Fans of the arts counter culture are currently pulling up their tent stakes, hopping in their minivans and leaving the Burning Man far behind. The week long festival, located 120 miles outside of Reno Nevada, has become the preeminent counterculture, alternative-arts fair experience. It started back in 1986, when a San Franciso Bay Area artist named Larry Harvey built and cremated an eight-foot-tall effigy of a man on Baker Beach. The concept caught fire and over the years Burning Man has become a symbol for anti-consumerism, the power of communal living and perhaps most importantly, anarchic artistic freedom. As the crowds of people grew, so did the Man, and now Harvey's simple effigy has grown to a 40 foot wood and neon chimera.

Concerns about crowding and fire forced the festival out of San Francisco and into the wide-open spaces. Visitors set up camps, creating an instant artistic village where money is mostly verboten. People barter for food, water, heat or air conditioning. (Remember this is the desert where temperatures can rise as high as 40 degrees Celsius at high noon and plummet to freezing at night.) Regardless of what they're trading, the festival has one primary focus, revolutionary art. The New York Times describes it: "On a walk across the desert fairgrounds (called "the playa"), a casual visitor might encounter anything from a school of neon fish suspended by wire on the heads of a dozen bicyclists to a 50-foot-long mechanical dragon replete with fire-breathing skills and with a New Orleans brass band playing "You Are My Sunshine" inside its metal gut. Turn the other way, and you may find yourself facing a satyr, an angel or maybe just another naked person. Elsewhere cars with complete cocktail lounges mounted on their frames zipped across the desert plain and an R.V. outfitted with a pair of 15-foot Tesla coils spit tendrils of lightning into the air."

Gee I wish we'd have something like that up here in Canada. A friend of mine attended last year and the tales he spun where worthy of a campfire. Do you think Canadians would embrace something like Burning Man or is it too counterculture? What do you think? Or better yet, do you know of anything Canadian that already possesses a similar spirit?