Date: Thu, 5 Dec 2002 09:55:19 -0600 (CST)
From: Me
Reply-To: (old alternative list)
To: (old alternative list)
Subject: [(old list tag)] A "Heads Up" on a place I recommended before
Not sure, but I think that I might have mentioned a links page of mine here, some months back : "Burning Businesses in Chicago and Other Links"
webspace.webring.com/people/jg/green_tortoise_reviewer/green_tortoise/burning_man_links.html
(This is a new location. If you go to the old one over at Internet Trash,
(old url ommited, site has been deleted)
you'll find a notice mentioning the fact that I've relocated all of my Burning Man-related material off of it, citing recent censorship as a reason. The fact that the I.T. server has been down for as much as a month or two at a time didn't help, either).
Originally, I had recommended a place called "Burkhert Underground" on that page. Now, I wish I hadn't. Here's what happened.
Burkhert Underground is an open mike event, mostly music but with some fiction writing and poetry. Think very low budget : it meets in Burkert's basement, hence the name. It can be a much more social event than most such open mikes, with people gathering in the man's backyard or upstairs in his gallery between sets, depending on the weather. So far, it all seems good, especially if you're one of the performers, but toward the end of summer something that seemed a little disturbing happened, disturbing enough to make me retract that recommendation.
I came in late, to find one of the writers being yelled at by a red-faced Burkhert, who seemed unhappy about the fact that she had political literature on her, and that a political point of view had come out of her reading. That point of view was a Socialist one : she was a member of the Revolutionary Communist Party, apparently. Allegedly.
She remained calm as Burkhert screamed at her, at the top of his lungs, saying that she was saying "fuck you" to him (even as she denied this), going on a rant about how she wanted to steal his home from him (which she denied, pointing out that selling $ 5 tickets to an event in one's own basement hardly made him an oppressor of the working classes). Burkhert then threw her out.
I had always taken the good spirits that I had encountered at this event at face value, which may be a little naive, but it makes for a more relaxed evening. I went up to those who had witnessed the exchange, a minute or two after the lady's departure, and asked them what had just happened. They seemed more than a little nervous, and couldn't even seem to speak for themselves, about an incident that they had seen happen right in front of them. Not that they needed to, as I soon found that Burkert had been hovering just around the corner. He returned quickly, and told me what happened, instead of letting the (sort of) independent witnesses speak for themselves, and then told them what happened!
Huh? They were there. It's a little weird when people are being told what they saw by somebody who knows that they were there at the time. It's a lot weirder when they seem to not know what they saw, until the local authority figure (Burkhert) tells them. Yes, I know that there's a lot of that going around, but who needs to make a trip and pay a cover charge to see more of it?
You might not think much of the lady's politics, but with an open mike event open to writers, that should be beside the point. A writer, to do her job as well as she can, must not censor herself. If her writing is to be worth anything at all, her point of view has to come out of it, regardless of whether or not her point is one that somebody else cares for. One might strongly argue against her point of view. One might even, in an extreme case (a Nazi extolling the virtues of killing non-aryans) decide that the person needs to leave, so that the evening may be enjoyed. But one should not lose sight of the fact that we are diminished every time such an option is exercised, not as comfortable to speak as we were before, and with fewer ideas in front of us to consider, and so such an option should be exercised only with the greatest reluctance. Reluctance was not what was on display that night.
Some will say "it's the man's home, so he's entitled to set any rules he wishes". Yes, perhaps so, but it's also the right of others to choose to not attend, especially when the rules seem less than reasonable.
What those rules might be, seems to change from moment to moment.
Within minutes of his screaming rant regarding the evils of Socialism, Burkhert was already rewriting history, trying to claim that politics was not an issue, despite what he had been saying a few minutes earlier. He went off on some vague tangent about how he couldn't allow her to speak because what she was saying would set people against each other and he wanted to bring them together, and how he wouldn't let George Bush read there, either. "No politics, man". In which case, it's "no content, man", because it's hard to make a statement about life without it having any political implications.
The moral of this story is to never place too many of one's eggs in a single basket, no matter how nice that basket might look, because you never know when it might fall apart. Burkhert Underground has been seen by some as being a good place to meet people to do "Burning Man- type things" locally (and I've been one of them). But, censorship isn't any cooler when it comes from the right, relatively speaking, than when it comes from the left, especially if what one is looking for is a place where one can be oneself and be at ease.
I never did get the lady's version of events, as she was long gone by the time I got done talking with the witnesses I had first gone up to, but looking back I can see that I saw enough. I can not recommend this event.
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