Author Archives: legallysociable

Rioting over cultural works and ideas: Blackboard Jungle and Stravinsky’s Rite of Spring

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Even though I have heard multiple times about the groundbreaking 1955 movie Blackboard Jungle, I finally watched it recently. (Side note: watching the film without commercials on AMC was excellent. Watching movies on TV is often so frustrating as they drag it out.) After watching the movie (and noting how “inspiring teacher” movies of recent years seem to build upon this film), I read on Wikipedia about riots that took place when the movie was first shown in theaters:

The film markedthe rock and roll revolution by featuring Bill Haley & His Comets’ “Rock Around the Clock”, initially a B-side, over the film’s opening credits, as well as in the first scene, in an instrumental version in the middle of the film, and at the close of the movie, establishing that song as an instant classic. The record had been released the prior year, garnering tepid sales. But, popularized by its use in the film, “Rock Around the Clock” reached number one on the Billboard charts, and remained there for eight weeks. The music also led to a huge teenage audience for the film, and their exuberant response to it sometimes overflowed into violence and vandalism at screenings. In this sense, the film has been seen as marking the start of a period of visible teenage rebellion in the latter half of the 20th century.

The film markeda watershed in the United Kingdom. When shown at a South London Cinema in Elephant and Castle in 1956 the teenage teddy boy audience began to riot, tearing up seats and dancing in the aisles.[2] After that, riots took place around the country wherever the film was shown. In 2007, the Journal of Criminal Justice and Popular Culture published an article that analyzed the film’s connection to crime theories and juvenile delinquency.

This reminds me of the riots that accompanied the premieres of classical music, such as at the opening of Stravinsky’s “Rite of Spring” (and detailed in The Rest Is Noise – though this description comes from Wikipedia):

The première involved one of the most famous classical music riots in history. The intensely rhythmic score and primitive scenario and choreography shocked the audience that was accustomed to the elegant conventions of classical ballet.

The evening’s program began with another Stravinsky piece entitled “Les Sylphides.” This was followed by, “The Rite of Spring”. The complex music and violent dance steps depicting fertility rites first drew catcalls and whistles from the crowd. At the start, some members of the audience began to boo loudly. There were loud arguments in the audience between supporters and opponents of the work. These were soon followed by shouts and fistfights in the aisles. The unrest in the audience eventually degenerated into a riot. The Paris police arrived by intermission, but they restored only limited order. Chaos reigned for the remainder of the performance.[6] Stravinksy had called for a bassoon to play higher in its range than anyone else had ever done. Fellow composer Camille Saint-Saëns famously stormed out of the première allegedly infuriated over the misuse of the bassoon in the ballet’s opening bars (though Stravinsky later said “I do not know who invented the story that he was present at, but soon walked out of, the première.”). Stravinsky ran backstage, where Diaghilev was turning the lights on and off in an attempt to try to calm the audience.

After the première, Diaghilev is reported to have commented to Nijinsky and Stravinsky at dinner that the scandal was “exactly what I wanted.”

Some scholars have questioned the traditional account, particularly concerning the extent to which the riot was caused by the music, rather than by the choreography and/or the social and political circumstances. The Stravinsky scholar Richard Taruskin has written an article about the première, entitled “A Myth of the Twentieth Century,” in which he attempts to demonstrate that the traditional story of the music provoking unrest was largely concocted by Stravinsky himself in the 1920s after he had published the score. At that later date, Stravinsky was constructing an image of himself as an innovative composer to promote his music, and he revised his accounts of the composition and performances of The Rite of Spring to place a greater emphasis on a break with musical traditions and to encourage a focus on the music itself in concert performances.

While we could do without the violence at these events, it suggests an era when ideas and cultural works prompted vigorous reactions. Today, do we have an equivalent? People going home and writing on their blogs (guilty as charged)? Critics spreading popular or contrarian interpretations? The occasional talkback session after a theater production?

I suspect that if people today read about these reports, they would do something like this: shake their head and ask why these moviegoers or concertgoers got so animated. But perhaps we could ask the opposite question: why don’t new ideas, particularly ones that push us to think beyond our accepted categories, animate us? Are we just so numbed by novelty and a plurality of ideas that nothing really shocks us anymore? Do we have space in our society to truly think through and debate the ideas presented in “entertainment”?

Of course, not all cultural productions are intended to push us in new directions. Some are there just for entertainment. But others push beyond typical boundaries. Take a recent movie like The Tree of Life: I saw it on the recommendations of a few friends and I’m still not sure what to think about it. But it certainly was thought provoking and wasn’t a “typical” movie. Is this simply an “art film” in its own category or is it more like what all cultural productions should be doing?

Washington Post gets to reporting new Jay-Z sociology class at Georgetown

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Earlier this week, I linked to a report from MTV about a new sociology class at Georgetown on Jay-Z. More mainstream media sources are now getting to this story including the Washington Post. Here is what was  reported on their Celebritology blog:

As noted by MTV’s Rapfix blog, Georgetown — otherwise known as the institute of higher learning unofficially endorsed by Justin Bieber — is offering a fall-semester-only class called “Sociology of Hip-Hop: Jay-Z.” The three-credit, twice-weekly lecture is taught by professor, author and Jay-Z proponent Michael Eric Dyson, who tells MTV about the course: “We look at his incredible body of work, we look at his own understanding of his work, we look at others who reflect upon him, and then we ask the students to engage in critical analysis of Jay-Z himself.”

Presumably that critical analysis does not involve speculation regarding ridiculous rumors involving Jay-Z’s wife Beyonce and their baby, aka Sasha Fetus.

Hip-hop has frequently been the subject of university classes; Duke University offers an African American studies class called “Sampling Soul,” which focuses on hip-hop, black cinema, social movements and other topics. And last spring, Bun B of the Underground Kingz served as a distinguished lecturer at Rice University, where he taught a religion and hip-hop course.

But focusing so intensely on a single rapper is somewhat rare. And it presents the unique opportunity to write a killer paper titled “Get That Dirt Off Your Shoulder: Obama, Politics and the Social Implications of ‘The Black Album.’?”

I’m sure someone could come up with a more comprehensive list of college courses on the subject. This might be much more interesting than this particular sociology course which focuses on a hot celebrity.

But this got me thinking about several articles about the news industry I’ve seen in recent years: just how much must traditional news sources write and emphasize the celebrity stories that seem to drive web traffic? A couple of things matter in this Jay-Z story: it involves a well-known celebrity (and the mentioning of the crazy rumors including Beyonce probably doesn’t hurt) and the course is being held not just at any college but at prestigious Georgetown. Beyond those two features, does it really matter which celebrity, which department, and which prestigious college this involves? To some degree, newspapers have always reported on prominent people though it probably involves a lot more celebrity news today.

A second question: does anyone go to the Washington Post exclusively or first for celebrity news or is it like a bonus after one consumes the political and business news? Are there people who don’t trust celebrity news unless it comes from more reputable sources? How does the Post decide what celebrity news to publish – I assume they don’t want it to be too scurrilous ?

Also, I would like to note that this blog reported on this story before the Washington Post.

Suburbs not prepared to provide for growing poor population

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With more suburban residents seeking assistance, many suburban communities aren’t prepared:

Suburban-based social service agencies have been swamped. A survey of non-profit social service providers in suburban communities in the Washington, Chicago and Los Angeles metropolitan areas, conducted in 2009 and 2010 by researchers at Brookings, found that roughly nine in ten were seeing increased numbers of people seeking help compared to the previous year. Many had suffered cuts in financial support, prompting them to lay off staff and place needy people on wait-lists.

“In many communities, there just aren’t the organizations needed to provide job training, counseling or emergency assistance,” said Scott Allard, a political scientist at the University of Chicago’s School of Social Service Administration and the lead author of the survey. “Poverty is a recent phenomenon.”

One key piece of data from the survey underscores the corrosive effects of suburban poverty on the American identity: Nearly three-fourths of the suburban non-profits were seeing significant numbers of people turning up who had never previously sought help.

Several thoughts:

1. The problem is perhaps even worse than just growing numbers as more budgets of suburban communities have tightened. Where in municipal budgets is there money for this?

2. This reminds of a talk I heard from a homelessness researcher some years ago who suggested that a good number of the homeless who go to shelters are people who are temporarily homeless. On one hand, there is a persistent minority of the homeless who are always homeless but most are there because of temporary circumstances like a job loss, eviction, or medical costs. Will this be the case for the suburban poor – are these long-term poor residents or would these numbers shrink considerably if the economy picked up?

3. How dispersed is the poor population in the suburbs? I have not seen any maps or measures where exactly the suburban poor live. Knowing American residential patterns, we might suspect that the suburban poor tend to cluster in less wealthy/more affordable suburbs while wealthier suburbs have barely seen an increase in the number of poor residents, particularly since wealthier suburbs would not want such residents.

Mortgage interest rates may be really low but only a few will qualify

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You may hear a lot of ads for refinancing your mortgage because of historically low interest rates. But, only a small number of people searching for prime mortgages will qualify for the really low rates:

Have a look at a key detail about the criteria for mortgage quotes from which Freddie derives its weekly mortgage interest survey:

The survey is based on first-lien prime conventional conforming mortgages with a loan-to-value of 80 percent…

But the second criterion is even more significant. Let’s say that you have a house worth $200,000 and a mortgage balance of $175,000 that you want to refinance. Your loan-to-value ratio would be 87.5%, so you wouldn’t be included in this average. You might manage to achieve a low rate, but someone with so little equity shouldn’t expect to necessarily achieve rates near this average.

So those qualifying for these ultra-low rates must have pretty spotless credit histories and a pretty significant chunk of equity. That excludes anyone underwater or even slightly above water. And unfortunately, they’re the ones who would benefit most by refinancing. According to real estate analytics firm CoreLogic, about three-quarters of underwater borrowers have mortgage interest rates above 5.1%.

So the low interest rates only really help people who don’t need the help as much? Not much relief then for people looking to lower their payments and perhaps stay in their once-overvalued houses.

This reminds me of an issue that has kind of disappeared from the national news: what about plans to adjust mortgages? As long as the jobs situation remains difficult, have government programs and mortgage lenders made changes so that a good number of people can stay in their homes?

What builders say the homes of 2015 will look like

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If you are looking for big changes in the homes of 2015, you probably won’t find them. But here is what builders say they do expect to change for the new homes of 2015:

According to the results of the study, surveyed home builders expect new single-family homes to check in at an average of 2,150 square feet. Current single family homes measure around 2,400 square feet, which is already a decrease from the peak home size in 2007 of 2,521…

Other things that make up the home of 2015? No more living room. According to the survey, 52 percent of builders expect the living room to merge with other spaces and 30 percent believe that it will vanish completely to save on square footage. Instead, expect to see great rooms — a space that combines the family and living room and flows into the kitchen.

Expect to see more:

  • spacious laundry rooms
  • master suite walk-in closets
  • porches
  • eat-in kitchens
  • two-car garages
  • ceiling fans

Expect to see less:

  • mudrooms
  • formal dining rooms
  • four bedrooms or more
  • media or hobby rooms
  • skylights

Many of these changes reflect a desire for builders and consumers going green. Smaller space means more efficient heating and cooling. Ceiling fans distribute heat evenly while skylights, on the other hand, release heat.

The two big changes proposed here aren’t revolutionary. Particularly if the economy remains in the doldrums, homes will decrease in size. The real question is what would happen if the economy really picked up again – would builders go back to larger homes? Also, 2,150 square feet is still pretty large and perhaps is more of a reflection of the smaller number of people per home these days. The formal living room hasn’t been too popular for a while and this could also be behind the drop in home sizes. Of course, compared to the sweep of American homes over the last sixty years, these are changes.

The rest seem like pretty small adjustments. I suppose I was hoping for something a little more revolutionary but I’ll have to settle for bigger laundry rooms and a few other things. The picture attached to the story of a more slanted Hawaii home that can take advantage of “Photovoltaics” looks  a lot more interesting than the rest of the story. Would Americans buy a home that looked like that just to save on energy?

Also: where do builders get their ideas about these things? From surveys and marketing they conduct or industry-wide figures and trends? What if we could ask what builders themselves would like to see change? Perhaps they simply want to go with what the public wants.

And what about those granite countertops and stainless steel appliances?

John Malone: Largest US landowner with 2.2 million acres

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I’ve never seen a list of the biggest landowners in the United States until now:

According to the newly released 2011 Land Report 100, which ranks the top land barons, John Malone is now America’s biggest individual landowner. The 70-year-old cable pioneer and chairman of Liberty Media now owns 2.2 million acres, after purchasing more than 1 million acres of timberland in Maine and New Hampshire earlier this year.

The purchase, which drew fire from plenty of environmentalists in New England, vaulted him past the longtime number one, Mr. Turner, who owns slightly more than 2 million acres. Mr. Malone and Mr. Turner are longtime friends and fellow cowboy-hat wearers from the cable world…

Mr. Malone told the Land Report that his love of land is due to his Irish genes. “A certain land hunger comes from being denied property ownership for so many generations.”…

Some might worry that Mr. Malone’s purchase may ease America back to its more feudal days when the rich owned most of the land. Environmentalists fret about an era of “Kingdom Buyers.” Others may see them as the most responsible long-term stewards. Either way, the wealthy are likely to continue looking at large tracts of land as the safest long-term, hard assets at a time of extreme market volatility and low borrowing costs.

Can there be a new cultural value of “land hoarding”?

According to the Land Report 100, it doesn’t sound like Malone wants to ruin the land:

Malone is an ardent conservationist, an ethic he shares with Turner. While the duo’s ends are the same, their means differ somewhat. “I tend to be more willing to admit that human beings aren’t going away,” Malone says. His 2011 Maine and New Hampshire purchase, which was brokered by LandVest’s Timberland Division, saw him acquire robust sustainable forestry operations from private equity firm GMO Renewable Resources. He intends to keep them in place. He applies this philosophy to his western properties, such as the Bell, where he raises cattle and horses. Ultimately, he plans to put all of his land in perpetual conservation easements.

Here is the top 20:

  1. John Malone
  2. Ted Turner
  3. Archie Aldis Emmerson
  4. Brad Kelley
  5. Irving Family
  6. Singleton Family
  7. King Ranch Heirs
  8. Pingree Heirs
  9. Reed Family
  10. Stan Kroenke
  11. Ford Family
  12. Lykes Bros. Heirs
  13. Briscoe Family
  14. W.T. Waggoner Estate
  15. Holland Ware
  16. D.M. O’Connor Heirs
  17. Drummond Family
  18. Phillip Anschutz
  19. J.R. Simplot Heirs
  20. Robert Earl Holding

In terms of land comparisons, these 2.2 million acres are significantly more than Rhode Island and more than Delaware.

If some of the American public has thoughts about people having too much money, are there similar thoughts about people having too much land? Obviously, it takes some money to have this much land: John Malone has a net worth of $4.5 billion and is #69 on the Forbes 400 list. How much is this land worth?

Knowing when to fold ’em

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The Washington Post had a fascinating article yesterday about how banks are responding to one city’s foreclosure crisis:

Cleveland — The sight of excavators tearing down vacant buildings has become common in this foreclosure-ravaged city, where the housing crisis hit early and hard. But the story behind the recent wave of demolitions is novel — and cities around the country are taking notice. A handful of the nation’s largest banks have begun giving away scores of properties that are abandoned or otherwise at risk of languishing indefinitely and further dragging down already depressed neighborhoods.

This closely mirrors the approach that Youngstown, another Ohio city, has taken to their dwindling population:

Even when the result is an empty lot, it can be one less pockmark. While some widespread demolitions could risk hollowing out the urban core of struggling cities such as Cleveland, advocates say that the homes being targeted are already unsalvageable and that the bulldozers are merely “burying the dead.”

However, unlike in Youngstown where that city is simply trying to shrink to a manageable size, the Cleveland demolitions are already leading to redevelopment:

The demolitions in some cases have paved the way for community gardens, church additions and parking lots.

For good or ill, this looks to be a growing trend for some time. The article notes that New York, Philadelphia, Georgia, and others have or soon will pass laws similar to the ones Cleveland used to authorize its land bank and teardowns. Unfortunately, there doesn’t seem to be any shortage of foreclosed property candidates:

At the end of August, the nation’s banks, along with Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, had an inventory of more than 816,000 foreclosed properties on their books waiting for a buyer, according to RealtyTrac. An additional 800,000 are working their way through the foreclosure process.

H/t to the ABA Journal for the original link pointing me to the Post article.

DuPage County Board votes 16-0 for new regulations for proposed religious congregations

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Amidst a number of proposed mosques in DuPage County (see the latest example just south of Naperville), the DuPage County Board voted unanimously on Wednesday to institute new regulations for religious congregations:

The measure, approved 16-0, came in the wake of five recent applications for new Islamic centers or mosques in residential areas in the county over the last two years. Three of those applications were approved by the board, one near Naperville was rejected, and one near West Chicago is pending. The new regulations would not affect those applications or other existing facilities.

Under the changes, a new place of assembly will be prohibited in a single-family house without a variance granted by the County Board. Variances also will be needed for any facility, regardless of its size, that does not have primary access on an arterial street or is not hooked up to public sewer and water service.

The county originally had considered barring all new places of assembly from unincorporated residential neighborhoods, but the board scaled back on that plan during the committee process. Along with religious houses of worship, the measure applies to other gathering spots, such as lodges for veterans groups.

Several quick thoughts:

1. I’m glad they scaled back their plans. No new religious buildings in unincorporated residential neighborhoods?

2. I wish these articles say how much land this applies to in DuPage County. These regulations cover unincorporated areas in the county, not land that is part of a municipality. Individual municipalities can develop their own zoning regulations.

3. Here is the reasoning behind these new regulations:

Board member Jim Zay, R-Carol Stream, said the measure is necessary to control disruptive changes to neighborhoods.

“What we’re worried about is people’s property rights,” Zay said. “In our district, we have a lot of single-family homes being bought, and the next thing you know, there are 25 cars in the driveway, and (neighbors) are up in arms.”

Translation: “disruptive changes” are bad for property values. In other words, having religious assemblies in houses or veteran’s groups meet in houses would bring down the whole neighborhood.

4. What exactly would the Board say precipitated this move? Why don’t reporters ask the Board members?

Space for sociological factors when looking at scientific research

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I ran into this blog post discussing a recent study published in Hormones and Behavior titled “Maternal tendencies in women are associated with estrogen levels and facial femininity.” This particular blogger at Scientific American starts out by suggesting she doesn’t like the results:

Friend of the blog Cackle of Rad was the first person to send me this paper, and when I first tried to read it, I got…pretty angry. Being a rather obsessively logical person, I know why I felt angry about this paper, and I worked very hard to step back from it and approach it in a thoroughly scientific manner.

It didn’t work, I called in Kate. That helped a little.

In the end, it’s not a bad paper. The data are the data, as my graduate advisor always says. But data need to be interpreted, and interpretations require context. And I think what’s missing from this paper is not data or adequate methods. It’s context.

In the end, the blogger suggests the “context” needed really are a number of sociological factors that might influence perceptions:

So I wonder if the authors should make more effort to look into sociological factors. How does the intense pressure on women to become wives and mothers change as a function of how feminine the girl looks? I think you can’t separate any of this from this whole “women with higher estrogen want to be mothers” idea. This is why papers like this bug me, because they try to sell this as a evolutionary thing, without really acknowledging how much sociological pressure goes in to making women want to be mothers. And of course now I read them and I instantly get bristly, because what I see is people making assumptions about what I want, and what I must feel like, based on a few aspects of my physiology. It can be of value scientifically…but I don’t want it to apply to ME. I know it might be science, but I also find it more than a bit insulting.

I don’t know this area of research so I don’t have much room to dispute the results of the original study. However, how this blogger goes about this argument for adding sociological factors is interesting. Here are two possible options for making this argument:

1. Argument #1: the study actually could benefit from sociological factors. Definitions of femininity are wrapped up in cultural assumptions and patterns. There is a lot of research to back this up and perhaps we can point to specific parts of this study that would be altered if context was taken into account. But this doesn’t seem to be conclusion of this blog post.

2. Argument #2: there must be some sociological factors involved here because I don’t like these results. On one hand, perhaps it is admirable to admit one doesn’t like these research results. This can often be true about scientific results: it challenges our personal understandings of the world. So why end the post by again emphasizing that the blogger doesn’t like the results? Does this simply reduce sociology to the backup science that one only calls in to suggest that everything is cultural or relative or socially conditioned?

Perhaps I am simply reading too much into this. I don’t know how much natural science research could be improved by including sociological factors, whether it is often considered, or whether this is simply an unusual blog post. Argument #1 is the stronger scientific argument and is the one that should be emphasized more here.

In order to deal with issues like health, don’t focus on race but place and residential segregation

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Researchers examined health in two Baltimore neighborhoods and argue that it is not race that leads to different health outcomes but rather the places themselves:

LaVeist and several colleagues tested this idea by examining the counterfactual: If society weren’t segregated, would health disparities still exist? They identified a low-income community in Southwest Baltimore, spanning two census tracts, that is fairly equally divided between black and white residents (out of deference to the neighborhood, LaVeist doesn’t name it). The median household income in the area was less than $25,000 during the 2000 census. It has no pharmacy, no practicing physicians or dentists, no supermarkets, and no banks.

Within this integrated community, the researchers found that health disparities all but disappear. There was no significant difference in diabetes rates, or obesity rates among young women (a metric on which large gaps exist nationally). There did remain a difference in hypertension rates, albeit it a much narrower one than national data shows. The lone exception: Whites in this community smoked at a significantly higher rate than blacks.

This suggests that what the national statistics are really telling us is that minorities live in much higher numbers in unhealthy neighborhoods. And that means that in trying to address health disparities nationally, we’ve been looking for the answers to the wrong question. We should be asking what’s going on in these communities, not what’s going on within minority populations.

“Solutions to health disparities are likely to be found in broader societal policy and policy that is not necessarily what we would think of as health policy,” LaVeist says. “It’s housing policy, zoning policy, it’s policy that shapes the characteristics of communities.”

While this sounds like interesting research (though it only covers two neighborhoods?), haven’t sociologists been talking about this for years? In fact, Massey and Denton made just this point in American Apartheid back in the early 1990s:

Our research indicates that racial residential segregation is the principal structural feature of American society responsible for the perpetuation of urban poverty and represents a primary cause of racial inequality in the United States.

If as a country we really wanted to deal with disparities in education, jobs, opportunities, health, and more, then the problem of residential segregation is the one that needs to be tackled. Local decisions about zoning and resource allocation also matter. Simply dealing with the health concerns without addressing the whole neighborhood can only get us so far.