Burning Man, an annual event set during the week before Labor Day in the vast Nevada desert, started off small in 1986 as a celebration of the summer solstice. Since its inception as an exploration of a hybrid of modern life and ancient rituals, Burning Man has transformed into a massive, pseudo-utopian haven for all types of creative expression. With Burning Man’s explosion in popularity among almost every facet of the counter-culture movement, the festival has grown from a small group of like-minded people gathering together in the dessert to a full-blown event, akin in scale to Woodstock. This paper will explore the origins of Burning Man, the festival’s transition to its current state, and if the original ideals behind Burning Man can still prevail on such a massive scale.
Burning Man was envisioned by Larry Harvey and Jerry James in San Francisco as a sort of spiritual cleansing event revolving around the burning of personal mementos and souvenirs from the past, along with a human-sized figure made from scrap wood. The organizers refer to it as an "experiment" and describe its aim as "radical self-expression." The idea that you can reinvent yourself at will is a modern notion; in its postmodernism, Burning Man proceeds from the idea that you were invented to begin with. Any personal characteristic sexual bent, character trait, religious belief is only a choice away from being something totally different. With support from The San Francisco Cacophony Society, the Burning Man crowd swelled to 800 and the signature burning ‘man’ grew to 40 feet in just four years. As the festival continued to grow, it was moved to Black Rock City, Nevada, where it currently resides.
The event was conceived from the notion that bohemians hav...
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...al of putting meaningful items inside the man before the burning. The burning cleanses the mind and lifts the weight from the body. But many believe that the popularity of this meaningful annual gathering is becoming tainted due to all of the mediocracy and global broadcasting of the once sacred utopia. Alicia Ludena states In Search of the Postmodern, “Postmodern theorists, however, claim that in the contemporary high tech media society, emergent processes of change and transformation are producing a new postmodern society”(Ludena).
Works Cited
http://www.burningman.com/whatisburningman/lectures/la_vie.html
Harvey, Larry, LA VIE BOHÉME — A History of Burning Man February 24, 2000.
Ludena, Alicia In Search of the Postmodern http://mural.uv.es/alulla/charact.html
Poschardt, Ulf. DJ Culture. Trans. Shaun Whiteside. London: Quartet Books Ltd. 1998. 393
Displaying a constructed view of predominately historical European culture, the Arizona Renaissance Festival loosely follows the format of nineteenth-century World’s fair’s midways. The festival is a fair that spreads over thirty acres with booths that sell goods, food and hold games of skill. The festival has eight stages which are the central focus for entertainment. The Arizona Renaissance Festival’s re-production of Europe’s culture and society of the past imparts nominal educational benefits. The festival’s central goal is entertainment and revenue. The participant is removed from the everyday and is placed in an alternate culture where knights, pirates, fairies and belly dancers exist together, generating a fantasy world. The Arizona Renaissance Festival does not have a specific area dedicated to Middle Eastern culture. The entire festival is a journe...
......” (Flash Art online). This enraged animal rights groups such as the RSPCA, and was intended to confront and shock the viewers with “revolting situations” (Mirror/Arse Exhibition), including footage of Parr slicing his arm with a blade, holding his hand over a flame, and vomiting blue dye. This emphasis on shock tactics is central to Postmodernism, and many, but not all, Postmodern works intend to confront the viewer and provoke a strong reaction.
As civilization advances, most of the people in society are uplifted by the development made. In a thousand years, we went from an agricultural society to an industrial one, and we are rapidly entering the digital age. But inevitably, there are people whom civilization has abandoned and exploited in order to advance this far. In his poem, “Halloween in the Anthropocene, 2015”, Craig Santos Perez dispels the preconceptions we hold about our society and reveals the horrors that we have either suppressed or neglected. He uses the Halloween scene to reveal how we have taken the atrocities that mankind has afflicted and relinquished. Through figurative language, imagery, and repetition, Perez
Fire has become less a means of human survival and more of a form of entertainment. This world of shallow hedonistic people strives to be the same and the word “intelligence” is considered a dirty word. This society maintains a focus on a certain equality, where people born unequal made equal. Funerals for the dead are eliminated due to the sadness they bring and death is forgotten about quickly, with bodies being incinerated without a proper ceremony. Fire is idolized by this society and is considered the means to cleanliness.
Burns is a post-apocalyptic story when survivors need being again and link together to create a new society. The greatest common cultural icon used is the popular episode “Cape Feare” from the Simpsons. This gloomy comedy pushes us nearly a century, following a new society tripping into the future. “In Mr. Burns the episode from The Simpsons becomes the dominant character. Most plays are about people who experience challenges, and who develop towards the end of the play changing by the events that have taken place. Saying that, its not hard to believe a story can experience great challenges too. “Stories unite us, reminds us who we are and who we want to be. Stories keep our past alive” Mr. Burns delivers us with a brilliant opportunity to think about things that keep us human, in the extreme wisdom of the word, as we move forward into a progressively erratic future (Mr. Burns pamphlet Lab
Bradbury first depicted fire as a hurtful force through Montag, a fireman, who burn books. With the converted mentality of his culture, “it was [Montag’s] pleasure to burn. It was a special pleasure to see things eaten, to see things blackened and changed” (3). Montag’s culture sees burning as an enjoyment; however, the fire portrayed here demonstrates the destruction of knowledge and personality. While Montag’s profession brings him joy he does not understand that burning is the most permanent form of destruction. He is oblivious to his governments’ strong desire to eliminate the ideas and knowledge that books hold. In this society, where ignorance is bliss and their phobia of unhappiness controls all aspects of life, people believe that their destructive fire “is bright and…clean”, as it is used as a means to keep themselves oblivious and happy (60). In addition, Bradbury establishes the difference in the symbolisms of fire by naming part one of his novel “The Hearth and the Salamander”. The hearth is the fireplace of the home and is the most positive image of fire. This fire contributes warmth and restores relationships between people. The salamander, the symbol of the firemen, and who personify fire’s destruction is contrasted with the hearth, which represents restoration.
In the summer of 1969, a music festival called, “Woodstock”, took place for three straight days in Upstate, New York, with thirty-two musical acts playing, and 500,000 people from around the world coming to join this musical, peaceful movement. Woodstock started out being a small concert, created to locally promote peace in the world, by the power of music and its lyrics. Now, Woodstock is still being celebrated over 40 years later. The chaotic political climate that the ‘baby boomers’ were growing up in is most likely the reason for this event becoming of such an importance to the world. The violence of the Vietnam War, protests at Kent State and the Democratic Convention, and the assassinations contributed to an ‘out of control’ world. The fact that so many people came to Woodstock and were able to latch onto the ideals of peace, love, and community became a wonderful, joyous symbol to this generation. This three day music festival represented the ideal for baby boomers during a chaotic political time.
The postmodern cinema emerged in the 80s and 90s as a powerfully creative force in Hollywood film-making, helping to form the historic convergence of technology, media culture and consumerism. Departing from the modernist cultural tradition grounded in the faith in historical progress, the norms of industrial society and the Enlightenment, the postmodern film is defined by its disjointed narratives, images of chaos, random violence, a dark view of the human state, death of the hero and the emphasis on technique over content. The postmodernist film accomplishes that by acquiring forms and styles from the traditional methods and mixing them together or decorating them. Thus, the postmodern film challenges the “modern” and the modernist cinema along with its inclinations. It also attempts to transform the mainstream conventions of characterization, narrative and suppresses the audience suspension of disbelief. The postmodern cinema often rejects modernist conventions by manipulating and maneuvering with conventions such as space, time and story-telling. Furthermore, it rejects the traditional “grand-narratives” and totalizing forms such as war, history, love and utopian visions of reality. Instead, it is heavily aimed to create constructed fictions and subjective idealisms.
In 1969 at Bethel, New York, the Woodstock Music and Art Fair was 3 day event that was all about peace, love, music, and partying. It was a historic event that changed what was known back then as the “hippie movement”. At Woodstock there were many influential artists that performed at this huge event. It was a popular festival that led the later generations to embrace the sentiment and mood of what Woodstock came to represent. People didn’t realize (until later) how historic Woodstock really was. Woodstock was actually supposed to be a simple small event that would have around a only expected to have 5,000 people attend. It surpassed all expectations by having nearly 500,000 people attend. In the end it actually become a
At a time of social reflection, with America reacting to war in Southeast Asia, the assassinations of President John F. Kennedy (1963), his brother Senator Robert F. Kennedy (1968), and Martin Luther King Jr.(1968), the Apollo landing on the moon, and a culture of public demonstration, through Woodstock, the country was asked to question its attitudes toward drugs, sex, and the establishment. Was Woodstock simply a music festival or a sign of growing dissatisfaction with government and its policies? Even though the Woodstock festival was defined as three days of peace, love, and music, its effects upon American society could be felt for generations, influencing a nation’s attitudes and becoming a symbol of an age of change.
Envision a world that is so structured and censored that fireman exist not to fight fire but instead burn books. In Fahrenheit 451 this is the reality of the citizens that live in this time. In the book not many people realize that every story has a writer but think that it is just mindless words that mean absolutely nothing. Throughout the story books are looked at as dangerous, therefore, they burn every book they can get their hands on. Everyone in life is affected by media just like in Fahrenheit 451. Media tells them to just go along without questioning it such as books.
...“Some Common Themes and Ideas within the Field of Postmodern Thought: A handout for HIS 389,” last modified May 13,2013,
Ten years before Tarantino made Pulp Fiction, the academic and critic Frederic Jameson identified some of the key features of postmodernism, and debated whether these were a true departure from modernism, or just a continuation of the same rebellious themes. His paper on postmodernism tends towards the latter view, but at the same time prophetically pinpointed the essential departures that postmodernism has made from what has gone before. Tarantino’s film does not continue the debate in an academic way, but instead presents a virtuoso visual performance of the ideas that Jameson could only dimly perceive. These ideas include pastiche, a crisis in historicity and a blurring of the distinction between high culture and low culture.
Postmodernism attempts to call into question or challenge the notion of a single absolute unified master narrative without simply replacing it with another. It is a paradoxical, recursive, and problematic method of critique.
In Slaughterhouse-five, Kurt Vonnegut expresses the idea of Postmodernism through irony commenting on a Postmodernism belief of life being disillusioned and superficial. When Billy and the Americans are crossing the theater and about to watch the Cinderella, Billy touched the “stove”, and describes it as “cold” as “ice” (184). Vonnegut uses irony to describe the stage of the theater, because people usually associate stove as being hot and warm, but he used cold and ice to describe the temperature of the stove. The ironic descripition makes the whole set up of the theater seems disillusional, and due to the fact that theater is becoming more commonly seen during the mid-twentieth century, further demonstrates how Postmodernism perceives life