Burn Rate

Desperate for cash, the organizers of Burning Man are auctioning art to stay afloat another two months, according to Billboard.

The event operator has partnered with Sotheby's to sell 100 works of art, so it doesn't go under before it can begin to sell tickets for its 2022 event. Prices for the art reach into the tens of thousands of dollars.

Burning Man, which normally attracts 70 thousand attendees and generates $43 million in registration fees, has cancelled its annual event two years in a row. CEO Marian Goodell told Billboard his company was in "dire straits."

Will other event organizers follow suit?

Talk about a fire sale!

Happiness is a Warm Brush

Happiness lies in the joy of achievement and
the thrill of creative effort.

— Franklin D. Roosevelt

On Saturday, I had the distinct pleasure of painting en plein air outside the studio of N.C. Wyeth in Chadds Ford, Pennsylvania, under the guidance of my realism teacher, Randall Graham.

Initial charcoal sketch

The afternoon was warm, the autumn sunlight lemony. 

I found that to bathe in that warmth and light and in all those Wyeth-family vibes in the air inspired me to paint freely and loosely—even though the results are highly questionable (another of my teachers found the following day innumerable faults in Pumpkin on Boulder, all clearly on display to a knowing eye like hers).

The painting aside, my memories of Saturday will last me a long, long time, because I was swept up for five hours in the wellspring of happiness, flow.

I recently asked Delaware painter Lena Moaney why she paints and her reply was immediate: "I paint to relax. When I paint, nothing else in the world matters to me. I’m using my full imagination and all my skills in the moment."

That puts it nicely.

Happiness is a warm brush. 

Above: Pumpkin on Boulder. Oil on canvas. 18 x 12 inches.

Villany vs. Stupidity

You have attributed conditions to villainy
that simply result from stupidity.

— Robert A. Heinlein

As we sail toward Columbus Day, Madrid's “Trumpista” president Isabel Díaz Ayuso took advantage of an interview in New York this week to bash Critical Race Theory.

Díaz Ayuso warned that the theory is a "revisionist, dangerous, and pernicious" ideology that will lead to "cultural regression." 

She also lambasted the Indigenous movement, calling it a "dangerous current of communism" and an "attack against Spain." 

Díaz Ayuso called New York's recent decision to rename Columbus Day (now Indigenous People's Day) "fatal."

"Why are we revising the history of Spain in America," she asked, "when all it did was bring universities, civilization, and the West to the American continent?"

Her remarks echo Steve Bannon's 2014 Vatican remarks, in which he described Europe's past exploits as the foundation of a "civilization that really is the flower of mankind"

The day after the interview, Díaz Ayuso denounced Pope Francis for apologizing for the Catholic Church's support of the conquistadors.

Why vilify Spain, she asks, when the conquistadors merely made a few mistakes?

Robber Barrens

Two centuries before Tony Soprano, New Jersey's Pine Barrens—a million acres of coastal woodlands—harbored gangsters during the American Revolution. 

Known as banditti, they used the desolate woodlands as a base of operations, from which they robbed citizens' homes and smuggled contraband into and out of New York City, in open defiance of the Patriots fighting to separate the colonies from England.

The roughest and toughest of the banditti was John Bacon.

A shingle-maker by trade, Bacon began raiding the homes of Patriots in Forked River in the summer of 1780, carrying off everything of value that he and his men could find. In December of that year, Bacon upped the ante when he shot and killed a Patriot militia officer in Tom's River, as the soldier tried to arrest him.

Bacon's reputation as a robber blossomed a year later, thanks to an incident that became known as the “Skirmish at Manahawkin.”

When it learned he was leading a raiding party in the area, a group of local militiamen assembled to ambush Bacon at a Manahawkin crossroads. But when Bacon didn't materialize by 3 am, the militiamen retired to a tavern to get drunk. Bacon's party arrived at daybreak and shot and killed one of the militiamen as he fled the tavern. 

Bacon was indicted for high treason, as a result; but that didn't deter him. He continued raiding homes the Barnegat Bay area throughout 1782, "taking whatever he wanted—money, food, and clothing—at the muzzle of a musket or point of a bayonet," a one historian has written.

In October that year, Bacon perpetrated the "Massacre of Long Beach Island," during which he used bayonets to kill or wound 21 Patriots from Cape May, as they salvaged boxes of tea from a derelict British ship.

New Jersey's governor then put a £50 bounty on Bacon's head.

Hoping to earn the bounty, a Burlington County group of militiamen set out in search of Bacon on Christmas Day, but were waylaid by his band at Cedar Bridge, where two were killed and another wounded.

Two months later, the Revolutionary war ended. Most New Jersey bandits fled the Pine Barrens for New York City, but Bacon, fearing arrest, remained behind. 

That was a mistake. 

In April 1783, the same bounty hunters he bushwhacked at Cedar Bridge found Bacon in a tavern in Tuckertown, and executed him on the spot. The governor awarded the killers the bounty.

John Bacon was the last man to die in the Revolutionary War.

This Bird

In a recent op-ed in The Washington Post, Tufts poli-sci professor Daniel Drezner justified his attendance of an in-person conference that will take place this weekend by claiming it will allow him "to see old friends, but also to meet new colleagues."

Despite the health risks posed by attending, Drezner wrote, "my benefits far exceed my risks."

Five thousand of Drezner's colleagues disagree. 

The conference he will attend normally attracts 7,500 attendees. But only 2,500 poli-sci professors have registered—and many are cancelling, as opening day approaches.

Live event organizers in every field ought to take notice: poli-sci professors represent the canary in the coal mine.

When two of three customers drop you overnight, it's time to question your value proposition. It's time to stop acting like an ostrich.

Poli-sci professors, after all, aren't fools: they're experts in risk-benefit analysis. And two of three have rendered their judgement: the conference simply isn't compelling enough to ignore the dangers.

Birds of a feather flock together.

This bird has flown.

If the value you provide isn't compelling, yours will, too.