Rivalries

Friday night my friends and I went to the New Trier Homecoming football game.  As we walked to the field, we passed a group of Loyola students wearing maroon shirts that said "Beat New Trier!" on them.  They were shouting and making obscene gestures at other New Trier fans.  Now in case you didn't know, New Trier played Main South for homecoming, not Loyola.  This struck me as a rivalry gone way to far.  I would have understood if it was Loyola fans at a NT vs. Loyola homecoming game but it wasn't.  The came to a New Trier game that had nothing to do with them just to watch New Trier lose and be obnoxious.  This just seems absurd to me.  Why do two High school football teams have such an intense rivalry that kids see going to NT games to be obnoxious as a good use of time on a Friday night.  If you think thats ridiculous, think about this, after every New Trier vs. Evanston basketball game at Welsh-Ryan Arena there are multiple fights which often results in kids spending the night in the hospital, or prison.  Last year, one fan was beat over the head with a brick, this resulted in serious head injuries, the perpetrators were arrested and expelled.  Its hard to imagine a stupider and more pointless reason to ruin your life and harm another's.  Sports were invented as a fun passing of time but they have become a cause for violence and animosity even at the High School.  I also believe the schools are contributing to it.  Do you think that a basketball game versus Evanston would be as big a deal if it was held at the school like all the other season games?  I don't.  Yet the schools continue to rent out Welsh Ryan Arena and heighten the rivalry and anger.
Let me know what you think.

A Violent Interest

While I was researching Timothy Treadwell for a comment, something very interesting occurred to me yesterday.  I began to research in the usual for our generation, I pulled up google and began typing T-i-m-o-t-h-y- -T and the second i typed the T for Treadwell, a google suggestion popped up.  It predicted that I was going to search "Timothy Treadwell death audio."  I could't believe it.  Google suggestions is based on other searches from other computers, so that means that so many people had searched for an opportunity to listen to Treadwell's suffering as he was being torn apart that google assumed I must be searching for it too.  This seemed demented and abnormal to me, but I started thinking about modern interests and entertainment and of course, television was the first to come to mind.  I searched for a list of the most popular television shows.  I discovered that among television's most viewed programs are Bones, True Blood, NCIS, Criminal Minds, Dexter, and Law and Order: Special Victims.  These are all shows about death, murder and over all pain and suffering.  Video games also came to mind.  Some of the most popular video games are Call of Duty, Halo, Battlefront, Grand Theft Auto and Gears of War.  These are all games about war, murder, crime and death.  I wondered, why is that what Americans find most entertaining?  Too further my research, I googled the worst and infamous name that I could think of, Jeffrey Dahmer, who was arguably the most troubling serial killers of American History.  First and foremost, I only had to type J-e for google to predict that I was going to research Jeffrey Dahmer Murders.  I clicked on the first link that came up to try to understand what so many people were researching.  First was an at depth description of who dahmer was, what he did and what happened to him.  It seemed normal until I continued scrolling down to the next section.  The site showed pictures of what the police found at Dahmer's apartment!  (I knew so many people were researching this because I found links that had been viewed almost a million times.) I wondered why would someone ever post these horrors and who would seek them out?  However I found that millions of people were searching for them.  This small amount of rough research has really made me question American mainstream interest and entertainment.  Why is it that we millions of people search for chances to view pain, violence, murder and suffering?

Please Comment with your opinions.

The Death of Jazz

This past weekend I attended the Chicago Jazz festival.  As I looked out at the sea of people I thought about how many consider jazz to be a dead and forgotten art form.  The Walrus news magazine wrote an article called "Life after the Death of Jazz" and the Chicago Tribune has written a piece called "The Death of Jazz."  This is only to name a few.  It is safe to say that the general consensus of researchers is that Jazz has been mostly forgotten.  You know that music you have on your ipod that your parents don't understand or like?  Whether its rock, pop, rap or electronic music I think you know what I'me talking about.  There was a time when jazz was that music.  Jazz was that rebellious youthful fad that bonded teenagers like us together at one point.  Now of course your thinking, that point has passed, its happened to other musics too.  But think about the fact that there are still plenty of people who are really into 80's heavy metal or 70s hip hop.  So why is jazz so scarcely appreciated, especially among young people.  Guitarist Pat Metheny has the right idea in my opinion, here are his thoughts. 

A point Metheny makes is that in all genres there is both good and bad music.  However the reason jazz has been forgotten is because it takes more work to discover the good stuff because there is so much bad music surrounding the good music.  Furthermore, usually only the bad music is advertised when it comes to jazz.  You never see an advertisement for the jazz greats living today like Chris Potter and Nicholas Payton, you have to find that yourself, yet there are commercials advertising the music of Kenny G.  The reality is good jazz is hard to find, and Americans don't want to do the work to find it, because music is about pleasure, thus we believe there shouldn't be any work involved.  This really got me thinking about the stereotype that Americans are lazy.  There is a reason jazz is still popular in almost all other civilized nations but ours.  Everything is so simple when it comes to music here.  You hear something on mainstream radio, and you can purchase is from your computer or even your smart-phone.  With jazz its not that simple.  As Metheny points out, you have to talk to people to find good jazz.  Americans don't want to do that which in my opinion is why jazz is so under-appreciated in America today.