performers. Cash-strapped local governments see festivals as relatively cheap economic development tools for creating traffic around sales-tax-producing retail corridors. Major industries have found that festivals work better than conventions in attracting paying crowds. (Coachella has essentially become an entertainment industry bash for cutting deals and gaining status for the bottle service crowd).

Regional museums and cultural institutions use festivals to differentiate themselves, and attract tourists. No region has taken more advantage of a festival strategy than the Coachella Valley, which hosts dozens of major gatherings, from the big music weekends, to the Palm Springs International Film Festival, to the architecture-design-fashion events known collectively as Modernism Week, to the Indio International Tamale Festival.

There’s also a cultural fit between festivals and this era. Short attention spans require a constant mix of offerings. And given how hard it is to build any structure in California, the impermanence of festivals is attractive. Californians are turning away from established, brick-and-mortar institutions in favor of pop-up food and social events. Festivals are happenings designed to be photographed, hashtagged, geotagged, and shared in order to produce the maximum amount of FOMO among one’s friends and followers, who won’t get their own chance to attend.

All of which makes festivals both red-hot—and vulnerable. Visiting such events around the state, I keep hearing organizers ask: How much longer before the bubble pops? Will the crowds still have the cash for $5 bottles of water if the state’s other bubbles, from housing to technology, burst? Will they tire of waiting in long lines? In an era of skyrocketing land values, will open spaces hosting these festivals eventually find it more lucrative to house something permanent?

A shakeout may be underway, at least among bigger musical festivals. With so many successful festivals seeking to book the same performers, fees go up, and so do ticket prices. How much can the market bear? Major festivals in the United Kingdom (widely considered the global leader in musical gatherings) and in places from Oregon (Sasquatch!) to Tennessee (Bonnaroo) have seen attendance decline and experienced difficulty in securing headliners. Perhaps the biggest harbinger of a festival problem was the colossal disaster of this year’s Fyre Festival in the Bahamas, which sold tickets costing $1,500 to $12,000 and delivered a grand total of zero performances to a hugely disgruntled audience.

Corporate consolidation is another factor to watch. Many of the bigger music and arts festivals are owned by just a couple of companies, making them vulnerable to economic winds. One of those companies is Goldenvoice, which is responsible for Coachella, Stagecoach, and Pasadena’s new Arroyo Seco Weekend. Goldenvoice producer Paul Tollett mused to The New Yorker recently about threats to Coachella from terrorism to botulism to “fake news.”

“There are big ships that go down over small things. You’re riding high, but one wrong thing and you’re voted off the island. It’s scary,” Tollett said.

Don’t forget the Listerine: Jerry Hernandez wears a garlic-shaped hat as he listens to a live band at the Gilroy Garlic Festival in Gilroy, Calif. on July 24, 2004. Photo by Marcio Jose Sanchez/Associated Press.

When the shakeout comes to California, which festivals will endure? The fastest-growing events are mid-sized or boutique gatherings that allow people to immerse themselves in a very particular world for a time.

Among these are the High Sierra Music Festival, a family-friendly gathering (entertainment includes a morning kickball game) in tiny Quincy in Plumas County, and Desert Hearts, an electronic music gathering at the Los Coyotes Indian Reservation east of Temecula. The West Coast “transformational” festival scene—a movement that produces hippie parties with lots of costuming—is strong in California; its crown jewel festival, Lightning in a Bottle, is in tiny Bradley in Monterey County.

The state’s best festivals may be small, but they also have a strong sense of place. No matter how many Googlers move into San Francisco from faraway places, it’s hard to imagine San Francisco street events like the How Weird Street Faire ever shutting down.

“In a more globalized ethos,” says Eamon Armstrong, California-based creative director of Everfest, which produces the Fest300 list of the world’s best festivals, “there’s a desire to create your own smaller communities and assert your own identity.”

California’s most enduring festivals have been careful to develop a deep web of ties to their local communities, so they are aiding their hometowns every day, not just one weekend a year. For example, the Monterey Jazz Festival, now in its 60th year, has a robust education program that includes a student festival and summer camp.

But when it comes to engagement, it’s hard to top the Gilroy Garlic Festival, famous for its garlic shakes and garlic cook-off. The event’s proceeds help support over 140 local nonprofits, creating an incredibly diverse array of supporters. It provides a venue for local musicians and performers. It relies on more than 4,000 community volunteers. High school students often complete their community service requirements by working at the festival, and young women compete to win a college scholarship in the Miss Gilroy Garlic Festival Queen Pageant.

Sure, you could have seen Lady Gaga at Coachella this year. But she’s also playing L.A., San Francisco, and Sacramento in August alone. The only place you can find that much garlic is in Gilroy. And the taste lingers.

The post What California Festivals Need–More Garlic, Less Gaga appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

If Coachella isn’t your bag, there is a festival somewhere in the country for every interest—classical music at the Spoleto USA Festival in Charleston, South Carolina; paintings that come to life at the Pageant of the Masters in Laguna Beach, California; all the Bard you can consume at the Oregon Shakespeare Festival, just to name a few. In advance of the Zócalo/James Irvine Foundation event “Do Arts and Music Festivals Matter?”, we asked a panel of experts: What does the popularity of music and arts festivals say about the ways Americans are experiencing art now?

The post What’s So Great About Coachella? appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.