Summary
One year [at Burning Man] a guy came up to me crying, and he said, 'Why can I cry here when I don't cry in my own church?' Well, he's in the desert. His cell phone won't work. He's lost his keys. The ice chest is leaking all over the inside of his car. His girlfriend left him for someone in another camp. His mushrooms are bad. He's worn out.
[picks up pieces of scrap wood] When somebody puts this on the temple, they're not four pieces of scrap wood. They're four pieces of wood that have been cared about by Heidi or Will or Becky or [Maureen Garrett] or Jody or Tim. The temple crew has handled thousands of these sheets. They've had to count it and pack it and carry it and sort it and figure out what the hell I wanted to do with it. There's a whole lot of layers. They're putting it on because they know I've collected it for a year. They're putting it on because they know someone's son committed suicide and that person's going to come up. So they put these on nicely. That is how the temples got built.One says, "Hey Man, I want to put this on the car." It's a sign saying "Jesus loves you," and I'm like AAAACK! Not You can't put this on the car! We're going to make the Kingdom of God! [laughs] Remember, I'm not mellow.See the full content of this document
Extract
Sacred Junk
David Best turns discarded trash into ephemeral monuments to dreams, grief and memory
One winter day five years ago, junk artist David Best was rummaging inside a dumpster behind the B.C. Bones model dinosaur factory in Petaluma when he found a trove of what manufacturers call "drop" - the discards that remain after industrial processes. It was sheets of plywood, cut into skeletal frames and traceries, from which dinosaur bone shapes had been cut out by a computerized rotor. The repeating, filigreed patterns looked like slices of hollowed-out bones themselves, or crude wooden lace, or parts for a Moorish temple frieze, if spiders on LSD had designed Moorish temples."At first I didn't know what the hell to do with it," Best told me recently. "But what's neat about this stuff is that it's really user-friendly. If you have identica...See the full content of this document
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