Category Archives: Entertainment

How to make Toronto’s suburban streets look like Chicago’s suburban streets on screen

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A new Peacock show on John Wayne Gacy filmed many scenes in Toronto but wanted them to look like Chicago. Here is how they did it:

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The series was filmed largely in Toronto, though the sets bear a striking resemblance to Chicago’s suburban sprawls in the 1970s. Macmanus works with a private researcher, Patrick Murphy, on most projects; Murphy scoured local reports from the Chicago Sun-Times and the Chicago Tribune, as well as news footage, and produced a “great bible of photos” that was passed off to the production team to scout and replicate.

And they needed the scenes to look like a particular Chicago neighborhood (Norwood Park):

“I didn’t realize how close he was to O’Hare. That was just shocking, in the sense that he truly was hiding in plain sight. The house wasn’t in some remote area, it was a suburban street like so many other suburban streets, with houses right next to each other, right next to the airport,” Chernus said in a recent chat over Zoom.

Will the average viewer be able to tell that the filmed scenes are in Toronto and not actually in Chicago? Probably not. If the production team found similar settings and then adds a combination of establishing shots and internal sets (that could be located anywhere), it may be hard even for people with lots of Chicago experience to spot differences.

I have heard people suggest Toronto and Chicago are similar in character (and population). How much harder would it be to make it look like Chicago if it were filmed in Vancouver (a common Canadian setting for American production) or Atlanta (still in the same country but different landscape) or another American city with bigger tax breaks?

Is there any evidence that filming in the actual location improves the final product? If filming elsewhere is about saving money, what could be gained by filming on location in Chicago? Are there particular producers or networks that prioritize filming in the actual location?

Building a suburb or a “cozy city” in a video game

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A review of a new video game suggests players can build suburbs:

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Town to City, developed by Galaxy Grove and published by Kwalee, is a cozy, casual city-builder that focuses on developing a small town, decorating buildings with small dynamic details, and providing a beautiful suburban environment for our voxel citizens. The game was released into Early Access recently with a decent amount of content and a relatively polished experience.

The game’s page on Steam describes it this way:

Build an idyllic 19th century Mediterranean town and help it flourish into a prosperous city. Freely place and customise each element to create the perfect home for your growing population in this cozy city builder from the creators of Station to Station.

Town, city, community, suburb. Is there a big difference in what these places look like in this game? These are not always interchangeable terms and using them hints at their overlap and their distinctions.

The majority of my experience in city-building games comes years ago with various iterations of Simcity. The goal there seemed to be to create a large city. You could build lighter density residential units but the push was to keep increasing your population, which could lead to redeveloping those lighter residential areas.

If this game is truly about creating a suburb or small town, it would be interesting to consider how the game experience could be different. How might the unique features of a small town or suburb translate into different decisions to make about development? Does this game or other games incorporate the kinds of zoning issues that come up in suburban communities? Or can players feel the reasons Americans love suburbs while they oversee the construction and maintenance of a suburban community? Do they get to consider the increasing diversity in suburbia?

And if there was a game that simulated building suburban communities in the United States, how many people would be willing to play? The majority of Americans live in suburbs but would they want to play in them, as opposed to building massive cities or playing Farming Simulator.

Music in public considering that the United States once had 500,000 jukeboxes

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Less than a century ago, the United States was full of jukeboxes:

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By the early 1940s, about 500,000 jukeboxes dotted the country, sometimes inspiring too much of a ruckus: Newspapers frequently reported on bar fights over music selections and complaints about noise. Snootier critics, meanwhile, voiced more petulant grievances: “The contrivance is everywhere and is always booming its inanities,” one Los Angeles Times writer lamented in 1941.

Private spaces have multiple options for providing music. They could use a speaker system to play music (radio, recordings, etc.). They could have live music. They could go with silence. A jukebox puts the control of the music into the hands of the visitor or customer, letting them select songs.

Alternatively, consider the options visitors to spaces have in more recent decades. Each person can choose their own music without subjecting others to it. A Walkman allowed for hearing the radio or a cassette, a portable CD player for a CD. The spread of digital music – MP3 player, smartphone with built-in storage or streaming music – provided even more private options. Go with headphones or earbuds and someone could be in their own aural world even with a blaring jukebox.

Could having a common aural experience bring people together in ways that separating them into their podcast/music/Youtube streams does not? Not everyone would necessarily like what was playing on the jukebox near them but they would be exposed to the same music as everyone else. And then they could put something on the jukebox for others to hear. Of course, the limited selection of the jukebox and the processes that go into getting records into the jukeboxes might lead to a more homogeneous musical experience.

The unusual albums that can move massive quantities in their first week, Taylor Swift edition

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We are in an era of fragmented media consumption. Yet, some works can be blockbusters, such as Taylor Swift’s recently released album:

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Taylor Swift’s The Life of a Showgirl album is off to a sparkling start in the United States. On its first day of release, Oct. 3, the set sold 2.7 million copies in traditional album sales (physical and digital purchases) across all versions of the album, according to initial reports to data tracking firm Luminate. That marks Swift’s biggest week ever, and the second-largest sales week for any album in the modern era — since Luminate began electronically tracking data in 1991. The only larger sales week in that span of time was registered by the opening frame of Adele’s 25, which sold 3.378 million copies in its first week in 2015…

The sales of The Life of a Showgirl will increase in the coming days, with the current tracking week ending on Thursday, Oct. 9. The album’s final first-week sales number is expected to be announced on Sunday, Oct. 12, along with its assumed large debut on the multi-metric Billboard 200 albums chart (dated Oct. 18). If The Life of a Showgirl debuts atop the Billboard 200, it will mark Swift’s 15th No. 1 album, lifting her past Drake and JAY-Z for the most No. 1 albums among soloists, and becoming the sole act with the second-most No. 1s ever. She is currently tied with Drake and JAY-Z with 14 No. 1s each, and only The Beatles, with 19 No. 1s, have more, dating to when the chart began publishing on a regular, weekly basis in 1956.

So maybe it is not just the album we should be thinking about here; Taylor Swift is a rare artist who consistently sells albums. She has lots of fans and they consistently push her album to #1.

Thinking as a sociologist, here are questions I have moving forward:

  1. At what point does this sales record decline or the support not become as fervent from fans?
  2. What is it exactly about Swift’s music and persona that cuts through this fragmented media landscape? I recently saw some figures about what is popular these days to watch on cable TV; it is basically live sports and cable news as other programming does not draw large audiences. How is she so successful in this particular music and cultural landscape?
  3. Are labels and artists trying to replicate what Swift does – doing what she does for even one or two albums might make for a very successful artist – or do they acknowledge she is a singular artist?
  4. What will we remember about Swift with these massive sales and #1 record after #1 record? What narratives will emerge and how might these differ across different storytellers?

When music accompanists do not get to see what they are accompanying

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I have played piano in a number of situations – for church services, weddings, funerals, musicals, choirs, marching band shows, and instrumental soloists – where I do not get to see what the audience sees. This can happen because I am focused on my own playing and there is not much time to look. I need to make sure the music sounds good, my fingers are where they should be, and the pages are flipped when needed. But it also regularly happens because of where the piano is located; where the instrument is situated makes it difficult or impossible to see the action. Whole musicals have occurred where I can hear the lines, singing, and movement but I am facing another direction to watch the director who is facing the action on the stage.

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This is an interesting position to be in: to be part of the event or performance without seeing all of it. The audience takes it all in. For them the music and all that happens in front of them are all one thing. To the participants, they each have a role to play. The musical accompaniment is not the main focus. It “supports or complements.”

This is analogous to numerous situations in life. There are times when each of us are main actors in what is going on around us. We can make choices that have immediate consequences and drive the story forward. But this does not happen all the time. Often we are playing a part in an organization or a group or a situation. Our participation matters – the situation is different depending who is or is not present, who is doing something and who is not – but does not depend on us.

In the musical situations when providing accompaniment I described above, does this mean I have missed these events? I may not have seen the bride walk in or the formation the band makes on the field or observed the way people leave a funeral service. I do not know everything that happened in the front. But I was there and playing a part that contributed to the whole.

Horror films, the suburbs, and “the seedy underbelly of American promise”

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Want to show that Americans may not be able to access the American Dream? Why not make a horror film set in the suburbs?

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Weapons is not a very scary horror film. It is, however, a fascinating movie about the suburbs and the way the architecture of family life supports silence and complicity. Horror movies often use the suburbs to interrogate the seedy underbelly of American promise. Whether exploring fear, ennui, racial tensions, or Satanic Panic, suburban horror films are about control—who has power and who desperately wants it.

Since the rise of postwar suburban sprawl, numerous cultural works have explored the facade of successful suburban life. What is hiding behind the green lawns?

Horror films do this in particular ways, following conventions in their field. One question we could ask is whether this particular film gets at this seedy underbelly in unique ways. Does it put together existing ideas in new ways? Does it break new ground in exploring the suburbs? Does it offer new commentary on suburban life here in 2025?

Another question we could ask: how many Americans are familiar with these horror film depictions of suburbs? If you have seen one or two such films, do you have a general sense of their suburban commentary?

The social process of determining the “worst” music

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How do we know if music is any good or not? We look to the opinions of others. See the recent online discussion of whether the 2009 song “Home” by Edward Sharpe and the Magnetic Zeros is the worst of all time.

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Check out the song for yourself.

Perhaps an online crowd can convince people that this song is no good. But there are other social ways of addressing this question. For example, Wikipedia has a page titled “List of music considered the worst.” I have sampled across the albums and songs and there is a wide range of music that could be considered the “worst.” Or a group of friends could debate this among themselves as they play and remember different pieces of music.

This reminds me of a 2006 study in Science titled “Experimental Study of Inequality and Unpredictability in an Artificial Cultural Market.” Put people in listening rooms with a list of songs and their opinion of those songs partly depends on what others in the room think.

How do we know if music (or books or TV shows or art or the product of any culture industry) is any good? We decide this collectively through interactions and over time. What we consider the “worst” music could differ but we have opportunities to be shaped by the opinions of others – including large-scale actors – and to shape the opinions of people around us.

How to “win” at civilization (according to Civilization VII)

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What does it look like for a civilization to “win”? The game Civilization VII has five paths to victory (with quoted descriptions from here):

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-Domination: defeat all other civilizations.

-Scientific: “You must complete 3 Space Race Projects. After completing them all, you unlock the First Staffed Space Flight victory condition.”

-Cultural: “You must house 15 Artifacts in your empire. Completing this Legacy Path unlocks the World’s Fair victory condition.”

-Economic: “You must gain 500 Railroad Tycoon Points from manufacturing goods in your Factories. You gain points each turn for each Factory Resource slotted into a Settlement with a Factory and connected to your Rail and Port network. When this is completed, you unlock the World Bank victory condition.”

-Military: “You must gain 20 points from conquering Settlements. However, before you adopt an Ideology, conquered Settlements count as only one point. After adopting an Ideology, conquered Settlements count as two, and if you conquer Settlements from an opponent with a different Ideology from you, they count as 3. When this Legacy Path is completed, you unlock the Operation Ivy victory condition.”

What if people around the world were asked how their civilization or nation or people group might “win.” Would it be peace and collaboration? Would it be mobility and success for individuals? Would it be amassing military victories and territories?

Some of these are captured in the Civ 7 conditions and some are not. And what people across the world want in “winning” (and this language may strike many as strange) could differ quite a bit.

While this is just a new version of a game in a long-running series, this could easily move to a larger and important conversation: what are humans doing through their efforts? Don’t contexts strongly influence our desired goals (and how we regard the goals of other groups or civilizations)?

(Back to the game: across the various iterations over the years, I have spent time pursuing different victory paths. For example, if one wants to win via culture, they need to make numerous choices along the way that limit success along the other paths.)

“End of Beginning” and Chicago

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One song popular in the last few years, “End of Beginning,” references Chicago in its chorus:

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And when I’m back in Chicago, I feel it
Another version of me, I was in it
I wave goodbye to the end of beginning

This song is “End of Beginning” by Djo, an artist name for Joe Keery who went to college in Chicago and then later left for New York City:

In a recent interview, the Newburyport, Massachusetts, native said he’s “excited” to get back to Chicago, where he studied theater at DePaul University.

Besides performing at Lollapalooza, he said he has plans to catch up with old friends and may even hit up Allende Restaurant, just steps away from the Lincoln Park campus. And at the top of his mind is a dip into Lake Michigan at Montrose Beach…

The last time the Sun-Times spoke with Keery, “End of Beginning” was one of the most popular sounds on TikTok. Though the song was released in 2022, fans made edits using the popular verse: “And when I’m back in Chicago, I feel it.”

It’s a song about closing the chapter on his life in Chicago before moving to New York City.

On one hand, the song seems to speak of good experiences in Chicago. The artist says he is looking forward to being in Chicago.

On the other hand, Chicago is the place before going to the real place of success: New York City. The singer may like Chicago but he finds fame elsewhere. One of Chicago’s nicknames is “The Second City” and this may have originated in its status behind New York. But now, those in acting or entertainment may need to go to New York or Hollywood/Los Angeles to make it big. Chicago might be a place to be when you are young but these larger coastal cities have a ability to launch you into the stratosphere.

For a number of American places, you could put together interesting playlists that speak to the character and music of a community. Add this song to the list of songs about Chicago and I am always interested in songs that namecheck specific places.

Researching social science in a video game

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In Civilization VII, players can research and have the civic “Social Question.” Upon doing so, they gain the benefit of social science:

From a Civilization wiki regarding the Social Question:

Civic life in the 19th century was in a state of flux, as the old medieval order began to decay and former farmers flooded into the city. Under feudal arrangements, local lords were at least putatively responsible for the well-being of their subjects, but in the city, no such noblesse oblige existed: workers were alone to face exploitation, squalid living conditions and poverty – the profits and industry that drove the industrial revolution were directly dependent upon the exploitation of those working the machines. Perhaps more influentially, those with power could see directly the suffering of those around them.

This, then, raised the “social question:” what is to be done? Is there a sense of justice that the state must respond to, or is this a matter for churches and humanitarian organizations? Workers began to see themselves as a collective force, to whom some justice was owed. From here came a wide variety of responses: welfare, humanitarianism, socialism, etc., which had in common a notion that squalor and suffering were not a natural occurrence that extends from the soil, but something that society both caused and could remedy. It is a question with which we still contend today.

The start of sociology and other social sciences came around the same time as industrialization, urbanization, revolutions, the rise of the nation state, and rationality. I wonder how many players would see this civic as key to progressing through the game; does a society need to address this social question or can we just get on to other exciting features of modernity?

I may just have to report back on what happens when the civic Social Question is enabled and social science is possible. While I have logged many hours of playing Civilization II earlier in my life, I have little experience with more recent iterations of the game. As a sociologist, shouldn’t a robust social science sector lead to a civilizational victory?