Who Am I ?

Hello, I'm The Matt Man. Some people call me Dimensional Matt, some call me Matt of Dimensional, yet some call me....., wait a minute, lets not go there. Now that you know what to call me, you might ask who is this guy. If you look at my blog picture here, most of you that have attended events at The Silo will recognize me as the guy that's always wearing that loud blacklight tuxedo with the blacklight owl t-shirt. I have Terry B's wife Marilyn to thank for that. I was in need of a new costume for the event called Fuego but didn't have enough time to make one. In stepped Marilyn with a $30.00 Al's Formal Wear reject tux and 4 or 5 cans of Krylon uv spray paint and a short time later I had a new costume. The Owl t-shirt is super special too. It was made by a guy named Fred that I met at The Enchanted Forest during Art Outside in 2006. I've met many tie die artists since I bought this shirt and in talking to them I realized that I had another truly special piece of clothing. As it turns out, none of them can figure out how he was able to tie die such an elaborate image. I've even been stopped on the street in Austin on many occasions while wearing this shirt and have been asked if I'm wearing a"Fred". Wow! Unfortunately, we will never know how he made it as Fred passed away a mere six months after I bought the Owl shirt at the young age of 44. Its because of these two special people that you don't see me wearing different costumes like other people do. Someday I will wear other outfits, but for now, this is who I am. But this doesn't really tell the story of who I am. It merely tells you what I wear at The Silo and other events. So, who or what am I ? I first started out as a mobile dj in a year that won't be discussed here. I then quickly invented the concept of the mobile vj so that I could stand out from all the other djs out there. I continued on this path for many years, but still that was not enough. Then in 1989 intelligent lighting was born. With a big bank loan I bought a large inventory and embarked on a journey that eventually made me stop dj/vjing. I was getting all these cool lighting gigs and life was lots of fun until 1995. That's when some people from a group called The Purrin Lion called and said they had heard of my light shows and that they wanted me to light their next rave called Larga. Over the next 6 years I did sound and lighting for more raves than probably all of my competition in Texas combined. Some called me the rave God of Texas. While these six years were lots of fun I still knew my life was not complete. Then in 2001, my good friend Marc Z and I attended our first Burning Man festival. My life changed completely after Burning Man 2001. I then realized it wasn't music that was important. What was important was people, music, bizarre art, performance art, costuming, and EXTREME environmentalism. Now I anxiously wait till the time comes to go back to Black Rock City for that one glorious week of fun on The Playa. Burning Man is my true home. Houston is just this place I live the other 51 weeks of the year. I find it interesting that since the death of the rave scene (thank God for that) in 2001 that something would come along and replace it so fast. I've been going to Burning Man every year since and I now consider myself a lifer. In 2006 I started producing small burn events with my good friends Kelly Hertz and his wife Sun On Water at the SDC warehouse. In 2007 we found The Silo and things jumped up to a much higher level. The same year we built our first off site large theme camp at Flipside called Giza. Three months later we were building the same theme camp at Burning Man for my friend Vatra(San Fran) and his troop The Pyronauts. You can view photos of these camps and others in the photo gallery in this site. 2008 brought the events Fuego, Sculpture, and Tribute to The Silo. Then Hurricane Ike struck and temporarily halted events there. But we will return to The Silo as soon as some repairs have been made. We have to. I already have 4 more events planned for The Silo of which the first one will be called Media. Media will top everything that came before it. But in the meantime, I had to get away from everything and, get myself clean and rediscover myself. So in January of this year I took off to Chiapas Mexico for a visit to the Mayan ruins of Palenque with my two oldest friends David and Kevin. There I had an epiphany. I knew I had to start doing things in a more dramatic way and that those things would have to be all over Texas. That brings me to introduce my best effort yet. Its called Grotto and will be held at Longhorn Caverns and Inks Lake State Parks during the last weekend of February 2009. More on Grotto in my next and only the second blog I have ever written. Tune in again Monday evening for that story. Signing off, The Matt Man