Fame Game Research Articles

The Drama of Celebrity by Sharon Marcus

MLR, .,   Poland in an attempt to learn their family’s history without going to Auschwitz itself. Good work, Ewa! U  M S T e Drama of Celebrity. By S M. Princeton and Oxford: Princeton University Press. .  pp.;  b/w illustrations. $.; £. ISBN –––– (ebk –––-). In one of the most widely researched and acutely conceptualized books that I have had the pleasure to read in recent years, Columbia’s Sharon Marcus rewrites the history of the modern phenomenon of celebrity as it has developed over the past two hundred years. Ranging across times and places in remarkable fashion, and appropriately illustrated by over one hundred black-and-white images, e Drama of Celebrity refuses to reduce its explanation of the fame game to a single privileged source. Instead, it keeps in play—in an intellectually exhilarating fashion—the triangular geometry of celebrities, media, and publics (also in the plural), who are all shown to contribute to the perpetual reshaping of the particular instances of this phenomenon in the ‘suspenseful, interactive, serial drama’ (p. ) of the book’s title. As such, Marcus nuances a commonly held view that celebrity is created by media, which she traces back to Daniel Boorstin’s  study, e Image: A Guide to Pseudo-Events in America (London: Vintage), noting on her opening page that ‘many people still cast stars as deceptive effects of a sinister, monolithic, and all-powerful cause: the media’ (p. ). As she continues: ‘e notion that celebrities are famous merely for being famous persists to this day, appealing to laudable desires to resist authority and unmask falsehood’ (p. ). Although she is too polite to say it, this is also a notion that informs a sizeable chunk of our teaching about culture’s relationship to power. Marcus does not want to throw the baby out with the bathwater. Hence she brings back into play the agency and subjecthood of stars (referencing Taylor Swi’s  Tumblr post ‘We don’t ask you for free iPhones’, which forced Apple to pay royalties to artists) and fans (not least through richly original archival work on their scrapbooks), while retaining an informed sense of the ideological and technological power of the media. In this version, the media are powerful, but not all-powerful, and ‘we can opt out’; as Marcus points out, ‘No one ever did time for ignoring One Direction or not liking Miley Cyrus’ (p. ). Intriguingly, she deconstructs the largely negative scholarly take on celebrity as media manipulation by historicizing the origins of that scholarly discourse in ‘the first serious analyses of celebrity in the s and s’, whose reference points were ‘the authoritarian Hollywood studio system and the [. . .] personality cults formed around Adolf Hitler and Benito Mussolini’ (p. ). Although e Drama of Celebrity bears witness to historical change, its author is unusually, and refreshingly, keen to stress continuities, perhaps because she herself is already something of an academic star, as one of our best literary and cultural historians, and does not feel the need to make a splash by overdramatizing the  Reviews diachronic process. And it is her sense of the past that gives genuine weight to her reading of the present. For in each of the eight chapters (from ‘Defiance’, via ‘Sensation’, ‘Savagery’, ‘Intimacy’, ‘Multiplication’, and ‘Imitation’, through to ‘Judgment’ and ‘Merit’), the book’s central figure, Sarah Bernhardt, returns as ‘the godmother of modern celebrity culture’ (p. ). Indeed, the authority and acumen with which Marcus traces the roots of modern celebrity back to the nineteenth century are not surprising when one recalls her previous scholarship on English and French culture of that period in her two monographs: first, Apartment Stories: City and Home in Nineteenth-Century Paris and London (Berkeley: University of California Press, ), and then Between Women: Friendship, Desire, and Marriage in Victorian England (Princeton: Princeton University Press, ). e audience for her latest book deserves to be yet wider still. U  C N W Character as Form. By A K with illustrations by D S. London and New York: Bloomsbury. . vi+ pp. £.. ISBN ––– –. Character as Form is no conventional academic book. Punctuated with small illustrations by artist David Scher, and divided into sections with quirky subheadings such as ‘Another way to use this...

Last-Minute Hall of Fame Game Fumble May Be Costly

This year NFL fans were forced to wait an extra week after the NFL canceled the 2016 game out of safety concerns that resulted from mismanaged field construction. Several NFL analysts and former players applauded the league’s judgment in canceling the game out of player safety concerns. Not surprisingly, though, fans were not as pleased with the league’s seemingly last-minute decision to cancel the game.

Optimal convergence in fame game with familiarity

A modified fame game is proposed by introducing familiarity between agents in the evolution process. We assume that since an agent is recommended, the forgotten probability by the taker decreases with the times that it has been recommended. At the same time, a tunable parameter is introduced to character the correlation between interaction strength and the familiarity. We find that there exists an optimal parameter value leading to the fastest convergence. We attribute this optimal phenomenon to the balance between the recommendation efficiency and the success rate of recommendation. Moreover, some other relevant characters, such as the time interval of forgetting each agent and the success rate of recommendation, are also investigated to understand the dynamics of the modified fame game.

Trial and Error

Though Raymond Halliday landed a job in television not long after moving to the North, he had never tried to make a new name for himself. It was enough for him to be working the nightshift at a local cable TV station, where he sat for nine-hour stretches before a wall of monitors flipping between black-and-white scenes of criminals and cops and commercials for the likes of litigation law firms and mattress salesmen. In that giant casino of a city where the stakes are so high in the fame game that a player can either become a household name or remain a stranger in his own neighborhood, Raymond counted himself in with neither the lost nor the found. He did not go there to be discovered but to avoid being condemned. After all, as he had conceded, driving was simply not working out for him. While still living in an anonymous suburb on the southern edge of the country, Raymond had totaled four cars in two consecutive accidents. The first time, he made a left turn in front of a young couple on the way to their friends’ wedding reception. The husband had carried his wife out of the passenger side of the wrecked sports coupe and, after gently laying her and her light pink dress on the dirty pavement, had scowled, “That’s right, look at her, you son of bitch!” Raymond’s next car tumbled across the asphalt like debris in a windstorm when the front of a speeding station wagon plunged into its passenger side door. The three people from the station wagon were already standing on the street by time Raymond had climbed out of his own edifice of bent steel and broken glass. The other driver, a tall heavy man no more than twenty years old, walked off from his crying kid sister and his cane-supported mother to meet the disoriented Raymond, whereupon the young man slightly furrowed his brow and stated, “You know you ran a red light?” Faced with an unmanageable new rate of auto insurance and a lack of desire to tempt fate any further, Raymond left his hometown for the city with the largest public transportation system in the country. But although he was being carried around by trains and buses now, he still always carried with him his driver’s license, which had been the most accepted proof of who he was. One morning after leaving the TV station, Raymond went to the Department of Motor Vehicles to renew his driver’s license. After pulling a number out of the dispenser and finding a seat beside another empty chair, Raymond scribbled his new address on an official form. Then, while listening to the ringing of a service bell and its accompanying automated voice announcing other people’s numbers, he took out the driver’s license

Playing the Fame Game: Bibliography, Celebrity, and Primacy in Late Antique Spain

This article positions the Spanish strand of the De viris illustribus in its social and literary context. I argue that, rather than simply continuing the biographical catalogues of Jerome and Gennadius, Isidore of Seville and Ildefonsus of Toledo used their lists of illustrious Spanish Christian leaders to assert the historical status of the Spanish church, particularly in relation to Rome and Constantinople. I also suggest that lists of famous Christians functioned on a second level, as a medium for articulating competition between the great bishoprics of Spain. At the start of the seventh century, Isidore put together a selection of literary bishops from Spain to demonstrate the historical excellence of the Spanish church and to establish his brother, Leander, as its preeminent ecclesiastic. A few decades later, Ildefonsus constructed a list of miracle-working monk-bishops from Toledo as part of a broader campaign to assert Toledan primacy in Spain. Recording the deeds and writings of late antique, Spanish celebrity Christians was thus central to the establishment and articulation of ecclesiastical power, creating connections to the past and establishing a reservoir of institutional and charismatic power on which future generations were keen to draw.

Toward Understanding the Fame Game: The Effect of Mortality Salience on the Appeal of Fame

Although the appeal of fame in society seems to be increasing, experimental research has yet to examine the motivations that may underlie this apparent appeal. As a first step toward doing so, we conducted three studies to assess whether concerns with mortality play a role in these phenomena. Based on terror management theory and research, we hypothesized that reminders of death would increase people's desire for fame and admiration of celebrities. In Study 1, mortality salience led participants to report greater desire for fame. In Study 2, mortality salience produced greater interest in having a star in the galaxy named after oneself. In Study 3, mortality salience increased liking for abstract art when it was attributed to a celebrity. These findings suggest that the appeal of fame is based in part on the desire for symbolic continuance beyond death. Discussion focused on the implications of these findings and remaining issues.

Readers panel - Use and abuse in the fame game

Readers panel - Use and abuse in the fame game

I Don't Care If I Never Get Back...: A Baseball History Tour

I Don’t Care If I Never Get Back…A Baseball History Tour Chris Epting (bio) The baseball road trip has become something of a national obsession it seems. Visiting ballparks, chasing after favorite teams—whatever the main passion, there is something about the road and baseball that simply goes hand in hand. Or hand in glove. I love that the concept of a baseball road trip has taken off like it has, as it has allowed me to focus on a personal mission and actually share it with an active audience. My passion is discovering and uncovering the nooks and back roads where baseball history took place, including former ballpark sites, shrines, museums, plaques, statues, and the like. Ever since I was young, playing baseball and growing up in the early 1970s, I always wondered as I stared at ancient baseball photos: Can I go stand where the Polo Grounds used to be? What about Ebbets Field? As I got older I began visiting places around the country, and little by little I was able to put together the book I always wanted to write: Roadside Baseball. And now, if I may, I'd like to take you on a tour of what I consider to be some of the most interesting and historic baseball places in the land, the spots I believe every true baseball fan is better for visiting. Ready? Grab your mitts and let's go . . . The Birth of Baseball? Elysian Fields (former site) Corner of 11th and Washington Streets Hoboken, New Jersey It's a fact that Frank Sinatra was born in Hoboken . . . but was baseball too? Perhaps. We know that several games similar to baseball had been played in Europe and the United States as far back as the 1600s, but it wasn't until the 1800s that baseball's closer cousin, "town ball," began to take shape. Certain facts are clear. In 1842 several men, including Alexander Cartwright and Daniel "Doc" Adams, began drafting rules for a game called "baseball." In 1845 they [End Page 136] formed the first actual baseball "club," the Knickerbocker Baseball Club, and adopted twenty rules not previously included in earlier editions of the game, including three strikes per batter, three outs per inning, tags and force-outs in lieu of trying to hit the batter with the ball, and the inclusion of an umpire. On June 19, 1846, the Knickerbocker Baseball Club, under these new rules, played the first ever organized game versus the New York Nine. With Cartwright umping, the Knickerbockers lost the four-inning game, 23–1. Soon after, using these rules, the sport caught on. In 1869 the first professional team, the Cincinnati Red Stockings, were formed, and in 1871 the first nationwide professional league was founded. Was this the first game ever, the so-called birth of baseball? It's hard to say for sure. But until something displaces the seminal games that took place in Hoboken, it is hard to dispute. Doubleday Field The Baseball Hall of Fame 25 Main Street Cooperstown, New York 607-547-7200 It almost doesn't matter that Abner Doubleday was probably nowhere near Cooperstown during that famous summer of 1839 when he allegedly laid out the first baseball diamond and limited the number of players per side to nine. Enough baseball has been played on this field now to give it a unique history, Doubleday or no Doubleday. Here on the "mythical" birthplace of baseball, a former cow pasture called Phinney's Farm, two pro baseball games are played during each annual Baseball Hall of Fame induction weekend: the Hall of Fame game and the Hall of Fame Weekend New York–Penn League game, hosted by the Oneonta Tigers, who normally play their home games at nearby Damaschke Field. Huntington Avenue Grounds (former site) Original location: Left field (NW), Huntington Avenue; third base (SW), Bryant (Rogers) Street, now Forsyth Street; first base (SE) New Gravelly Point and New York, New Haven, and Hartford Railroad tracks; right field (NE), New Gravelly Point Northeastern University Boston, Massachusetts 617-373-2211 Before the 1912 opening of Fenway Park in Boston, Huntington Avenue Grounds was home to the Boston Red Sox...

Losing the fame game

Losing the fame game

Fame and Disability

Fame and Disability

The Fame Game: The Peculiarities of Sports Image Rights in the United Kingdom

The Fame Game: The Peculiarities of Sports Image Rights in the United Kingdom

The Fame Game: The Peculiarities of Sports Image Rights in the United Kingdom

A new legal term has entered the lexicon of sport fans. Image rights, broadly defined as the commercial appropriation of someone's personality, including indexes of their image, voice, name, and signature, became widely discussed among sports fans after the sale of a leading European soccer player Louis Figo to Real Madrid in 2000. Since then a range of legal, economic, and political arguments have developed in the United Kingdom as to what image rights actually are, their legal efficacy, and their potential impact on developments in the long-standing relationship between sport and the media. In particular, this article focuses on the problematic definition of the term in the United Kingdom context and how it relates to certain economic and commercial transformations in British sport. Using soccer as its primary focus, this article traces the rise of image rights clauses in player contracts. This process is analyzed in the context of rapid and dramatic change in the media coverage of the sport in what is called the new media environment. This article concludes with a range of issues raised by the tightening controls of both proprietary and contractual rights related to sports images and information, and its potential impact on the wider economy and culture of new media sport.

The fame game.

The fame game.

The name of the journal fame game: Quality or familiarity?

The name of the journal fame game: Quality or familiarity?

The name of the journal fame game: Quality or familiarity?

The name of the journal fame game: Quality or familiarity?