Alan Menken, a famous Composer, Actor, and Artist, was born on July 22,1949 in New Rochelle, New York. Alan received a taste of the music life from the start, his mother, Judy Menken, was a young actress/playwright and his father, Norman Menken, DDS, was a piano playing dentist (Biography Comments 1). His whole family loved Broadway musicals and they spent many nights together just listening to his father play piano, Alan once said, “I showed an interest in piano at a very young age, but I hated to practice, so when my parents left the room I 'd make up my own version of the piece. That 's how I started composing” (The Whole New World of Alan Menken 1). Menken lived a very happy and prosperous childhood at home with his sisters Faye and Leah until 1966 when he moved out to attend college. He attended New York University’s College of Arts and Sciences with a Musicology degree, and was admitted into the BMI Musical Theater Workshop, where he wrote small musicals for them but would also sneak away to the piano room and compose songs that he kept to himself. In 1968 he wrote his first musical, Separate Ways, for NYU. (Biography Comments 1). When Menken graduated from NYU, he wrote a few musicals for The Downtown Ballet Company that were not very successful, but he considers it one of the best moments of his life because it is where he met a ballet dancer who eventually became his wife of forty-four years, Janis Roswick. Still working for the Musical Theater Workshop, Menken
From “The Other America,” in Major Problems by Michael Harrington is a document that tells of the poverty present in America that is often skillfully and unintentionally concealed and also speaks of Lyndon Johnson’s war on poverty and briefly of how poverty rose during the Reagan administration. After Johnson’s declaration of war on poverty, there was significant change regarding the climate of the social, economic, and political in the America of those times. And while Johnson’s countless social programs helped decrease poverty immensely, it also left a huge number drowning in it still. Later Reagan’s administration would cite George Gilder on the fact that welfare did not reduce poverty but increase it to explain why the levels of poverty rose during the first few months of Reagan’s administration. Democrats and liberals would argue against this and say that poverty
If technology is the only thing people are going to use in the future, the world will revolve around it and the government will gain control. Characters in the book Brave New World by Aldous Huxley are being controlled by the government without knowing it. The government believes that the people should be acting like robots in the future. Technology has taken over the people and the government is using it to their advantage. By having the people obey the government and thinking they are superior to the people, they do not have to worry about anyone trying to leave the Reservation. They use different tactics to have them able to be cajoling the people when they are children,
Jared Diamond is a world renowned scientist, author, Pulitzer Prize winner, and currently a geography professor at UCLA. Of his six books published, we will be looking at the last chapter of his fourth book, Collapse: How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed. In this book Diamond utilizes the comparative method to find resemblance in past societal collapses with our current society. In the chapter entitled, "The World as Polder: What Does it Mean to Us Today," Diamond points out that there are indeed many parallels between past and present societies and that our modern day society is currently on a path of self destruction , through examples such as globalization and the interdependency of each country.
Do you think fear can kill? “For the record, prejudices can kill and suspicion can destroy, and a thoughtless, frightened search for a scapegoat has a fallout all its own - for the children and the children yet unborn. And the pity of it is that these things cannot be confined to The Twilight Zone” (“Rod”). In 1959, one of the most popular television series was The Twilight Zone, wrote and produced by Rod Serling. The series includes many tales and adventures that are very thought provoking. The Twilight Zone highlights the tragedies during the 1950’s, specifically in the episode, “The Monsters are Due on Maple Street”. The Twilight Zone contains five seasons but only thirty-six of the episodes were during the 1950’s and 1960’s, and were based on fear and catastrophe. The later episodes of the 1960’s reflected the catastrophes in the 1950’s. In The Twilight Zone episode, “The Monsters are Due on Maple Street”, the events display tragedies of the 1950’s, like the Red Scare, McCarthyism, and the Space Race.
In the world of sex, drugs, and baby cloning you are going to be in many situations where you feel like the world we live in should be different. In the story Brave New World, they had sex with multiple partners along with a very bad use of drugs.
“And that," put in the Director sententiously, "that is the secret of happiness and virtue — liking what you 've got to do. All conditioning aims at that: making people like their unescapable social destiny.”
In Aldous Huxley’s “Brave New World,” there is a forceful religious connotation. Huxley’s uses of biblical allusions emphasize the inborn necessity of spiritual belief, in even the most neutral society. By assimilating religious references into the population, specific characters, and science, he successfully illustrates the absolute need for the religion in any society
Imagine a clear summer night, gazing up at the stars when all of a sudden something goes zooming across the sky. A shooting star perhaps or could it be something more. This is how “Monsters are Due on Maple Street” begins and ends, with the unknown. Now, there is no evidence to prove or disprove the existence of alien life forms, but one young boy puts doubt into the minds of everyone on Maple Street. The fear, paranoia, and suspicion the characters’ experience is directly related to real-life events that took place in the nineteen-fifties.
Women and men are different in many aspects from today, than in Brave New World. Some things that happen occur today, and others are unethical and do not. The author shows that men and women are classified as being the same, but have certain rules and boundaries. For example, having feelings for someone you’re sexually active with is bad, when we all know, today women and men normally gain feelings regardless. As far as having sex goes they don’t affiliate that with reproducing. They just do it like it’s a sport or their favorite past time. And they reproduce human beings by using what they call the Bokanvosky Process. Woman weren’t presented in the positive way that they should be.
In the book Brave New World, by Aldous Huxley, the character John the Savage is brought from his homeland of Malpais to London. When he arrives he finds that this world is very different from his own. Saddened and angered by the injustice of the society, he attempts to isolate himself from the world. John the Savage’s experience of being exiled from Malpais was enriching in that it showed him the true nature of the Other Place and alienating in that he was separated from his culture and not able to integrate into the new one. This illuminates the meaning of the work in that it shows the negative side of the “utopian” society.
Usually in high school or even in real world events, if one doesn’t fall into the social norms of their peers, they become socially excluded from social events. In most cases, people in high school could agree with this statement. If one doesn’t dress the way people dress, socialize the way they do, and even act the way their peers do, not only would they be excluded from any social life but they would also feel very lonely. In the story Brave New World by Aldous Huxley, one could compare Bernard Marx to the lonely kid at school who feels isolated and criticized by his peers. Bernard 's physique and high level of status makes him feel so out of place and insecure. On Pg.67, Huxley describes him in a way that gives us an insight on how
Why are the people of the World State discouraged from having close relationships and families? In the Brave New World, by Aldous Huxley, Huxley creates a world where it can be seen as both a utopic and a dystopic state. The story is placed in the World State, where the government controls the majority of the planets population. The government, controlled by ten World Controllers, mass produces people in tubes into five different castes. At the top the social class, there are the Alphas, who are intellectually superior and have individual traits. Next are the Betas, who are moderately intelligent; therefore, their positions require less thinking. After the Betas come the Gammas; they are semi-skilled workers and experts at repetitive tasks. After the Gammas come the Deltas; they are unskilled workers that lack individuality and tend to common jobs. The lowest group in the social class are the Epsilons; they have undesirable jobs with no intelligence and have a lack of individuality. Mustapha Mond, the World Controller of Western Europe, controls his people through the usage of soma, a drug to escape sadness, embarrassment, and discomfort, hypnopaedia, a sleep-learning method, and the conditioning of babies with electrical shocks soon after their birth. While the government allows and advocates open sex, they refuse people from forming a close relationship with one partner. Emotions are portrayed to show weakness. The idea of forming relationships and families in the World
Aldous Huxley’s utopia in Brave New World foreshadowed and illuminated the complications within modern day society. Upon its release, the narrative became widely banned all over the United States due to the unorthodox thoughts and actions of multiple characters in it. Early readers, as well as modern day audiences, feared and rejected the ideals that Huxley incorporated into his perfect society; however, our society today is heading towards the dark paths the older generations desired to avoid.
seven. They could have had twice as much blood from me…” (117). That is a line from John that emphasizes the desire that John has to prove his worth to his fellow companions who ostracize him because of his appearance.
David Foster Wallace’s short story “Good People” uses the themes of division, isolation, and loneliness to suggest how communication can overcomes these psychological problems. These themes, prominent in the story of a young couple struggling with how to react to an unwanted pregnancy, are present in many of Wallace’s stories, and come from his own struggles and literary influences.