Category Archives: Entertainment

Up and coming Chicago area rock band recycles suburban critiques?

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I read an interesting profile of The Orwells, a band from Elmhurst, Illinois that has been getting some radio play and whose major label debut comes out this summer. It sounds like a common story: four suburban kids put a band together during high school, find they have some talent which is affirmed by others, and are forgoing college to make a go at it in the music industry. Yet, I found this bit about their new album interesting:

They’ve got their major-label debut, “Disgraceland,” coming out in June; its cover, shot by Eddie O’Keefe, depicts a cookie-cutter post-war Elmhurst house.

From theorwells.com, here is the cover of the album:

A fairly typical home from the Chicago suburbs: split-level, a yard, detached garage in the back. Why the focus on critiquing the suburbs with the image and the title of the album? I listened to some of the band’s songs on SoundCloud and found the group doesn’t say much specific about the suburbs. (As for their sound, it is a mix of classic and modern rock.) Indeed, the theme of a number of the songs seems to be normal stuff for rock ‘n’ roll: how to get the girl. There is a song called “Mallrats” (with a music video filmed at Yorktown Mall) but its verses talk about a girl and the chorus has numerous repetitions of “la la la.” Of course, the new album may have more material about the suburbs.

Maybe this kind of explicit sexual desire is taboo in the suburbs. Maybe the suburbs are simply boring. But, I wonder if this the new album cover and title simply mimic decades-old critiques of the suburbs as too confining for rock music. Does the album contribute anything new or unique about suburban life? The profile of the band suggests the members had a pretty good family life with plenty of ongoing family support plus good educations. Were the suburbs really that bad or is this a simple way to show the band is turning away from the stereotypical clean, comformist, and dull suburbs? If so, they are in a long line of writers, artists, filmmakers, and musicians.

NBC: social media use driven by popular TV shows, not the other way around

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The Financial Times reports that after studying media habits related to its Olympic coverage, NBC found less social media activity linked to television broadcasts than might have been expected. In other words, it isn’t apparent that people tune into television programs because they see activity about it on social media. At stake is a lot of advertising money.

It will be interesting to see how this plays out. From its early days, one of the major critiques of television was that it encouraged passivity: people generally sat on the couch in their private homes watching a screen. While they may have had conversations about TV with others (and a lot of this has moved online – just see how many sites have Game of Thrones recaps each week), television watching was a limited social activity practiced alone, with family, or close friends. Whether social media changes this fundamental posture in watching television remains to be seen.

Breaking Madden: tweaking the game to have the most unequal outcome

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I’m a latecomer to the Breaking Madden series but here is what happens when you tweak the game to pit the two most unequal teams together on the same field:

I released every member of the Seahawks and Broncos that I possibly could, and replaced them with a total of 82 players I created…

Imagine also that this player is seven feet tall and 400 pounds heavy, and that there is no stronger, smarter, faster, or more skilled football player on the planet.

Now imagine 41 of them. In previous editions of Breaking Madden, I’ve made a small handful of these sorts of players — maybe one, or three, or five. Never 41…

In just about every way, these Broncos are the anti-Seahawks. They are as short (five feet tall) and light (160 pounds) as the game would allow me to make them. In every single skills category — Speed, Strength, Awareness, Toughness, and dozens of others — I assigned each of them the lowest rating possible…

I could not continue. My heart wouldn’t let me. I used the simulation feature to speed up the game to the end. I relinquished my ambitions of a 1,500-point game. Seahawks 255, Broncos 0. The machine and I agreed upon the final score.

The visuals are priceless: a team of giants overwhelming the team of scrawny players with the game just giving up at the end. I’ve never seen anything like it in my years of playing Madden football.

The premise of the project is interesting as well: just how much can the average video game be tweaked by the user to create different outcomes? I would count a lot of the newer games that have open maps and numerous playable characters as ones that can be tweaked a lot. Yet, there are still plenty of games that have you follow a fairly strict script. Both can be enjoyable but the autonomy of the gamer is quite different.

One thing I’ve always liked about sports games – and sports in general – is that the outcomes are somewhat unpredictable. Sure, there does come a point where the gamer reaches a skill level that overwhelms the computer every time but then you can set new goals: start a career team from scratch, play with some sort of handicap, or move up a difficulty level. This has been my recent quest: move up the ranks of English soccer in FIFA 2012 with Oxford United. At some point, the game can still be too easy or repetitive – this was the curse of earlier sports games when certain plays or players could just dominate – but playing a game within a game usually insures some flexibility.

Sociologist asks why people of Westeros haven’t had an Industrial Revolution

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Westeros is consumed by the Game of Thrones but may be missing something else: an Industrial Revolution.

For Dr Peter Antonioni, from University College London, the key puzzle posed by the return to screens this week of the phenomenally popular fantasy series is quite why the people of Westeros have not had an industrial revolution.

Alas, the rest of the story is behind a subscriber wall. Perhaps they are too often stuck in battles that drain their limited resources. Once you get past the first few books, everyone is struggling: the kingdoms can’t raise much more money for troops, the countryside isn’t providing much food, and the average people are scrounging for food. And since these major skirmishes take place every generation or two, there isn’t much time to stockpile needed goods.

The relatively narrow geographic boundaries of TV sitcoms

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TV shows often don’t have a very wide geographic scope as the characters interact in a limited physical space:

Most shows define their social universes geographically: They are populated by people whom circumstance has thrown together, physically. The throwing could take place in a bar (Cheers), in a coffee shop (Friends), in an apartment (New Girl), in an office (The Office), at a taxi dispatch service (Taxi), at a TV studio (30 Rock), or, of course, in a house (pretty much every other sitcom ever). Regardless, in the social—and, you could say, moral—cosmology of the typical sitcom, it is spatial connection that leads to social connection.

In part, these physical spaces are plot devices that explain to audiences why this small group of people seems to be always together, and always so insulated in their togetherness. In HIMYM, the friends’ go-to bar, MacLaren’s—conveniently located in the basement of the building where three of the five characters live—functions in the same way that Monica’s apartment (and Mindy Lahiri’s ob-gyn practice, and Greendale Community College) do: They allow the audience to suspend disbelief. They sacrifice the inevitable frictions of real-world social relationships—the vagaries of distance, the misalignments of schedules—at the altar of sitcomic convenience.

There are obvious production-side reasons for that social narrowness, too, of course: Actors are expensive. Contracts are a pain. TV programs, even in the age of the DVR and the stream and the binge-watch, need to offer their audiences some sense of stability, episode after episode. But what those constraints amount to, ultimately, are shows that embrace an eponymous approach to family itself: According to the most basic logic of the sitcom, one’s family is “the group of people that situation has thrown together, comedically.” So we get The Office‘s ironized treatment of the workplace family. And The Big Bang Theory‘s haphazard fusion of work life and home. And Modern Family‘s casual confidence that an entire TV show can be premised on demographics alone…

HIMYM may have done this for the same reason that, say, Sex and the City often treated its male characters as expendable—that reason being that that’s just how sitcoms are—but it amounted, in context, to a premise that was often misaligned with the realities of friendship as its audience was experiencing them. It’s worth noting that the show, which premiered in September 2005, came of age in the age of social media. (Mark Zuckerberg launched TheFacebook in 2004.) At a time when many members of its audience were experiencing friendship as newly expansive, and newly transcendent of geography, HIMYM‘s five characters hunkered down at MacLaren’s. They hung out in a single apartment. They dated one another. They married one another. And they used and/or ignored the people who existed beyond their tiny social circle. It was Central Perk all over again.

Sitcoms are bounded in numerous ways (limited number of characters, fairly formulaic storylines, similar kinds of jokes) but this analysis of space is quite interesting: for convenience and forced interaction, characters keep gathering in a public/private space. One question would be whether this geographic narrowness on TV matches reality for average Americans. At the least, they would have more knowledge about the outside world, whether current events or sports or celebrity news that simply isn’t included in most sitcoms (the info would be dated by the time it airs, etc.). Yet, good portions of our lives are spent in bounded areas like work and home. Meeting in third places like bars and coffee shops? Not so much.

Claim: end of urban friends TV shows, revival of happy suburban McMansion shows

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With the end of “How I Met Your Mother,” one critic argues TV shows have moved on to happy suburban McMansions and darker shows about urban singles:

The series is among the last of a vanishing breed, the romantic comedy about well-educated, pop culturally attuned young white people trying to find love and sex in the city as they embark on their careers and independent lives. Such sitcoms proliferated after “Friends” became a huge hit for NBC in the 1990s.

But since ABC struck gold with “Modern Family,” networks have traded the urban coffee shops and bars for the suburban McMansion. TV comedies that explore the dating lives of young people now tend to be a lot darker than “How I Met Your Mother.” Take, for instance, HBO’s “Girls,” where the sex is graphic — and often soul-crushing for the characters.

Such a claim might sound true – but where is the data to back this up? Later in the article:

But that distinctive [storytelling] approach may have come at a price. “It’s that kind of innovation that never makes it to huge ratings heights of the good, old-fashioned sitcom,” Thompson said. “They’re very post-modern characters, so steeped in the irony and cynicism of the ’90s they grew up in, that sometimes it’s kind of hard to like them.”

Indeed, “HIMYM” never cracked even the Top 40 in total viewers, consistently averaging around 9 million or so over the course of its run, according to Nielsen. Yet it still occupied an important role for CBS, which is the most-watched network in the U.S. but often has trouble attracting young adults.

So no data on the number of shows with each genre or kind of storyline (young, happy singles vs. suburban McMansion dwelling families vs. unhappy urban singles) and then another knock against HIMYM and “Girls” and similar shows: they often don’t draw big ratings. So, while critics might like these shows (and critics might live in an alternate universe , how many of them are popular? Check out the Nielsen Top 25 for the week ending March 23, 2014: I don’t know all of these shows that well but I don’t see too many suburban McMansions. The suburbs are a common theme on television shows with a long history, dating back to the happy family shows of the 1950s. Yet, they don’t necessarily draw big ratings or the positive attention of critics even if they seem to be fodder for cancellations when the new crop of shows are rolled out each fall.

Sociologist explains why her course “The Sociology of Miley Cyrus” is needed

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The new class “The Sociology of Miley Cyrus” at Skidmore College has garnered a lot of attention and the sociologist behind the course explains why it is needed:

With all the very real problems we’re facing as a nation, right — violence against women and children in communities of color, the collapse of the public education system, ongoing poverty and wealth stratification — it’s a convenient distraction to say that a barely post-teen girl or woman is a moral apocalypse. So on one hand, it’s a convenient distraction.

On the other hand, I think that the things that get people so incensed about Miley are the same reasons that I’m trying to teach this course — to help people deconstruct and better understand media, systems of representation, and ideas of power and privilege in the contemporary U.S…

All the best, most inflammatory stuff — all of the pearl-clutching about “Oh, the liberal arts are a cesspool; oh the social sciences are a cesspool! Can you believe that someone would do something so silly!” — is more grist for the mill. It’s more data about why we need to rigorously study media and representation. If you look at the flyer for my class that got tweeted, and if you look at the content of that, this is, you know,  serious sociology. This is rigorous stuff, looking at understanding the world. So in some senses, all of the hubbub in the blogosphere sort of proves the need for a class like this…

I mean, officially, anything that lets me remind people why sociology as a discipline is a rigorous and relevant, why this is useful, why what happens in a liberal arts school is helpful to society? That’s great. I can talk about that all the live-long day.

This is not new criticism – courses about Jay-Z and other parts of popular culture draw similar attention – but it misses the point. Sociologists study social behavior and interaction so theoretically anything is fair game for sociological instruction. Classes can work even better when using current examples, like the attention Miley Cyrus gets for her actions, to illustrate important sociological points. In this case, it sounds like the course will look at how the media presents celebrities and women, to think about how all that media (roughly 11 hours a day for American adults) affect our viewpoints of the world and reflect power dynamics between different groups. The purpose of a sociology course isn’t to psychoanalyze Miley Cyrus or to judge the morality of her actions but rather to think through what she represents and what it reveals about American society.

A call for better statistics to better distinguish between competitive gamers

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Here is a call for more statistics in gaming, which would help understand the techniques of and differentiation between competitive gamers:

Some people even believe that competitive gaming can get more out of stats than any conventional sport can. After all, what kind of competition is more quantifiable than one that’s run not on a field or on a wooden floor but on a computer? What kind of sport should be able to more defined by stats than eSports?

“The dream is the end of bullshit,” says David Joerg, owner of the StarCraft statistic website GGTracker. “eSports is the one place where everything the player has done is recorded by the computer. It’s possible—and only possible in eSports—where we can have serious competition and know everything that’s going on in the game. It’s the only place where you can have an end to the bullshit that surrounds every other sport. You could have bullshit-free analysis. You’d have better conversations, better players, and better games. There’s a lot of details needed to get there, but the dream is possible.”…

“There are some stats in every video game that are directly visible to the player, like kill/death,” GGTacker’s Joerg said. “Everyone will use it because it’s right in front of their face, and then people will say that stat doesn’t tell the whole story. So then a brave soul will try to invent a stat that’s a better representation of a player’s value, but that leads to a huge uphill battle trying to get people to use it correctly and recognize its importance.”…

You could make the argument that a sport isn’t a sport until it has numbers backing it up. Until someone can point a series of statistics that clearly designate a player’s superiority, there will always be doubters. If that’s true, then it’s true for eSports as much as it was for baseball, football and any other sport when it was young. For gaming, those metrics remain hidden in the computers running StarCraft, League of Legends, Call of Duty and any other game being played in high-stakes tournaments. Slowly, though, we’re starting to discover how competitive gaming truly works. We’re starting to find the numbers that tell the story. That’s exciting.

This is a two part problem:

1. Developing good statistics based on important actions with a game that have predictive ability.

2. Getting the community of gamers to agree that these statistics are relevant and can be helpful to the community.

Both are complex problems in their own right and this will likely take some time. Gaming’s most basic statistic – who won – is relatively easy to determine but the numbers behind that winning and losing are less clear.

Dunphy’s home from Modern Family isn’t exactly a middle-class home

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The home used as the Phil and Claire Dunphy household on Modern Family is up for sale:

[G]et ready for a blast of memories from “Modern Family,” the Golden Globe & Emmy-winning ABC prime-time comedy that was filmed at 10336 Dunleer Dr., Los Angeles, CA 90064.

The price is $2.35 million, but listing agent Mitch Hagerman of Coldwell Banker Previews International said there’s decent income potential given the fact that TV producers have forked over generous fees for the right to film exterior shots of the property. He said it would be up to the new owners to negotiate with ABC Studios…

The home is a traditional, two-story style and has been impeccably remodeled, complete with crown molding, wood floors and upgraded appliances. It sits on a prime street in the coveted Cheviot Hills neighborhood. Hagerman says the home should sell pretty easily on its own merits.

“It’s a charming, gorgeous, cozy, family-oriented and classic-style home in a fantastic neighborhood where there’s very little inventory,” he said.

The home offers 4 bedrooms with en suite bathrooms, plus a powder room. The home last sold for $1.97 million in 2006.

A nice and expensive home. This is interesting because the Dunphy family is portrayed as being fairly middle-class. Phil is a realtor who is not the most successful or smart (these are running points throughout the shows). Claire recently returned to work, working for her father’s closet business, after not working. Where do they get all of their money? How do they afford such a nice house?

Sociologist Juliet Schor argued in The Overspent American that one problem of post-World War II television is that it showed an increasingly lavish middle-class lifestyle. The evolving image of the middle-class on television showed families with more money and possessions and not much discussion about how they could afford it all. The Dunphys are supposed to look like normal Americans yet their lifestyle is pretty wealthy with little concern about money and pretty nice possessions. Schor suggests portrayals like this pushed more Americans to consume more.

In other words, the show plays off the idea the extended family depicted is a “typical” American family yet its class status is far from what many American families experience.

Court says director of “The Queen of Versailles” did not defame film’s subject

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The director of an interesting film about the largest single-family home in the United States was cleared of defamation charges in court:

Lauren Greenfield received a best director nod at the 2012 Sundance Film Festival for her documentary, “The Queen of Versailles.” Now, two years later, she has another victory to her credit, which may ultimately prove more important to her career.

An arbitrator at the Independent Film and Television Alliance ruled that her movie about David and Jackie Siegel was not defamatory. This seems to end Siegel’s effort to punish Greenfield for her film, which centered in large measure on the family’s profligate ways — building a 90,000 square-foot mansion (to replace the 26,000 square-foot home they lived in); spending $1 million a year on clothing, and having a household staff of 19…

Siegel charged the film defamed him and his company. His claims were dismissed by a federal court judge, which is how the case ended up in arbitration.

“Having viewed the supposedly egregious portions of the Motion Picture numerous times, [the Arbitrator] simply does not find that any of the content of the Motion Picture was false,” the arbitrator, Roy Rifkin, ruled.

An unflattering but true story can still be told. But, if the story was not going to be positive, why participate in the first place or go through the whole process after things had turned sour? As I note in my quick review of the film, the story is less about the big house and more about what happens when someone loses lots of money and disconnects from his family. Also see a September 2013 update on the fate of the home.