SelwynDuke.com

Hollywood Blast: Bursting Our Eardrums in a Background-noise Culture

By Selwyn Duke

“What did he say? Huh? Okay, well, pass the popcorn and put on the sub-titles.” This is not only a common experience people have with today’s entertainment; it also reflects something deeper about our culture.

It’s not often that reading a Washington Post article makes me exclaim “Thank you. Thank you!” But that’s precisely the reaction I had when imbibing a Friday piece by movie critic Ann Hornaday. Titled, in part, “How auteurs diss their audiences,” it criticizes a modern film phenomenon long a pet peeve of mine: background — or, should I say, foreground and all-around — music so ear-splittingly loud one cannot hear the dialogue.

I know you’ve noticed this. Most everyone has. My late father, a WWII veteran with hearing somewhat damaged by reports in training and battle, complained years ago already that actors in movies would “whisper.” I’ve been with other people who’d have to crank the volume of a movie up high so they could decipher the dialogue, and the commenters’ verdict under Hornaday’s article is unanimous. “I used to think I was going deaf,” related one reader. Numerous others said they’d wait till they could watch a film at home so they could turn on subtitles. For my part, I’m no fan of modern movies; there’s a good chance the work isn’t my cup of tea if the actors weren’t dead when I became alive. But I have watched enough of them to know that, despite my fairly acute hearing, I can only decipher parts of the dialogue and must fill in the blanks.

Read the rest here.

Influential Beats: The Cultural Impact of Music

By Selwyn Duke

The Devil really is a fellow of wine and song,
Playing a tune that trades right for wrong.
The tone-deaf man will hear his notes and say,
What could be wrong with being festive and gay?
And when a sad tomorrow that tune does bring,
Few will know that from their own lips it did spring.

There perhaps is something primal about music, something that can touch or twist one’s soul. This is no doubt why Ludwig van Beethoven said, “Music can change the world,” and William Congreve famously wrote that music “has charms to soothe a savage breast.” And music’s power is tacitly acknowledged all the time. For example, last year Michelle Obama lent her name and image to a rap album that complements her “Let’s Move!” anti-obesity campaign. And while a track featuring a trio called “Salad Bar” and a song entitled “Veggie Luv” is easy to mock (given their mother’s priorities, I can just hear Sasha and Malia singing, “And we’ll have fun, fun, fun till daddy takes the tea cake away”), there is method to the first lady’s madness. As Boston College professor emeritus William K. Kilpatrick wrote in his book Why Johnny Can’t Tell Right From Wrong:

[We] tend to learn something more easily and indelibly if it’s set to a rhyme or song. Advertisers know this and use it so effectively that we sometimes have difficulty getting their jingles out of our heads. But there are more positive educational uses. Most of us learned the alphabet this way and some of our history as well (“Paul Revere’s Ride,” “Concord Hymn”). Recently some foreign language courses have been developed which employ rhyme and song as the central teaching method. Similarly, one of the most successful new phonics programs teaches reading through singing.

Quite true. To this day I can recite a McDonald’s Big Mac-recipe jingle I heard as a little child — verbatim. And I only had to hear the weather advice “Red sky in morning, sailor take warning; red sky at night, sailor’s delight” once to remember it forever. But since all power can be misused, can music possibly usher in a storm of civilizational upheaval? If it can soothe the savage breast, does it not follow that it can also inflame it?

Read the rest here.

Obama’s Henchmen

By Selwyn Duke

The big questions now surrounding Barack Obama’s triumvirate of scandals is “How much did he know?” and “When did he know it?” Former presidential advisor David Axelrod made the point that the government is “so vast” that the president can’t possibly know all that transpires. Of course, this is one of the best arguments against big government a leftist ever put forth, yet the truth is that Axelrod is right. But this brings us to an important, and usually ignored, point.

Obama knew what his underlings were (or should have known) when he picked them up.

My phraseology references an old American Indian tale about a little boy who, after doing a rattlesnake a series of good turns, was nonetheless bitten by the serpent when the charitable endeavors were complete. When the lad registered shock and asked why the snake would do such a thing, the rattler replied, “You knew what I was when you picked me up.”

Read the rest here.

Is YouTube Cooking Stats for Obama?

By Selwyn Duke

News aggregator DrudgeReport.com is currently linking to a YouTube video of a government schoolteacher instructing young students to praise Obama in song. While this is shocking, there is an even bigger story here. Consider this: the video’s “views” counter listed only 363 views as of 1:04 p.m. EST on Sept. 24.

But at the same time it had 2,279 comments.  

What’s wrong with this picture?

Wild, Wild Kanye West

By Selwyn Duke

Everyone has seen the video of Kanye West running up onto the stage and snatching the microphone away from 19-year-old country music star Taylor Swift at Sunday's MTV video music awards.  West wasn't happy with the choice of Swift as winner and went into a rant about how Beyoncé should have won.  Now, just for the record, I've heard neither Swift nor Beyoncé sing and thus can't render any definitive judgments on this subject.  What I do know, however, is that I wouldn't consider it positive if an over-rated oaf like West was lobbying for me.