Category Archives: Entertainment

What the Beatles on iTunes might mean for their popularity

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Apple and iTunes have apparently reached an agreement with the Beatles to sell their songs in digital form. This puts an end to a long-running stand-off between the Beatles and Apple.

But what does this mean for the Beatles popularity? A few thoughts:

1. Does this mean the Beatles become more known for their singles or single songs rather than albums? Since buyers on iTunes can pick and choose, might they not just pick the Beatles songs they know versus some of the hidden gems (or the worse songs)?

2. This may mean that a whole new generation of young music fans will now have the opportunity to browse the Beatles catalog and find that they enjoy it. But in the long run, will these digital sales help boost the popularity of the Beatles or will their popularity just slowly die out as their generation of music fans slowly disappears?

3. How many fans will be angry that the Beatles have “sold out” to video games and digital music? Are more commercials next?

(UPDATE 10:04 PM 11/16/10: EW.com has a list of other big acts that have not released their music to iTunes. This list  includes AC/DC, Garth Brooks, the Smiths, and Kid Rock.)

Quick Review: The Cove

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On the surface, The Cove is not a typical film that I would watch: a documentary about nature. But I found The Cove to be engaging. A few thoughts about this award-winning 2008 documentary:

1. The story follows the actions of Richard O’Barry as he tries to expose the slaughter of dolphins in a protected cove in Taiji, Japan. O’Barry’s backstory is very interesting: he was the trainer for Flipper but immediately switched sides to protect dolphins after one of the show’s dolphins died (he says she committed suicide) in his arms. O’Barry assembles a team of people to help expose what is going on in Taiji as some in that community attempt to stop him. To me, O’Barry is the heart of this film – his decision and actions to try to save dolphins shows remarkable dedication and stubbornness in the face of difficult odds.

2. It is hard not to like dolphins: they are intelligent and are graceful. But O’Barry suggests one part of their appearance that may work against them: they appear to humans to always be smiling and this masks the times when they are in pain or are suffering.

3. Why do whales and dolphins get all of this attention, both in this film and from zoo or aquarium attendees? There are plenty of animals that are mistreated and locked up. There has to be an interesting social history here.

4. One of the side plots in this film is Japan’s role in the International Whaling Commission. This international body has difficulty stopping Japan from doing anything. Again, this could be a whole story or film in itself: how Japan skirts international law and advisories to conduct whaling activities.

5. One strong point of this documentary is that O’Barry’s team actually attempts to do something (and it is set up like the plot of some action film) as opposed to documentaries where people talk the whole time and viewers are shown statistics.

Overall, I enjoyed this film: the fight against what happens in Taiji, Japan makes for an interesting tale.

(This film was highly rated by critics: it is 96% fresh at RottenTomates.com with 116 fresh reviews out of 121 total.)

Making big money in real estate in the online world

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A number of stories in recent years have highlighted the increasing amount of real money changing hands in online games or environments. A recent example comes from the Entropia Universe where a gamer sold his property for over $600,000:

Take, for instance, what just went down on Planet Calypso, where one of Entropia’s wealthier players has sold off his interests in a “resort asteroid” for an eye-popping $635,000.

The seller is Jon Jacobs, also known as the character ‘Neverdie’. He originally purchased the asteroid in 2005 — eventually converting it into the extravagant resort ‘Club Neverdie’ — for the then-record price of $100,000. For those keeping score, that’s a gain of over $500,000 in just five years. In nerdier terms, that’s an ROI of 535%. Match that, Citibank.

And we’re not talking about Monopoly money here. Launched by Swedish developer MindArk in 2003, Entropia Universe features a real-world, fixed-rate currency exchange that works just like chips at a casino: players trade real cash for in-game funds called PEDs (Project Entropia Dollars), which can at any point be redeemed back for real, spendable cash — minus a transaction fee, of course.

Jacobs was making money from the get-go, however, having earned back his initial hundred-grand investment in just eight months. How? By selling rights to hunt and mine on the asteroid, as well as selling off bits of real estate. He worked it much like any real world landlord, really, but with a lot less red tape and a lot more graphics.

With that kind of a return on investment, will more people flock to these realms to make money? How many people in the world make a steady income based on online gaming?

There has to be a good sociological study being done out there about these types of transactions…

Considering the portrayal of single women

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In the beginning of a film review, a British reviewer highlights a sociological study about how people treat and interact with single women:

Apparently, couples still shun the female singleton, fearful that she’ll wreck their marriages or at least their dinner-party numbers. One survey found that half of its sample never had single women as visitors, and 19% knew no single women at all. Casual disregard for this social group goes unremarked. Our prime minister insists that marriage must be prioritised and rewarded. The last government repeatedly identified “hard-working families” as its abiding concern. WAGs, meanwhile, are celebrated as much as manless Anistons are pitied.

In a world centred on cosily coupled units, leftover women labour under an enduring disadvantage. When they’re not ignored completely, they’re expected to provide tireless but unrecompensed support for people who matter more than them, as babysitters, carers or shoulders to cry on. When a mother is called upon to bunk off work to attend a nativity play, her unpartnered colleague is expected to take up the slack.

Cinema hasn’t done much for the benighted single woman.

The sociological study in question included 48 Australian married people. It is an interesting area of gender roles to consider; the norm in society is still to find a spouse or partner by a certain age. Cultural values and norms plus supportive public policies put pressure on people. This is particularly the case in many churches where singleness is frowned upon.

But hasn’t there been some pushback in the cultural realm on this front? Perhaps not in movies but television shows like “Cougar Town” have taken up this issue. Some of it may depend on the end goal: is the message of such films and TV shows (and books and music) that single women need to find men/husbands to be complete?

The kind of music debates I like: the Beatles vs. the Rolling Stones in the psychedelic era

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This past Sunday’s Chicago Tribune featured a book excerpt where two music critics debated the merits of the Beatles and the Rolling Stones in the psychedelic, late 1960s, Sgt. Pepper vs. Their Satanic Majesties Request era. An interesting read if only for the suggestions that the Rolling Stones laughed their way through the psychedelic era while the Beatles, Paul McCartney in particular, couldn’t stop themselves from wanting to be accepted by the British establishment.

The next biggest US TV network: Univision

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Amidst lower ratings and numerous articles about how to avoid TV all together, the big four American TV networks have some major competition: Univision. With already decent ratings and a growing Hispanic population, Univision may just be the network of the future:

With double-digit ratings growth this season, Spanish-language broadcaster Univision is off to a better start than any of the major English-language networks, and the future is promising as well.

The new census is expected to show a nearly 45% increase in the number of Hispanic Americans since 2000, to a total of 50 million. This couples with continuing audience erosion at the major networks and Univision’s recent deal with Mexican programer Grupo Televisa, which locks up the source of much the network’s popular programing for at least another decade.

Just a few years ago, the notion of Univision catching and surpassing them would have had mainstream network executives rolling with laughter. They’re not laughing now.

And they’re not talking publicly about it either: When asked to comment, the Big Four nets refused.

So while the big 4 networks are chasing edgy 18-49 year olds (or older viewers), Univision is capitalizing on the big demographic changes taking place in America.

How will the big 4 networks respond? They have been having troubles for years, losing viewers to cable and other media. Might we see some crossover programming from Univision and other Spanish-language stations reach the air through older broadcast networks?

College courses created by students include looks at Mad Men and Seinfeld

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The University of California-Berkeley has a program called DeCal. In the program, college students teach other college students for college credit. One recent article about the program highlights how some of the courses take a longer look at television shows:

That’s because the popular show based in the 1960 is the subject of a fall course.

It’s a two-unit class that meets once a week in the school’s DeCal program. It focuses on the “thematically, symbolically and historically rich television series.” DeCal classes give a platform to students who want to dig into atypical subjects, according to the university.  This fall’s topics range from a class on the “Sociology of Seinfeld” to longboarding. DeCal is run by the students themselves, but the classes give real college credits…

The teachers…say they are covering the following themes:

  • contemporary culture
  • politics of the 1960s
  • the role of women, class and society
  • the family unit

Students have more than just a television show to watch as homework, they are also given supplemental reading assignments.

I can imagine one category of reactions to the article: “of course, when you let students teach their own courses for credit, you will end up studying television shows.”

On the other hand, there are courses like this at other schools where media content, film, movies, and other cultural products, are analyzed. As one of the student teachers suggests, Mad Men could be read/watched as saying important things about our culture. Not only does it offer some reflection on early 1960s life, it also could be read as how people in 2010 view that era.

Overall, teenagers (8-18 years old) and emerging adults (18-25) consume a lot of media-produced stories like Mad Men. Courses like this might help them better understand what they are viewing and how it lines up with the real world.

(I would be curious to know what kind of evaluations these kinds of courses receive. Do students perceive that they learned more or less in a student taught course? And then, did they actually learn more or less?)

Vatican newspaper says Homer J. Simpson is a Catholic

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The Vatican’s newspaper recently said that they consider Homer Simpson to be a Catholic:

But in an article headlined “Homer and Bart are Catholics”, the newspaper said: “The Simpsons are among the few TV programmes for children in which Christian faith, religion, and questions about God are recurrent themes.”

The family “recites prayers before meals and, in their own peculiar way, believes in the life thereafter”…

“Few people know it, and he does everything he can to hide it, but it is true: Homer J Simpson is a Catholic,” insists L’Osservatore Romano.

This must be a very loose definition of what a Catholic is or how one should act. In fact, it strikes me as a very American sort of idea: Homer’s Catholicism is a grab-bag of practices and beliefs of his own choosing. Is Homer’s approach to religion really much different than many Americans?

But one point the newspaper makes seems accurate: the Simpson’s portray “old-fashioned family values” in a way that few other shows do today.

Banksy and the Simpsons: a wink to what watching the show actually means

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Part of the long-term appeal of The Simpsons has been its ability to effectively play with ambiguity: it has had the ability to both mock television in general while at the same time creating a likable cast that reach resolutions that are not that different from many sitcoms. Should viewers revel in its put-downs of all aspects of society or should they enjoy the heart-warming family outcomes?

The latest stunt on this front involves the elusive British street artist Banksy:

The episode, “MoneyBART,” opens with an extended “couch gag” — the opening sequence in which the Simpson family takes its place on their sofa — created by British street artist Banksy. The artist’s dark vision gives viewers a horrifying look at how he imagines the hit show and its lucrative merchandise are made: sweatshop conditions for its animators; unsafe conditions for producers of its apparel; boxes sealed with the tongue of a disembodied dolphin head; the center holes popped out of its DVDs with the horn of a shackled, emaciated unicorn. Really…

Were the show’s creators trying to draw attention to the unethical business practices an animated series must engage in to remain competitive? Are viewers meant to draw conclusions about our own complicity as we consumers indirectly fund companies that enslave people overseas? Or was the sequence merely a stunt calculated to bring attention — negative or not — on an aging, fading series?

While an interesting opening sequence that was longer than normal and contained typical Simpsons absurdities (like the unicorn), is this really edgy or new? Any television watcher should know what is really going on with shows: they are about making money. In its early days, the Simpsons was a rebellious show, drawing in a young audience and selling a lot of merchandise. Today, it is still about making money (and perhaps sowing ground for a second successful movie). The Simpsons may now be part of American culture but that is not why the show is still on television.

Ultimately, this may simply be about gaining attention. And with the show then moving on to a typical 22 minute storyline, can the opening really be construed as some sort of powerful statement?

Learning the norms of audience behavior at the orchestra concert

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Going to a symphony orchestra concert of a major group, such as the Chicago Symphony Orchestra, is an event: certain behavior is expected of the audience. An article from the Chicago Tribune offers some tips and a comment from a musician about how to learn about going to the orchestra:

It is extremely hard for anyone without significant exposure to classical music to truly understand it, he said.

“It’s something that has to be cultivated,” he said. “Beethoven’s music is filled with philosophy. …You can’t just come to one concert and understand it.”

But he hopes beginners try. One concert, after all, can lead to another. And another.

I would like to know when exactly symphony halls became places of quiet and decorum. If you read about classical music in the early 20th century, such as in The Rest Is Noise, some concerts, particularly those featuring modern music by the likes of Stravinsky and others, were places of displayed emotions. Classical music wasn’t just nice background music; it was music that was tied to bigger ideas and revolutionary thoughts.