EXTREME Environmentalism

Hey Everyone. Oops! I'm a little late on this blog. It's been a long day organizing text, bios, and pictures for the website, talking on the phone......I think you get the picture. If you will remember from my first blog entry I was talking about how there were many important aspects of the events we produce and that music was only one part of the whole picture. Some people think we just throw cool parties. While these events are parties, they are really more of a social experiment designed to make you think about alot of different things. To myself and my partners, the most important part of what we try to convey at our events is the concept of extreme environmentalism. I'm not talking about putting spikes in Redwood trees to stop loggers. That's dangerous and I do not condone anything that puts people in harms way. If you read all The Silo flyers you will see a section that starts by saying " this ia a leave no trace event based on the environmental concepts of Burning Man". Burning Man is many different things but its main concept is that of you take out what you pack in. You leave absolutely no trace of the fact you were even there in the first place. No cigarette butts, boa feathers, bottle caps, etc. If you burn the wood you make your themecamp with, you take that out with you. If you build a shower there, they even make you take the dirty shower water with you. If you need power for your camp, they ask that you consider the greenest possible power sources such as solar power and bio-diesel for generators. This is extreme environmentalism. We should always strive to recycle as much of the things we use as possible. While recycling aluminum, glass, paper, cardboard, and #1 and #2 plastics is good, it simply is just the starting point. We should also go to special recycling centers with our #3 thru #7 plastics, batteries, paint, used oils, electronic components, styrofoam and more. While this is more work than the average person would like to do, it is also the morally right thing to do. We should try to make the garbage truck business obsolete, make composte piles and reduce the amount of things we recycle in the first place. A good example is when you go to a store and buy one, two, or three items. You carried them to the checkout. You can also carry them to your car. Refuse that plastic bag the checkout person puts your purchase in. Bring your own cloth bag to the store so you don't have to use the stores paper or plastic bags. There should be a law the forbids putting one item in a plastic bag. YOU DONT NEED THE BAG! Why should you get a bag for your six pack when it already has a handle on it? Its easier to use the handle anyway. All this leads me to ask all attendees of Grotto to practice these concepts while you are at both Longhorn Caverns and Inks Lake State Parks. If you see recycling bins at these parks, use them. If you don't see them, look for them. If you can't find them, ask where they are. If nobody knows where they are, pack your recyclables and trash out. If you smoke, consider bringing a small altoids tin to put your butts in so you can pack them out. For smokers we will have some interactive asstrays all over the area. No, I didn't misspell that. We will cut up some doll bodies, paint them uv, stick them on a pole stand, and face their butts toward whatever direction you come from. Put your butts in their butts. And for you smokers, remember that smoking in the cave is forbidden. Don't touch the walls of the cave as you might stop the growth of the cave with the oils on your hands. Respect these two beautiful parks and you will leave feeling and knowing you have done the morally correct thing. You've just become an extreme environmentalist. With that said, I'm The Matt Man signing off.

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