JACK RABBIT SPEAKS A tall figure stands alone, waiting to be engulfed in flames. It is the Burning Man, the giant wooden centerpiece of Nevada's famous weeklong arts festival. Every year, thousands flock to the middle of the desert to push the limits of creativity and outrageousness. Dex Edden is not one of them. A computer programmer, Dex has come to the wild and wooly festival only to please his boss. Out of the blue, he will be a witness to murder....

"It is the only absolute desert in North America, a four-hundred-square-mile dry lake bed so desolate that nothing ever grows there. Vast and featureless, Nevada's Black Rock Desert defies visual measurement - much to the consternation of off-roaders who venture out onto this playa only to run out of gas before reaching the other side. It is the largest flat area on the continent, where the sound barrier was broken in a car. And it is a place of total...

"Writer-poet William L. Fox has spent much of his career contemplating the complex ways that landscape, human cognition, and history collide to create our perceptions and treatment of place. In Playa Works, Fox considers the West's emptiest spaces - the playas, or dry beds, of the ancient lakes that once filled much of the Great Basin. Among the flattest, most barren places on the planet, the West's playas have haunted the American imagination since...

"From vast mechanical creatures to mind-blowing pyrotechnics, the Burning Man Festival is the incubator of some of the most remarkable site-specific outdoor art ever made. With photography from NK Guy, this book documents 16 years of the festival's installations and happenings as models of participatory, collective, and uninhibited expression"--Back cover.

A collection of short films, slideshows and time-elapse films depicting events at the Burning Man Festivals of 1999, 2000, 2002, 2003, and 2004

In search of ritual: the burning man: Part art project and part primitive ritual, The Burning man, an event held annually in the Black Rock Desert, is documented in this segment. -- "The Reno cure" is a look at the divorce industry in Reno, from it's beginning at the turn of the century, through it's heyday in the 1930's to the present. -- "Last flight of the Sky Crane" is a look at the history of the military helicopter, know[n] as the Sky Crane...