Cultural cringe is the belief that what’s happening where you live is inferior to the vastly more exciting stuff happening elsewhere. In the 1950s, Australian intellectuals and creative types felt they had to go to London to be taken seriously. But these days, our cultural cringe is all about New York.

Hundreds of iconic books, movies and TV series have cast a sentimental glow over Gotham, the Big Apple, the City That Never Sleeps. With its colourful districts, its famous architecture, its smart, vociferous media and even its takeaway coffees in those blue, Greek-themed paper cups, New York seems impossibly glamorous.

People in Melbourne, where I live, tend to treat New York artists, writers, musicians and designers with awestruck respect. Then they book a plane ticket and head over there so they can pepper their conversation with phrases like, “When I was in New York…” “I wish I was back in New York…” and “Oh, this? I got it in New York.”

I’m jack of it. I don’t care how huge the sandwiches are in the delis, how awesome the street art is, and how cool the warehouse gigs and vintage stores are. I mean, we’ve already got overpriced frocks, graffiti and crappy garage bands. How unique could New York possibly be?

So I decided to prove two things. One: as Judy Garland once said, there’s no place like home. And two: you don’t need to shell out thousands to get that authentic New York experience. I was going to make a pilgrimage to New York… without leaving Melbourne.

First stop: Brooklyn, 3012. My friends have rambled on endlessly about this epicentre of alternative culture, and Jay-Z and Santigold assure me that in Brooklyn, “we go hard, we go hard.” With my ironic T-shirt illustrating a well-known internet video of a cat pretending to play the keyboard, I feel sure I’ll fit in.

Brooklyn has a laid-back, industrial chic. I’ve read it had lots of derelict spaces that hipsters have turned into apartment lofts and party venues. I can definitely see lots of run-down warehouses and shipping containers, but without local knowledge, I’m not sure which ones host acoustronic chillcore gigs and pop-up bars, and which ones just contain highly flammable children’s toys made in China.

Melbourne likes to boast about its cool bars hidden in laneways, but Brooklyn really ups the ante. Instead of negotiating alleys filled with stinking garbage, I actually dodge trucks filled with stinking garbage, heading to the local tip. Perhaps the local hipsters are still crashed out from their previous night’s partying, since the place is deserted except for the constant procession of garbage trucks. As the sun beats pitilessly down on the concrete and chain-link fences, I feel like I’m in the Spike Lee joint Do The Right Thing. Wish I had a boombox to play ‘Fight The Power’.

I cross the (West Gate) bridge to cosmopolitan Chelsea, 3196, the hub of New York’s contemporary art scene. I can’t wait to check out some galleries, and I’m also keen to sample food from the local delis and ethnic eateries.

There are lots of intriguing clothes and craft shops but the art, I’m sorry to say, is a bit of a bust. Maybe I’m just a philistine, but the best of a bad lot is a picture of a purple Buddha that has been turned into a wall clock. Was it meant to meditate on the passage of time?

Never mind – time to get some grub. There are probably more cake shops than galleries in Chelsea, tantalising my tastebuds with such exotic fare as vanilla slice, gingerbread and lamingtons. I’m tempted by various unfamiliar treats, but I decide to really challenge myself: I purchase a chicken kebab… during the day… while stone cold sober. And the weirdest thing? A real Chelsea kebab tastes much like the Melbourne kebabs I’ve gnawed on. I can’t wait to tell my friends this in a thoughtful, worldly voice.

Madison Avenue (Dandenong North), 3175 is my next stop. “Mad Ave”, as it was known in its glamorous mid-20th-century heyday, is the hub of the New York advertising and design industries. Every creative person worth their salt dreams of pounding this pavement! I’m wearing retro glasses, so I’m looking forward to some nods of recognition from my peeps.

But I have to admit it’s more sedate than I imagined. The ad agencies are set back off the street and look more like ordinary houses than the shimmering modernist skyscrapers I’d imagined. The signage is pretty poor, too, so I’m not even sure which agency is which. I’m afraid to buzz for entry in case they mistake me for a door-to-door salesperson and tell me to get lost. Which is ironic, I think you’ll agree.

So far New York isn’t living up to my expectations. But things look up once I hit the beach in the Hamptons, 3188. Known as a playground for the rich and famous, seaside villages Hampton and East Hampton are full of artisan bakeries, gourmet provedores and designer boutiques aimed at women of a certain age. I’m secretly hoping I’ll spot hip-hop mogul P Diddy popping in for pastizzi, so I can score an invite to one of the legendary “white parties” the area’s real-life Gatsby hosts every year. But I guess he’s back at his estate.

The sea is twinkling in the late afternoon sun. Little sailboats scud past on the horizon, and sweat gleams on the bare shoulders of the joggers grimly negotiating the steep beach steps. I stroll the beach, sand in my toes. This is the life! I only wish I were wearing a floaty white linen outfit like Diane Keaton in Something’s Gotta Give.

And then I spot it! The mysterious dead creature that was found on the beach here… the Montauk Monster! Good lord! Of course, internet pundits say it’s nothing but a jellyfish, but I know it washed up from the shadowy biological research facility on nearby Plum Island.

Refreshed, I return to Manhattan to visit Carnegie Hall, 3163. My guidebook says this hallowed concert venue was built by philanthropist Andrew Carnegie in 1891, but the Carnegie Library and Community Centre looks much newer than that. A plaque in the foyer tells me it was renovated in 2006. Ah, that explains it.

When I climb upstairs to the hall itself, I can’t believe how small it is. No wonder the New York Philharmonic moved to Lincoln Center in 1962. A gaggle of old men are playing cards in the corner. I wonder if they’re musos or roadies, but it seems rude to interrupt them.

By now the light has turned golden, and what better place to watch a New York sunset than the city’s iconic green playground, Central Park (Malvern East), 3145? I sit on the grass watching dogs frolic and joggers trot past, although I guess the chess players have packed up for the day. It’s really peaceful: an oasis of calm in the hectic city. I could really go a hot dog right about now, but there isn’t a stand in sight.

Dusk is heavy in the sky by the time I reach Broadway (Camberwell), 3124. They say the neon lights are bright on Broadway, but this is patently untrue: beneath the leafy canopy of oak trees I can barely make out my own jazz hands. I have been hoping to see Cats… and here come a few now!

The singing’s not what I hoped for – more like ear-piercing yowling and hissing – but at least you can say it’s authentic. That’s the satisfaction I take with me as I reluctantly head home. Now, when people have obnoxious conversations about how awesome New York is, I’ll be able to chime in. I’ll know what I’m talking about. I’ve been there.

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE

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I have had just about enough of whimsy. That is, I can’t stand the way that supposedly discerning people are so quick to laud films, music, TV, comedy and books that sentimentalise the everyday lives of self-consciously free-spirited oddballs.

Cinematic whimsy appears in European quirkfests such as Amélie, or Richard Curtis’ excursions into British foibles, but American independent cinema saw it congeal into a treacly formula in which eccentric yet adorable protagonists find love or reconnect with family. Whimsical literature has largely pilfered its arch tone from McSweeney’s Quarterly Concern, the satirical journal founded in 1998 by Dave Eggers. McSweeney’s is a true cult publication in that its fans idolise Eggers and ape his writing style … to varying degrees of success. Its website, Timothy McSweeney’s Internet Tendency, is best known for its lists of quotidian observations and pop-culture detritus.

As for whimsy in music, don’t get me started! Singer-songwriters who sound like cats miaowing. Incompetent “outsider” musicians. Wacky poncers in face paint and costumes. Lo-fi beardies yodelling away in home recording studios.

I ought to like this stuff, given that I invent stupid ditties to serenade my cat, and am telling you all this while wearing a cardigan, 1950s nerd spectacles and a T-shirt that says “I Heart Sydney”.

Yet rare is the whimsy that escapes my wrath. Last week I got in a tedious online stoush over the cuddlesome trailer for the forthcoming film adaptation of Where the Wild Things Are. And just yesterday, I almost lost my lunch upon reading that American gourmet supermarket chain Trader Joe’s doesn’t have a mere catalogue, but a “culinary compendium” so that people may “shop savvily, adventurously and value-ably”. BLEHHHHH!

Like my nausea, anti-whimsy backlashes come in waves. Critics uncap fresh bottles of haterade every time a new and even more egregiously quirky text emerges. Whimsy-hating has now become so widespread that apologists for whimsy call the backlash “lazy” “cynical”, “unimaginative” or “uninformed”. This irritates me further, because I put plenty of effort, passion, imagination and research into hating whimsical culture.

My fundamental beef with whimsy is that it sets such low standards for its audiences — and for makers of culture in general. When whimsy becomes shorthand for “originality” or “wit”, people start to believe that a self-conscious performance of oddness is all that’s required to be creative.

Worse, they begin to view whimsy’s auteurs as self-evident geniuses incapable of making a creative misstep. This uncritical adoration really galls me.

Why do smart, cultured people find whimsy so attractive? Here is my theory: most people who are into whimsical culture are in their 20s and 30s. They may be having that disheartening revelation that they may not change the world after all, that their lives will be ordinary and unremarkable.

Whimsy banishes such grim thoughts because it finds magic in the mundane. It makes people feel that life can be amazing and special if serious situations are viewed lightheartedly and trivial things taken seriously. And given it deliberately evokes a child’s wide-eyed way of being in the world, whimsy is refreshing because it promises a reprieve from the dullness of adulthood.

Whimsy also reassures audiences that the lives of little people matter. It emphasises that everyone, no matter how eccentric, shares a precious humanity. And if incompetent poseurs can get record deals, it just shows you don’t have to achieve much to be admired for what you do.

These are legitimate consolations, and people deserve to get them from a better class of pop culture than whimsy. It’s possible to rediscover joy without letting irony colonise your everyday life or reducing your personality to a collection of quirks.

Mike Leigh’s 2008 film Happy-Go-Lucky is an instructive contrast. Its protagonist, Poppy (Sally Hawkins), is a zany London schoolteacher with a compulsion to make other people happy. Poppy could have been a whimsical pixie who transforms the lives of everyone she encounters. But Happy-Go-Lucky is set in the real world, where quips don’t solve problems and Poppy’s contentment makes people suspicious or jealous.

Unlike indie musicians yearning for catharsis, Poppy doesn’t need an angst-ridden “journey” to ignite her zest for life. And her story was funny without needing to wink at the audience. Even my hatred-wizened little heart swelled with hope. Isn’t that odd?

Poor Britney Spears. 2002 just wasn’t her year. Her album, Britney, was supposed to attract a sophisticated older audience, but ended up eroding her pre-teen fan base. Her movie debut, Crossroads, bombed at the box office. She was dumped by her boyfriend Justin Timberlake, who then went on to enjoy the ‘grown-up’ success Britney had craved. He even dissed Britney in his video for ‘Cry Me A River’. And to cap it all off, long-time sponsor Pepsi replaced Britney with the more bootylicious Beyoncé Knowles.

Pepsi’s decision is telling. Britney is no longer “the choice of a new generation”. Her fans are growing up, and they’re tired of her slick beats, her coy gyrations and exposed midriff. And for an increasing number of cynical teenagers, Britney is symptomatic of everything that’s crass and fake about the music industry.

Accordingly, a new kind of female pop singer has arisen. She won’t wear skimpy clothes. She writes her own songs and plays her own instruments. She doesn’t enjoy being pawed by backup dancers. And she’s not afraid to speak her mind, even if it means biting the hand that feeds her. In short, she’s the Anti-Britney.

The first singer to be dubbed ‘the Anti-Britney’ was Michelle Branch, 19, a guitarist and songwriter. Her first album for Madonna’s record label Maverick, The Spirit Room, sold close to a million copies in its first year of release. Branch went on to collaborate with Carlos Santana on ‘The Game of Love’, picking up a Grammy for Best Pop Collaboration With Vocals.

Branch’s first single, ‘Everywhere’, had critics hail the then-17-year-old as the antidote for Britney Spears’ sugar-coated pop. Branch took this in her stride. After all, she’d also heard herself called a “younger Sheryl Crow” or a “happy Alanis Morrissette”. “It’s natural for people to want to compare someone to something,” she said. “It’s just a way of asking what the sound’s like.”

Vanessa Carlton, however, is irritated by the ‘Anti-Britney’ tag. “It’s funny,” she says, “You’d never hear Rage Against The Machine compared to Radiohead. But if they were women, they’d be compared all the time.”

21-year-old Carlton was a waitress in Hell’s Kitchen when she was discovered by A&M Records. The smash single ‘A Thousand Miles’ followed, and her album Be Not Nobody sold 300,000 copies in three months. Rolling Stone magazine rated her in its “Top 10 Artists to Watch in 2002″.

Anti-Britneys have since been scrambling out of the woodwork. Reality-TV ingenue Kelly Osbourne impressed sceptical critics with her her chubby insouciance and her self-penned album Shut Up. Portuguese-Canadian Nelly Furtado burst onto the scene in 2001 with ‘I’m Like A Bird’, and won a Grammy in 2002 for Best Female Pop Vocal Performance.

Perhaps the most notorious Anti-Britney, however, is another Canadian: Avril Lavigne. The 18-year-old singer of ‘Complicated’ and ‘Sk8er Boi’ leaves whimsical folksiness to other Anti-Britneys, projecting a tomboyish skater-punk image. She’s also far less diplomatic than Branch and Carlton.

“I don’t like that term — ‘the anti-Britney.’ It’s stupid,” Lavigne told US magazine Entertainment Weekly. Yet, in an interview with Chartattack.com, Lavigne railed against Britney. “She’s not being herself [onstage] because she’s dancing like a ho … She’s doing one thing and saying another thing, y’know? It’s definitely not what I’m going to do.”

‘Being yourself’ seems to be the thing that unites musically diverse Anti-Britneys like Lavigne, Carlton, Furtado, Branch, Osbourne, and even jazz singer Norah Jones. They all claim to write and play their own material, to have found fame as a result of their own talents, and to express themselves through music. Yet, despite their insistence on individuality, their soundbites all seem creepily alike.

“When I sing, I have a sense of peace,” says Branch. “I become the core person of who I am – the essence of me.” Lavigne says: “I want people to know that my music is real and honest – it came from my heart. I was just being true to myself.” Osbourne’s website gushes: “She wasn’t a diva, didn’t wear belly shirts, and would not pander for the ever-present cameras. No way. She would be herself or all bets were off.”

Do these pop stars really have that much control over their music and image? Are they indeed ‘real’, or just a clever marketing exercise to woo jaded teenagers? Making arbitrary distinctions between Britney Spears (fake) and the Anti-Britneys (real), as many journalists have done, certainly won’t answer these questions.

But the Anti-Britney does reveal a lot about the roles our society allows for young women. It’s all about two ideas: authenticity and ‘girl power’.

Artists, or even entire musical genres, have risen and fallen on their ‘street cred’, and musicians despise nothing more than ‘selling out’. This issue of authenticity in pop music is still hotly debated by music scholars. Crudely, anything symbolising music as a craft, a culture or an aesthetic is deemed authentic, while anything that symbolises music as a disposable, marketable product is deemed inauthentic.

So, actually playing a musical instrument, particularly an acoustic instrument, is a mark of authenticity, as is writing songs that reflect your own experience, and performing live. Slogging it out at the lower end of the industry is also authentic, as is independent record production and a love of music for itself rather than as a path to fame and fortune.

According to these criteria, there are plenty of talented female singers who come across as ‘authentic’: PJ Harvey, Tori Amos, Ani DiFranco, Fiona Apple. But it’s all subjective. Let’s take another look at Britney Spears: a singer from a very young age; a veteran of the Mickey Mouse Club; a hard worker and entertaining stage performer.

The Anti-Britney singers, too, call ‘authenticity’ into question, successfully combining both authentic and inauthentic elements. For a start, their claims to write their own material need to be taken with a grain of salt.

“I sit down with a guitar player usually, and I come up with melody and lyrics,” Avril Lavigne explains. Michelle Branch wrote roughly half the tracks on her album; her singles were co-written by her producer. Kelly Osbourne’s album was also co-written.

Because the Anti-Britneys have muddied the idea of authenticity, music industry pundits have worked overtime to separate ‘real’ from ‘fake’. In an interview with Norah Jones, the Herald Sun’s Cameron Adams lumped Avril Lavigne in the ‘inauthentic’ camp along with Britney and ‘N Sync, presenting Jones as the one, true Anti-Britney, with eight Grammys to back her up.

Other critics are calling the Anti-Britneys hypocrites. New York’s Village Voice branded Michelle Branch’s album a turkey, noting: “Only in a biz discombobulated by teenpop could an 18-year-old with an acoustic guitar be plausibly promoted as ‘the anti-Britney.’ Don’t you remember? Writing Your Own Songs means zip, zilch, nada.”

Alternative music site Anti-Music.com mounted an even more sarcastic critique, imagining the record company board meeting at which Avril Lavigne and Kelly Osbourne were ‘created’. An imaginary exec says breezily: “Let [Avril] contribute something to the songs like a lyric or two so we can tell the fans that she co-wrote the songs.” The imaginary exec adds that it’s irrelevant if Osbourne can’t sing: “Once we get into the studio we can make her voice sound like anything we want.”

In an industry that defends its own ideas of authenticity so savagely, it isn’t so surprising that the Anti-Britneys have adopted such a liberal interpretation of ‘writing their own songs’. When critics present them as pop puppets, their only chance of musical credibility lies in appearing in control of their music.

Lavigne told Us Weekly: “I started working with these really talented people, but I just wasn’t feeling it; the songs weren’t representative of me … Then they started talking about having people write for me, but I had to write myself. I had to do my music.”

There’s a much-maligned term for young women who appear in control: ‘girl power’. This fluffy, pro-active brand of feminism was popularised by the Spice Girls, another group of female singers who faced accusations of being ‘manufactured’. Girl power, also called ‘post-feminism’ or ‘power feminism’, holds that girls can dress how they want, say what they want, and achieve anything they want, if they just try hard enough.

Girl power dovetails nicely with the Anti-Britney mantra of ‘being yourself’. In her 2002 book Girl Heroes: the New Force in Popular Culture, Queensland academic Susan Hopkins describes how pop culture impresses on young women the importance of pursuing one’s own destiny. More and more, Hopkins writes, the average girl’s desired destiny is no longer romantic love. It’s fame.

The Anti-Britneys perfectly combine the twin goals of ‘being yourself’ and ‘being a celebrity’. Nobody encapsulates this better than Kelly Osbourne, who has always lived under media scrutiny, and still comes across as independent and down-to-earth. Kelly freely admits she owes her pop success entirely to her famous dad.

By contrast, the other Anti-Britneys’ biographies are a girl-power twist on the Cinderella story, with some gestures towards musical authenticity thrown in for good measure. They write songs alone in their bedrooms, or slog it out in sleazy dives and county fairs, before being miraculously discovered by the new Prince Charming: the record company executive.

Young women who grow up craving celebrity see the Anti-Britneys as proof that raw talent and chutzpah will get them to the top. After unleashing Christina Aguilera on an unsuspecting public, A&M Records president Ron Fair produced Carlton’s record Be Not Nobody. Fair claims Anti-Britney artists succeed because their audiences can relate to them. “The same kids who two years ago were buying ‘N Sync and Christina Aguilera records are responding to styles of music that are more song- and artist-driven. They’re two years older, and the realism of singers singing their own songs has a lot of appeal.”

Branch says: “There are so many ‘put together’ musical acts today, younger girls write and tell me – ‘They all dance and sing and look so perfect, and it’s hard to watch them, then I heard your music and now I’m writing songs.’”

But getting famous is never that easy. Being yourself, says Hopkins, often means reinventing yourself. And girl power is as much about canny image management as self-confidence. “In current media culture, to be ‘mere’ image is to be empowered,” Hopkins writes. “And girl-power celebrities are acquiring more control over content and delivery in the image trades.”

The old chestnut of ‘creative control’, however, doesn’t account for the fact the Anti-Britneys work in a highly structured, money-driven industry in which just about everything – and everyone – gets manipulated. You have to wonder how much they believe their own publicity. As a marketing executive famously told Fortune magazine in 1997: “If you want to sell to the girl-power crowd, you have to pretend that they’re running things; that they’re in charge.”

While girl power may make young women feel good about themselves, it definitely has its limitations. “I have a lot of autonomy – I co-produced my album, I wrote my album, I co-direct my videos,” Nelly Furtado says. “But until I have my own television network, my own magazine and my own video network, I can only do so much.”

Norah Jones adds that her own success is more about luck and timing than anything else. “I think it’s a good record,” she says, “but there are a lot of good records in the world that nobody hears.”

For now, the pop pendulum seems to be swinging in the Anti-Britneys’ direction. Former pop queens Spears and Aguilera have both turned to heartfelt, personal lyrics. Aguilera’s current album Stripped features songs about her abusive childhood and the ode to self-esteem, ‘Beautiful’, as well as the sexed-up nymphet numbers for which she’s famous.

And Britney? “I feel basically more in control, and I think it shows in my music,” she said recently. “I’m just trying to do the kind of music I like.”

Sidebar: “Who are the Anti-Britneys?”

Michelle Branch
Born: Arizona, USA
Age: 19
Songs: ‘Everywhere’, ‘The Game of Love’ (duet with Santana)
She’s the Anti-Britney Because:
She’s been playing guitar and writing her own songs since she was 14. She understands that she’ll be pigeonholed as an artist, and rolls with it. But she won’t dress ‘sexy’. “I write music, and that’s why I’m here. … I never want the way I look or what I’m wearing to be the focus.”

Nelly Furtado
Born: British Columbia, Canada
Age: 23
Songs: ‘I’m Like A Bird’, ‘Turn Out The Light’
She’s the Anti-Britney Because:
She could sing in Portuguese at age four, was a rap MC at 14, and has collaborated with both Portuguese folk singers and hip-hop stars including Missy Elliott and Jurassic 5. She plans to follow Whoa, Nelly! with a world music-influenced album.

Vanessa Carlton
Born: Pennsylvania, USA
Age: 21
Songs: ‘A Thousand Miles’, ‘Beautiful Day’
She’s the Anti-Britney Because:
She’s a trained pianist whose songs are influenced by Beethoven and Debussy as well as Pink Floyd. She refuses to categorise her music. “I think once people listen to the record, they’ll realise I’m just me.”

Avril Lavigne
Born: Ontario, Canada
Age: 18
Songs: ‘Complicated’, ‘Sk8er Boi’, ‘I’m With You’
She’s the Anti-Britney Because:
She’d rather hang out with the guys than flirt with them. She’s full of skater-punk attitude, wears singlets, jeans and men’s ties, plays guitar, and writes biting songs from her own experience.

Kelly Osbourne
Born: London, UK
Age: 18
Songs: ‘Papa Don’t Preach’, ‘Shut Up’
She’s the Anti-Britney Because:
She’s not skinny and blonde, she swears like a trooper, wears eccentric clothes, and has an alt-rock boyfriend called Bert. What’s more, she doesn’t shrink from attributing her success to her famous dad.

Norah Jones
Born: Texas, US
Age: 23
Songs: ‘Don’t Know Why’
She’s the Anti-Britney Because:
Her jazz-flavoured album Come Away With Me wasn’t even supposed to be a pop hit, yet she won eight Grammys (count them!) in 2003. She sings like an angel, and plays piano like a charm, yet her music baffles radio stations.

Sidebar: What’s next? The anti-Anti-Britney

Former Bardot member Tiffany Wood is well known to readers of Ralph magazine. She appears, bikini-clad, on the cover of this month’s edition, rebranded as Tiffani.

Tiffani is busily working on a solo album, and has written or co-written 22 songs. Sound familiar? Well, she describes her guitar-based album as “pretty much a cross between Michelle Branch and Avril Lavigne.”

Tiffani seems to be following the path beaten by former R&B star Pink, who also reinvented herself as a rock chick. But while Tiffani may be aiming for Anti-Britney attitude, stripping down for an audience clearly doesn’t bother her. Contrast this with Vanessa Carlton: “I can wear clothing on every part of my body and feel just as sexy as if I was wearing a bra and panties.”

Hardened by her time in the pop machine, Tiffani also doesn’t spout platitudes about authenticity. She says of her experience with Bardot: “It taught me to treat the music industry as a business and, much as it’s something you love to do, everybody is out there trying to make money out of you.”

It’s a pro-wrestling thing. Two wrestlers face off, grappling, staggering, gouging, kneeing, body-slamming. It’s spectacularly visceral. They know the rules, and blatantly disregard them. The commentators screech in outrage, but the ref never notices. One wrestler hits the ground like a sack of spuds. Smacked down.

In Australia, another kind of smackdown is in progress. In the red corner: humanities academics. In the black corner: journalists. Their holds and trademark wrestling moves? The English language. The arenas? Newspaper columns and television programs. The prize? No less than the right to determine the intellectual direction of this country.

So far, it seems the academy is losing. People who think, publish and teach for a living have less and less credibility in John Howard’s Australia. At best, their opinions aren’t deemed relevant to ‘ordinary Australians’: they’re caricatured as members of ‘elites’ or ‘chattering classes’. At worst, they’re traitors to their country, ‘infecting’ innocent youth with their anti-Australian calumnies.

How can humanities academics escape this squirrel grip? How can they redeem their ideas from columnists’ accusations of irrelevance and superficiality? And given a political climate in which research is increasingly judged on utility, how can academics persuade an apathetic Australian public that thinking critically is the most useful skill of all?

These are big questions, and I can’t answer them here. But any answers will have to deal with the academy’s continuing failure to communicate with journalists. So, I want to look critically at the language used in the journalist-academic wrestling match. After all, this is a rhetorical smackdown. I’m interested in two 2003 skirmishes, which I’ll call ‘Miranda Devine vs Cultural Studies’, and ‘Andrew Bolt vs Media Watch’. Bolt is an associate editor of Melbourne’s Herald Sun, and his bi-weekly column is one of the paper’s institutions. Devine’s column appears on Sundays in Sydney’s Sun-Herald. Both are regarded among Australia’s leading conservative commentators.

Many academics regard them as irritating, inconsequential reactionaries. At a conference I attended in July, Devine’s stab at cultural studies was summarily dismissed as ‘just more of the old culture-wars rhetoric’. While comforting in the presence of one’s peers, this refusal to engage with Devine’s thinking is alarming — and dangerous. Of course, the Australian humanities have long railed against a culture they claim is anti-intellectual, and journalists have long propounded anti-elitism. Ideas like ‘cultural cringe’, ‘ivory tower’ or ‘tall poppy syndrome’ have been around so long they’ve entered the vernacular.

What is new, and urgently deserving of critique, is the vindictiveness of the language used by Devine and Bolt to condemn new work in the humanities. What’s also new is the target of all this vitriol — the young disciplines of cultural studies, media studies, or as Bolt puts it, “every tertiary course with the word ‘studies’ in it”.

Bolt and Devine have three rhetorical wrestling moves. First, theirs is the language of economic rationalism. They argue that taxpayers should only fund academic research with practical, useful, ‘real-world’ outcomes. Second, it’s the language of relevance. They claim that ideas they don’t deem ‘useful’ are not important to their readership. Third, it’s the language of citizenship. Bolt, especially, implies that academic thought should never undermine the government of the day.

Combining these three moves, Bolt and Devine deliver glancing blows to projects that analyse everyday practices. They imply that academic investigation of these things is both unnecessary and irrelevant, because ‘ordinary Australians’ already understand them. Yet in a weird paradox, they condemn humanities academics for using arcane language and theories that are incomprehensible to laypeople.

Bolt and Devine contrast humanities research with scientific, technological and industrial projects. Where humanities research is ‘superficial’, these projects are ‘useful’. Where the humanities are ‘pessimistic’ and ‘self-loathing’, the sciences give our country a ‘future’. Where cultural studies projects drain the public purse without enriching Australian knowledge, technology and commerce projects form productive connections between the academy and the private sector. Ultimately, where humanities graduates become fit for nothing else but more useless wankery, science and commerce graduates end up in high-powered, respected jobs in politics and big business.

Miranda Devine vs Cultural Studies

Nowhere are these ideas more clearly crystallised than in Devine’s column, “Super PhD loses out to blondes and vampires”. Devine’s “super” pun is intentional. She tells us that a “talented commerce graduate”, Wollongong University doctoral candidate Zaffar Subedar, is unable to find government funding for his “boring, though worthy, topic of risk in superannuation.” And Subedar knows exactly who’s getting the money he’s missing out on: “people researching things such as whether Jesus is gay and blondes are dumb”.

Faced with Subedar’s plight, Devine feels compelled to ask herself (and her readership) if we’re “getting value for money from our nation’s most educated brains”. She spends the rest of the column listing PhD thesis topics which did obtain Australian Postgraduate Award funding; and which, she suggests, provide poor value for money indeed.

In 2001, Andrew Bolt wrote a similar column, published under the headline “Scholarship or stupidity?” Like Devine, Bolt lists academic projects awarded Australia Council Discovery Grants. For Bolt, these ‘explain’ why “few of our academics have any impact in public debates — other than a negative one, thanks to the never-say-die Marxists and the navel-gazing Deep Sighers of postmodernism who so infest higher education.”

Devine’s language is subtler. Her examples of cultural studies projects are carefully chosen for their combination of banal, everyday subjects and academic jargon. That way, the projects demonstrate their own silliness. She cites a PhD on tattoos by Macquarie University’s Dr Nikki Sullivan, entitled “Writings in flesh: subjectivity, textuality, ethics and pleasure.” The academic reader might be intrigued. But to casual readers of a Sunday newspaper, this topic makes no sense at all. And Devine wants it that way.

Devine also suggests these PhD topics don’t involve hard work or rigorous thought — rather, that they’re a highbrow version of dole bludging, in which taxpayers shell out for students to do things they already enjoy. Adele Morey, for her PhD on the marriage breakdown of Nicole Kidman and Tom Cruise, “read The Australian Women’s Weekly, Woman’s Day, New Idea, NW and Who Weekly”. And on ANU student Alex Leonard’s project on “the surf culture of Bali”, Devine notes drily: “It’s a tough job, but someone has to do it.” Her conclusion? “Maybe there should be an inverse proportionality formula applied. The more ‘fun’ a topic, the less chance of funding.”

Devine’s column provoked several academic counter-moves, with mixed results. The University of Queensland hosed down her claim that Dr Rollan McCleary had received $51,000 to write a “PhD about the supposed homosexuality of Jesus”. Six weeks before Devine wrote her column, the university had issued a ‘statement of clarification’ on its website, spelling out that “Dr McCleary did not explore the issue of Christ’s sexuality in any detail, but made a very brief reference to the subject by citing the views of two other authors.” It was more convenient for Devine’s argument, however, to blur the distinction between McCleary’s APA-funded thesis and his subsequently produced book, which did make claims surrounding Christ’s sexuality.

A less successful rebuttal came from Dr Nikki Sullivan, whom Andrew Bolt had also attacked in a column denouncing the “Bodily Modifications” conference she organised at Macquarie University. An enraged Sullivan emailed Devine to defend her thesis. Unfortunately, she played right into Devine’s hands by using exactly the same impenetrable language that Devine had so ridiculed: “Furthermore, insofar as my research seriously engages with the social, political and ethical effects of such practices, it is of no less import than research that looks at the risk involved in superannuation”. Consequently, Devine required only an acid, two-word rejoinder to demolish Sullivan’s entire argument. “Got that?”

Andrew Bolt vs Media Watch

In 2001, Bolt asked: “Who on God’s earth will read these works for which we are paying so dearly?” In 2003, he sniffed out a much more heinous misappropriation of taxpayer funds: Asian studies scholar Alison Broinowski’s book About Face: Asian Accounts of Australia. That Broinowski “can get so much help from the Australia Council to write books you’ve never heard of is one reason you should know of her,” Bolt writes. “And get cross.”

But Bolt’s quarrel isn’t really with the Australia Council. He writes that Broinowski “shares the now fashionable view of our grant-fed ‘artists’ — that this land of unprecedented freedom, tolerance and riches is in fact a sewer of evil.” For Bolt, Broinowski’s “self-loathing judgment” that Australian foreign policy encouraged the 2002 Bali bombing is just more of the old “shame-Australia-shame drivel”. He writes: “If our artists didn’t flaunt their ‘national shame’ in opposition to the national pride that is the ‘popular attitude’ of the rest of us, how would we know they were artists?”

With this one sentence, Bolt distances Broinowski and her ‘artistic’ ilk from all other Australians, who presumably are throbbing with “national pride”. His implication? That Broinowski doesn’t deserve the privileges of Australian citizenship — like government funding. But his argument relies on the same shift in language that allowed Devine to construe Rollan McCleary’s PhD as a “gay Jesus” project. About Face investigates how Australia is viewed by Asian commentators. But Bolt sets out to pin these overseas writers’ comments on Broinowski herself.

“There’s a difference between endorsing and reporting, a difference Bolt is ignoring here — dishonestly,” says ABC-TV Media Watch host David Marr. Bolt once branded Marr “gleefully cruel” and “a bouffant moralist”; and their animosity flared up again when Marr used his nationally aired program to pull apart Bolt’s Broinowski column. “Bolt is not a man to let the truth stand in the way of an insult,” says Marr. “The book he was putting the boot into … received no funding whatever from the Australia Council.” Instead, Bolt’s outrage stems from Broinowski’s “worst crime of all — pursuing an academic career.”

Bolt immediately sent Marr an email demanding an on-air apology. “I consider an academic career to be something very respectable indeed, and admire those close friends of mine who lecture in our universities.” This is “encouraging”, Marr replies, “and we trust future columns in the Herald Sun will reflect this view.” He adds that “in the end, the uphill battle you face is to convince your Herald Sun readers that you are being fair and truthful. We suggest you concentrate on the task.”

This suggestion didn’t impress Bolt. He sent another email to Marr, returning to his favourite theme of wasting taxpayers’ money. For Bolt, Marr had “hijacked Media Watch and turned it into what seems a $1.4 million taxpayer-funded vehicle for attacking your ideological enemies”. This accusation has a certain irony. While Bolt had originally identified Broinowski’s taxpayer-funded academic treason as the enemy, his ire quickly shifted to Marr. In the recriminations that followed, Broinowski’s research — or the need to defend it — was quickly forgotten.

Alison Broinowski herself didn’t step into the ring at all. Her viewpoint was endlessly quoted, implied and speculated upon, but she never issued a comment. In some ways, her silence is encouraging. Cultural studies academics shouldn’t need to apologise for their ideas — after all, critical thinking is what they’re trained, and paid, to do. However, academics shouldn’t sit back and let journalists treat their disciplines as resources for slow news days. As Nikki Sullivan tried to tell Miranda Devine, understanding why we devalue certain ideas is one of the most valuable knowledges we can have.

But Devine’s continued ridicule of Sullivan shows that, no matter how important the idea, people lose interest if it’s poorly expressed. Obtuse, jargonistic writing may win funding and the respect of one’s academic peers, and it might stem the dreaded slide into ‘anti-intellectualism’, but it won’t win over the public. And if academics think engaging with the public isn’t their job, they’ve missed the point.

Like pro-wrestling, the smackdown between academics and journalists can be pretty entertaining. It certainly sells newspapers. But if researchers in the humanities don’t start learning some new holds, they could soon be down for the count.

Hold onto your tinnies, Australia. A new social subgroup has been found in our midst: “cashed-up bogans”, or cubs for short.

The social analyst David Chalke recently described cubs as being “well-heeled, skilled blue-collar workers” in their 30s and 40s. “Executive plumbers,” he called them. “On over $100,000 a year.”

There’s the clincher. Cubs have money, and they want to spend it on flash stuff. Like cars, boats and motorbikes, luxury clothing and expensive home entertainment systems.

We’ve heard plenty about aspiration and consumerism in Australian politics. Both major political parties have attempted to woo the “aspirationals”, just as marketers have discovered the cubs.

And in these bounteous, economic rationalist times, we’ve become homo consumen, to borrow a phrase from Australian Heartlands, a recent book by the academic Brendan Gleeson.

Still, what makes cubs so different from the rest of us? Surely most of us have aspirations. And surely we all work hard in order to live in comfort.

More to the point, why does this imaginary market segment go by the ideologically loaded name bogan?

Many Australians think they know exactly what a bogan is. Some say it’s a socio-economic class. Some say bogans are a subculture. And others say that tastes or pop-cultural references make someone a bogan.

Ultimately, bogans are none of these things. Rather than being grounded in reality, bogan is an abstract idea that is expressed through culture. And when we talk about bogans, we’re really talking about national identity.

Bogans pop up in the media and in the public imagination as figures that are both embarrassing and “un-Australian”, and instantly, recognisably “hyper-Australian”. We use the idea of the bogan to quarantine ideas of Australianness that alarm or discomfort us. It’s a way of erecting imaginary cultural barriers between “us” and “them”.

Put simply, the term cashed-up bogan suggests that there’s something embarrassing and unsophisticated about a certain sort of spending – that some aspirations are somehow wrong or misguided. By labelling these tastes bogan, we don’t have to consider the unsettling proposition that they’re our tastes, too.

Under the hazy notion of “aspiration”, consumerism in Australia has become a battleground of national identity. Interviewed for George Megalogenis’s new book The Longest Decade, John Howard describes self-employed blue-collar workers – in other words, cubs – as “a natural fit with me”.

Perhaps more accurately, the Howard Government has created this fit by linking neo-liberal social and economic policies with a brand of Australian identity emphasising the acquisition of social status and material wealth.

Naturally, Mark Latham sees things differently. In the introduction to The Latham Diaries, he savagely implicates consumerism in what he sees as a slide from community and collective responsibility to destructive individualism. Australians under Howard, says Latham, seek comfort in buying things and prying into the lives of others.

Buying big-ticket items speaks to a desire for respect, for others to acknowledge hard work and success. But as Latham points out, consumerism can’t fulfil our aspirations. It just puts us on a relentless treadmill of working longer hours to sustain our “lifestyle”.

Still, as a nation, we’ve invested heavily in the idea that material wealth is a virtue and a reward. Hell, we’ve voted for it. Four times. It makes us distinctly nervous to consider that we might be wrong.

So we dispel this anxiety by displacing our hunger for possessions onto someone “else” – those trashy bogans. Kath and Kim are cubs. And their cashed-up bad taste is something to point at and laugh.

It suits the political ideology of the bogan to declare certain tastes – and people – “lower class”, because that makes it their fault and not ours. The French sociologist Pierre Bourdieu declared that people in blue-collar occupations can never fulfil their aspirations to higher social status, no matter how much money they have, because their natural taste is for the utilitarian and necessary. When they splurge on luxury goods, they go comically awry.

But as another French sociologist, Bernard Lahire, has found more recently, only the very rich and the very poor have a coherent set of consumer practices. Most people’s tastes are a highly dissonant mixture of posh and trash, expensive and cheap. Plenty of people like beer and barbecues. And plenty of people like lattes and chardonnay.

Let’s hope this stupid term “cashed-up bogan” doesn’t catch on, because when we talk about cubs, we’re refusing to take responsibility for debating our own culture and identity. Such squeamishness about cash gives Australians no credit.

Claire Walsh (right) with Michael Moorcock (left) and JG Ballard (centre), in September, 2006. Image: Linda Moorcock, via Ballardian.

This is just a quick, fragmentary and unfinished musing, since I’m technically on deadline today. As you may know, game-changing British author JG Ballard died yesterday of prostate cancer, from which he’d suffered since 2006. This is a real tragedy: Ballard was a man of letters who wasn’t just controversial for the sake of public attention, nor out of the nihilism that I tend to see in his heirs such as Michel Houellebecq and Chuck Palahniuk. Rather, in writing things that were deliberately repugnant and offensive, Ballard provoked readers into considering the savagery that underpins our tenuously civilised society.

But more curiously, amid all the obituaries I haven’t read very much about Ballard’s partner of over 40 years, Claire Walsh. Many obits have mentioned that Ballard’s wife, Helen Matthews (referred to as Mary in some obits), died suddenly of pneumonia in 1964 during a family holiday, leaving Ballard to raise their three children alone. (Her death seems to be represented as some kind of dystopian watershed for Ballard, whose most notorious work, The Atrocity Exhibition, was written in the years immediately after her death.)

I only found out about Claire’s existence in an interview that Ballard’s friend of many years, the SF novelist Michael Moorcock, gave to Amazon following Ballard’s death.

“He leaves a partner, Claire Walsh, who was his companion for over forty years and nursed him through his long illness,” Moorcock said.

From what I’ve been able to piece together in the one-line mentions of Walsh in various Ballard obituaries, she is a journalist, and she and Ballard didn’t live together until very recently, when he left his Shepperton home to move in with her. Presumably Ballard was very ill by this time.

There’s a telling paragraph in an interview Ballard gave in 1991 to Canada’s Sunday Times, that hints at the dynamic of their relationship:

Engaged in writing far from the mainstream and bringing up a family singlehanded, Ballard had to rely on women coming to him. “I didn’t have the freedom to move around a lot. I was not passive in my private life. It was just a matter of time-tables. Women had to take the initiative with me out here.” The female characters in the book are very strong.

Ballard has written fondly of Claire in his autobiographical novel The Kindness Of Women and in his straight memoir Miracles Of Life. As he revealed to author Iain Sinclair, he also fictionalised her in his novel Crash: “Claire is the basis of the character Catherine. Catherine Ballard. I remember, when I was writing the book, I said, ‘Shall I call the character based on you Claire?’ She said, ‘Umm, perhaps not.’ So I called her Catherine.”

Skimming through the mountains of online material about Ballard’s life and work, Claire appears as a hazy but shrewd presence. In the final years of his life, she became his representative, travelling internationally to meet exhibition curators when he was too ill to do so himself.

Claire’s simultaneous cultural presence and absence makes me wonder how much we still cling to that figure of the female “muse”. In an era when women didn’t have much political or cultural agency, being a writer or an artist’s muse must have carried its own kind of power.

However, these days it’s a feminist orthodoxy that women should pursue their own creativity rather than exercising it through men, especially when women in intimate relationships with creative men become their de facto representatives or assistants.

Here, I’m also thinking of the current film Summer Hours, in which a family matriarch has spent her entire life managing the artistic legacy of her beloved (and long-deceased) uncle, a famous Impressionist painter. There’s a strong sense in the film that this woman loves the dead man more than her own living children, and that being his muse has overshadowed her own life.

Still, should we criticise women who choose to maintain private lives and let their acclaimed partners have the limelight? Claire Walsh does not seem like a downtrodden or dim person; perhaps there is no media conspiracy involved in whitewashing her out of Ballard’s public life, but rather it has been her own choice not to participate in that particular circus.

Heard that absurdly catchy, slyly raunchy pop song on the radio recently? You know, the one about the milkshake that’s better than yours?

Or about being a “slave 4 U”? The song about getting so hot you want to take your clothes off? Or perhaps the one that promises to have you naked by the end?

You’re probably listening to a song by Pharrell Williams and Chad Hugo, the US music producers collectively known as the Neptunes.

I say “probably” because a survey in August last year found the Neptunes produced almost 20 per cent of songs played on British radio. A similar survey in the US had them at 43 per cent.

It’s not unusual for them to have five hits a week in the Billboard Top 100 charts, and they have to stagger the release of their singles. “Otherwise,” Williams modestly told The New York Times, “the airwaves could be in gridlock.”

Williams’s and Hugo’s stuttering digital syncopations don’t just get airplay – they’ve changed the sound of pop.

What’s more, they effortlessly straddle genres – black hip-hop and white rock, edgy R&B and mainstream Video Hits fodder.

When the Neptunes were named Producers of the Year at the 2004 Grammy Awards, eight songs were cited in the nomination.

But how long can their reign last? A year ago, Hugo and Williams were just two successful studio boffins. Now they’re teetering on the edge of over-exposure.

Williams pops up everywhere – award ceremonies, in glossy magazine spreads and on other people’s albums. He attracts crowds of screaming groupies and tours in a bus with an enormous picture of himself on the side.

Even Hugo, a retiring husband and father, is recognised in the streets of Europe.

Williams and Hugo grew up in suburban Virginia Beach, a comfortable mixed-race city in the southern US state of Virginia.

Now both 30, they met when they were 12 at a summer camp for musicians. Williams was a drummer; Hugo played tenor saxophone.

“Have you seen that movie School of Rock?” Hugo recalled recently. “That was us, except we played jazz standards.”

In 1992, producer Teddy Riley, who’d revolutionised R&B with his hard-edged “new jack swing” sound, spotted a band called the Neptunes in a talent show at a high school.

Conveniently, Riley’s studio was next to the school. Williams and Hugo soon had a record deal.

While still in school, they wrote the hit ‘Rump Shaker’ for Riley’s band Wreckx-n-Effect, and later produced tracks for another group, BlackStreet.

Striking out on their own in the late ’90s, they unleashed rapper Noreaga’s ‘SuperThug’ onto an unsuspecting public.

Hip-hop in 1998 meant booming bass, heavy kick-drums and instrumental samples. The Neptunes’ sound, however, was driven by pockets of dead silence interspersed with jolting, mechanical drum loops, and sometimes no bass. “We do skeleton songs,” says Williams.

Williams usually writes lyrics and sketches a soaring hook over a few chords. He sends it to Hugo, who fills the spaces between beats with little synthesised bleeps, keyboard chord progressions and heavy-breathing sound effects reminiscent of prank phone calls.

The effect is crisp and anodyne yet slightly askew – a detuned note here, a slightly off-beat accent there.

For Esquire magazine’s Neil Strauss, it’s “not the messy kitchen sink of postmodernism but the sparkling, clean chrome kitchen of hip-hop futurism”.

And it produced hits – first in a trickle, then a flood. Hip-hop came first, like ‘Got Your Money’ by Ol’ Dirty Bastard (featuring Kelis of ‘Milkshake’ fame), Nelly’s ‘Hot in Herre’, ‘Shake Ya Ass’ by Mystikal, Jay-Z’s ‘Give It To Me (I Just Wanna Love You)’ and ‘Beautiful’ by Snoop Dogg.

The Neptunes also worked their magic on pop and rock tracks like Britney Spears’s ‘Boys’ and ‘I’m A Slave 4 U’, No Doubt’s ‘Hella Good’ and Pharrell’s solo effort ‘Frontin”.

By the time they remixed the Rolling Stones’s ‘Sympathy for the Devil’, the Neptunes could do no wrong. They started their own record label, Star Trak, and are rumoured to command $US150,000 a song.

Along with school friend Shay Haley, Hugo and Williams also started a genre-bending rock band, NERD.

It stands for Nobody Ever Really Dies, but the Neptunes are often championed as proponents of “New Geek Chic” – witty and articulate black nerds eschewing hip-hop stereotypes for science fiction and rock’n'roll.

Vibe magazine dubbed them “Mad Scientists”, along with fellow producers and Virginia Beach natives Missy Elliott and Timbaland.

And a 2003 cover story in hip-hop magazine The Source painted Williams as Captain Kirk to Hugo’s methodical Spock.

Hugo is uneasy with the Spock tag. “I wouldn’t say I’m as rigid as Spock,” he said last year. “I’m a musician, and for that, you need feel.”

Williams explains the difference between the two outfits as “Neptunes is what we do and NERD is what we are.”

For some months now, I’ve been reading about the hipster trend of wearing Palestinian headdresses or keffiyeh as neck scarves. It’s only recently that I’ve begun to see kids in Melbourne doing it too.

Let’s set aside the well-known debates over cultural and political appropriation, because they’ve been rehearsed so many times before when it comes to hip-hop apparel, bindis, dreadlocks, Thai fisherman pants and any number of other ‘ethnicised’ forms of clothing. I mean, I have always been a little shocked when I saw non-Palestinians wearing keffiyeh because I’ve always thought of it as a religious as well as an ethnic and political thing. But who am I to talk? I was at a tiki party last Sunday wearing a tropical print ’50s-style dress and a lei, drinking rum punch out of a coconut and watching my friends’ pitiful attempts at hula dancing.

No: here I am more interested in the transnational flows of hipster cultural capital. Blue States Lose has wondered many times, in its usual tone of laconic despair, how it happens that hipsters somehow ‘know’ how to be hipsters without ever ‘learning’ it. I began thinking about this after reading this blog post about a magazine series on the ‘flashmobbing’ fad, and the ensuing comments.

As Bill Wasik writes in the article,

hipsters, our supposed cultural avant-garde, are in fact a transcontinental society of cultural receptors, straining to perceive which shifts to follow. I must hasten to add that this is not entirely their fault: the Internet can propagate any flashy notion, whether it be a style of eyewear or a presidential candidacy, with such instantaneity that a convergence on the “hip” tends now to happen unself-consciously, as a simple matter of course.

For Wasik, this is the essential paradox of hipsterism: that a culture predicated on aesthetic individualism could be so homogenous and susceptible to fads. And according to Wasik’s logic, the Palestinian keffiyeh craze, like the popularity of McSweeney’s, Interpol and black stovepipe jeans, is all about the internet.

But I am not about to celebrate the transnational information flows enabled by technology. Rather, I am interested in a rather more low-tech idea: that hipsters work out what to do next using their general worship of that altar of cool, “the street”. I am interested in the physical congregation of people, the ways their bodies occupy physical space, and the strategies they have of displaying themselves and of observing and interacting with others. If the internet is involved, it’s using blogs, email, MySpace and messageboards – technologies that play off and replicate face-to-face networks.

And, importantly, I think these events and technologies are governed by affective relations. In his comments, Doug reflects the commonsense understanding of what it means to be ‘cool’:

But are hipsters permitted to ‘feel’ anything? Isn’t it a bit twee to feel? [...] how, then, do hipsters manage to be simultaneously ‘cool’ – universally depicted as being slightly detached from normal worries and concerns – and yet be affected by their cultural consumption?

I blame Fredric Jameson and his famous essay on postmodernism for the ‘commonsenseness’ of the equation: “irony = lack of affect”. Detachment isn’t a lack of affect: it is an affect; and it requires a certain repertoire of performances and knowledges. Hipster irony generates a variety of affective registers including the pleasure of feeling ‘cool’, the humiliation of exclusion and the outrage of moral violation.

Importantly, hipsterism is private yet public, just as irony relies for its meaning on a privately understood but publicly unacknowledged other meaning. I think that this, and not the nihilism that is often ascribed to hipsterism, is why it is incapable of politicisation. Politics relies on convincing an ignorant or uncaring audience of the importance of a topic: it’s insiders talking to outsiders. Hipsterism is insiders talking to insiders, and that’s why its aesthetics are apolitical.

Or rather, hipsterism has only a base, brain-stem politics: it delights in the event, in the idea of togetherness, even if that togetherness serves only hedonistic purposes. There is a primitive kinship in the idea of seeing someone wearing a keffiyeh, identifying them as ‘cool’, and deciding that you want to be cool, too.

Cinema Nova
The plush little Nova is one of Melbourne’s best cinemas! It has 11 screens and hosts arthouse films, the smarter commercial films, festivals and events. Better yet, on cheap Mondays all tickets to sessions before 4pm are $6, and sessions after 4pm are $8! Pocket change! Open 11am-9:45pm daily.
Phone: 9349 5201
www.cinemanova.com.au

Borders Books, Music & Café
Whether you’re into CDs and DVDs, the latest air-freighted international magazines, blockbuster yarns or provocative non-fiction, Borders has something for you. Nestle into the comfy leather armchairs or leaf through a book over a Gloria Jeans coffee – nobody here will tell you off for browsing. Open 10am-11pm daily.
Phone: 93480222
www.borders.com.au

Flight Centre Carlton
Planning a big end-of-semester overseas trip? Maybe you’re visiting family and friends, or heading to that awesome interstate music festival. Booking through Flight Centre is the hassle-free way to go. They guarantee the cheapest flights and can even arrange accommodation. Open 9am-5.30pm Mon–Fri and 10am-3pm Sat.
Phone: 9349 1499
www.flightcentre.com.au

Safeway Supermarket
Here you’ll find everyday necessities like milk, instant noodles, toilet paper, baked beans and laundry detergent. Along with your usual TV munchies, you can even pick up an electric fan, potted herbs and new pillows. Safeway is open every day from 7am to midnight, so grocery shopping fits around work, study and socialising.
Phone: 9348 1122

Demarte’s Amcal Chemist
Don’t get caught short without those little necessities like painkillers, contact lens solution, tampons or band-aids. Duck into Amcal, where the friendly staff will help you track down what you’re after. It’s super-convenient for the nearby doctors – take your prescription straight here to be filled. Open 9am-8pm Mon-Fri, 9am-6pm Sat and 12pm-6pm Sun.
Phone: 9347 6310

Lygon Court Newsagent / Cards on Lygon
Sure, you can pick up a newspaper or magazine here, but there’s also stationery so gorgeous you’ll want to take up the lost art of letter writing. With cards for all occasions and a rainbow of coloured papers and ribbons, your gift wrapping needs are sorted. Open Mon-Fri 8.30am-6pm, Sat 8.30am-5pm and Sun 11am-5pm.
Phone: 9349 1881

Lygon Court Key Cutting & Shoe Repair
Finding a rental property is such a drag; after you’ve worn out your shoe leather attending house inspections, you’ve got to get keys made for your new housemates. Fortunately, you can solve both problems at this tiny shop brimming with shoe polishes and mysterious tools. Open Mon-Fri 9am-6pm and Sat 9am-3pm.
Phone: 9347 0602

Bentley the Butler Dry Cleaners
Don’t you wish you had your own personal butler to clean up those suits and frocks after the uni ball got messy? Bentley the Butler is the next best thing – and you’ll be surprised how spruce you can look on a student budget. Open Mon-Fri 8am-7pm and Sat 8am-4pm.
Phone: 9348 2205

Lygon Court 1 Hour Photos
One hour photos! I hear you say. Nobody uses film any more! Well, sucka, Lygon Court 1 Hour Photos are well aware of this – that’s why they’ll do glossy prints from your digital files from 35c each. They also offer 15% off digital prints when you present your student card. Open Mon-Thu 9am-6pm, Fri 9am-7pm and Sat, 9am-5pm.
Phone: 9347 4792

Duncans Just Liquor Carlton
This might well be the uni student’s spiritual home. Stop in here before you head to the party, flash your student card, and get 10% off wine, 5% off spirits and RTDs, and a dollar off slabs of beer. From Sun-Tue they’re open ’til 8pm, and ’til 9pm Wed-Sat. How civilised.
Phone: 9347 9850

Lygon Court Medical Precinct

Lygon Court Medical Clinic
Feeling poorly? Head upstairs to this doctor’s surgery. It’s open from 9am-5pm Mon-Fri, and if you started feeling sick on Friday night, there’s no need to wait until Monday – Lygon Court Medical Clinic is also open on Saturday mornings until 12:15pm. Better yet, they offer bulk billing for full-time and international students.
Phone: 9347 6546

Metropolitan Medical Centres Carlton
Carlton’s newest general practice is a one-stop shop for what ails you – nine doctors, a practice nurse and a psychologist work here, plus they offer special women’s health services. Some doctors here offer bulk billing for students – check at reception. Open Mon-Fri 9am-5pm.
Phone: 9347 7711
www.metromed.com.au

Sexton Chiropractic
If your neck and back are aching from being hunched over your desk, Sexton Chiropractic can help. They use computerised spinal scans to see which muscles and nerves are out of whack and help realign them. Open Monday and Wednesday 1pm-7pm, Tuesday 8am-11am and 2pm-8pm, Thursday 8am-11am and Friday 7am-7pm.
Phone: 9347 3838
www.sextonchiropractic.com.au

Gribbles Pathology
The best thing about having Gribbles Pathology right in the medical precinct is that you can get quick results for blood tests and other standard medical tests. No need to run across town or wait for ages for your doctor to find out why you’re feeling off-colour. Open Mon-Fri 9am-1pm and Sat 9am-2pm.
Phone: 9347 9100

Food Court

Ken Oriental Noodle Bar
What? Asian food on Lygon Street? Damn straight, and they whip up soups, rice and noodle dishes fresh to order. Once cooler weather kicks in, you’ll be slurping down laksa and mee goreng like there’s no tomorrow. They’re open for dinner, too. Mon-Thurs 10am-8pm, Fri 10am-9pm, Sat 10am-7pm.
Phone: 9347 0386

Il Fresco
Order a sandwich with exactly the fillings you want, or choose from yummy yet wholesome meals like salads and vegie pizzas. Il Fresco make a killer lasagne, or you can get a gourmet pie with salad or chips for only $6. And the fresh mango juice is to die for. Open Mon-Fri 7am-6pm and Sat 9am-5pm.
Phone: 9347 2884

The Carlton Pantry
This tiny shop is a gourmet’s paradise. Go on, treat yourself: take home deli goods including olives and antipasto, prosciutto, dips and cheeses, select from their range of Phillippa’s breads, or browse the shelves for aioli, imported anchovies and dried goji berries. Open Mon-Thurs 9.30am-6pm, Fri 9.30am-7pm and Sat 9am-5pm.
Phone: 9347 5588

Connoisseurs Café Bar
Three words: coffee and cake. Connoisseurs is perfect for decadent morning and afternoon teas or post-movie dessert dates, and they do a luscious iced coffee. Here’s a secret tip: they’re also licensed, so you can linger over a glass of wine or a beer. Open Mon-Sat 10am-10pm and Sun 10am-6pm.
Phone: 9347 1699

Top Fives

Top 5 Things To Do Instead Of Studying
1. Gossip with a friend over coffee and cake at Connoisseurs Café Bar
2. Take in a movie at the Nova in the middle of the day – and sit wherever you like in the cinema!
3. Leaf through your favourite magazine in Borders with a Nudie Slushie from Gloria Jeans
4. Try on makeup at Amcal Chemist
5. Grab fresh fruit, bread and dips from Safeway for an impromptu picnic on the grassy median strip in Drummond Street or Faraday Street

Top 5 Things You Don’t Know About Lygon Court
1. There are two ATMs – one near the newsagent and one just inside Safeway
2. You can visit the doctor, psychologist or chiropractor via the lift from Drummond Street
3. The Carlton Pantry will make you up a gourmet gift hamper if you provide the basket
4. People say if you’re carrying bananas in your Safeway shopping basket, you’re “single and interested”
5. Cinema Nova can organise special film screenings for student clubs and societies

Top 5 ‘Ruh-Oh, You’ve Forgotten Your Boyfriend/Girlfriend’s Birthday’ Gifts
1. Knitted animal finger puppets from Lygon Court Newsagency
2. Bottle of single malt scotch from Duncan’s
3. Bouquet of flowers from florist
4. Moleskine notebook from Borders
5. Digital photograph of you printed and framed at Lygon Court 1 Hour Photo

Prize Pack Suggestions

Amcal Chemist Student Survival Pack: bottle of multivitamins for smart brains; eye drops for study-tired eyes; sunscreen for lazing about on the South Lawn; packet of painkillers for hangovers; packet of disposable razors to stay smooth; packet of condoms in case you get lucky; box of tissues in case you don’t

$50 Grocery Voucher from Safeway

Coffee Card, valid for 10 free coffees from Carlton Pantry, Il Fresco, Gloria Jeans at Borders or Connoisseurs Café Bar

50 digital prints from Lygon Court 1 Hour Photo

3 items dry-cleaned free at Bentley the Butler

10 double movie passes from Cinema Nova

Slab of beer or mixed dozen of cleanskin wine from Duncan’s

3 keys cut free at Lygon Court Key Cutting & Shoe Repair