School of English, Communications and Performance Studies, Monash University

Comedy Lecture #5 Lecture 5: 'The Comic Genres' Professor Agnes Heller Lecture 5: 'The Comic Genres' by Professor Agnes Heller, distinguished visitor to Monash University's school of English, Communications and Performance Studies.

Cosmopolitan Melbourne: Katie Fraser Steering Past Settlement: Cases from the African Legal Service Katie Fraser (Footscray Community Legal Centre) How does Melbourne’s social and cultural geography shape legal problems and unlawful behaviours? The western suburbs have long been a settling point for new arrivals; however, as gentrification continues and the inner west becomes unaffordable, new refugee arrivals from Sudan and Burma are being settled further out in the western suburbs. Here public transport links are less developed, and a private vehicle is essential for access to language classes, schools and other essential services. Driving without a license, driving with a suspended license, and driving without insurance are all inevitable consequences of this geographical imperative to drive. Such problems are compounded by certain public policy initiatives. For example, the Centrelink implementation of “welfare to work” policies pressures unskilled workers—including many refugees and other new arrivals—to take factory work, which tends to be available during time periods and at industrial locations not serviced by public transport. In these ways, policy, landscape and cultural differences combine to cause shame and high financial costs, creating barriers to settlement and barring the participation of some in “cosmopolitan” and “multicultural” Melbourne. Other social consequences include high costs on the road and the broader losses associated with social isolation. This paper will draw on evidence from the African Legal Service project, which has been run from the Footscray Community Legal Centre to provide legal advice services to African clients. It will examine geography as one of the barriers to social inclusion for new arrivals, and suggest ways in which spatial and cultural isolation can be overcome.

Cosmopolitan Melbourne | Scott McQuire strong>Public Screens and the Transnational Public Sphere Scott McQuire (University of Melbourne) Public space in 21st Century cities is increasingly shaped by interactions between media and architecture. The result is the formation of media-architecture complexes which are fast coalescing into ‘media cities’. The social implications of the new public spaces created at the intersection of media networks and material structures are highly ambivalent. New security and commercial agendas overlay older traditions of civic life. In a context where fear of strangers is frequently promoted as a strategy of political control, new media forms such as large public screens can play a critical role in promoting collective interactions in public space. However, facilitating cosmopolitan public culture demands strategic displacement of the flexible forms of power frequently deployed in the public spaces of contemporary cities. Drawing on research undertaken in Australia and the UK, this paper will argue that sites such as Melbourne’s Federation Square can take a strategic role in the contemporary formation of experimental ‘transnational’ public spheres.

Cosmopolitan Melbourne: Kate Shaw Planning the ‘Creative’ City: Global Strategies and Local Creative Subcultures Kate Shaw (University of Melbourne) The ‘creative city’ concept has high political and symbolic importance for global cities seeking to attract jobs and investment. But the concept contains a well established dilemma: local creative subcultures, which feed city cultures, can be vulnerable to the gentrification that often results. Increasing land rents in Australian central cities are placing pressure on local creative initiatives, displacing small cultural producers and dispersing local networks. Genuinely creative cities foster new ideas and practices and new uses of space, requiring that we plan for the unplanned. Some city governments are beginning to understand this, and are developing planning policies that can create the conditions for the continuity of their valued (and valuable) creative subcultural activities. This paper examines the complex relationships between ‘creativity’ and place, and evaluates recent initiatives intended to nourish local cultural diversity. In identifying cases of best practice in Australia, and with reference to similar practices overseas, the research reveals an evolution in the range of regulatory and negotiating tools available to governments, and in public discourses around the maintenance of sustainable city competitiveness.

Images of Torture, Images of Terror | Gabrielle Murray Images of Torture, Images of Terror: Post 9/11 and the Escalation of Screen Violence Gabrielle Murray (La Trobe) David Edelstein, the New York Magazine film critic, commenting on the surge in extreme, prolonged graphic torture, abduction, rape and dismemberment in films such as The Devil’s Rejects, Saw, Wolf Creek and Hostel, dubbed the phenomenon “torture porn” (2006). The current box-office success of films like the Saw and Hostel series stunned many critics; most seemed bewildered by young audiences’ thirst for such graphic fare. Edelstein’s uneasy review suggests that the media release of documentary images of US and UK military personal torturing prisoners at Abu Ghraib helped feed the escalation of uninhibited images of torture, degradation and mutilation in fiction film. This claim is echoed in most reviews and commentaries on the phenomenon (Barber 2007; Douthat 2006; Rimanelli and Liden 2006; Newman 2006). Furthermore, the critical literature argues increasingly graphic scenes are appearing in a broader range of mainstream and art-house releases. However, while much of the critical literature agrees that public attitudes toward violent imagery are generally historically determined, most discussion of the nature of the linkages between social and cinematic violence remain circumstantial and speculative (Slocum 2004). This paper poses questions regarding the public and critical perception post 9/11 that there is a direct link between increased visual knowledge of violence and torture in the “real” world acquired from images on television and the internet, with an escalation of representations of explicit violence in the commercial and cultural medium of popular western cinema.

Comedy Lecture #4 Lecture 4: Jokes Professor Agnes Heller Lecture 4: 'Jokes' by Professor Agnes Heller, distinguished visitor to Monash University's school of English, Communications and Performance Studies.

Comedy Lecture #3 Lecture 3: Laughter Professor Agnes Heller Lecture 3: 'Laughter' by Agnes Heller. Apologies for the very poor sound quality in this episode. We hope it's tolerable.

Music, Culture and Society Conference: Joel Crotty Marketing Romanian Music Abroad (1948-1964): The Use of Totalitarian Language in Various Guises Joel Crotty This paper uses two sources that were marketed in the “West” – one was an official party propaganda newspaper, For a lasting peace, for a people’s democracy and the other an academic journal, Rumanian review, that on the surface appeared to be above the direct approach of a communist communiqué. A source from the West that represented a communist mouthpiece, the British-Rumanian Friendship Association’s British-Rumanian Bulletin,_ _has also been included to highlight the extent to which the Romanian authorities went to project its propaganda. What was the language used? How was “socialist realism”, “cosmopolitanism”, “internationalism” expressed in musical terms? And how did the marketing of music change with the fluctuation of ideology? The period under review reflects an era in which communism had rapidly engulfed every aspect of Romanian life and the Party’s self-justification for societal domination needed both its own people and those abroad to be “educated” in the utopian vision. In terms of theoretical ballast the paper will use the work of Monika Kroupova and Vic

Music, Culture and Society: Chris Worth VU and Value: Canonising Popular Music Chris G. Worth The study of popular culture originated partly in resistance to scholarly investment in ‘elitist’ canonical texts at the expense of texts generated and/or consumed by ‘the masses’ or by marginalized social groups. There are, however, many processes at work which encourage the formation of certain kinds of canonicity within popular cultures themselves and also within academic discussions of widely circulated or marginalised cultural texts. Many such processes deploy notions of value and of judgement or taste, explicitly or inexplicitly, to serve the interests of those for whom canon formation is an exercise of and source of power. What are the elements that might be at issue in the formation of putative canons of ‘rock music’? I apply a grid of supposed markers of canonicity and value to the Velvet Underground’s music and its reception. Looking at the results of this thought experiment, I argue that explorations of notions about cultural persistence can in fact generate productive dialogical resistance to, for example, those kinds of critique that, with the best intentions, treat popular creative texts as short-lived commodities circulating in an aesthetic-free market economy.

Music, Culture and Society: Shane Homan Pop in the City: Industries, Governance and Night-Time Economies Shane Homan Popular music plays an important role in the cultural life of many cities, as a key commercial entertainment option for residents and tourists, and as a particularly powerful means by which cities claim a competitive foothold in the ‘selling’ of a vibrant nightlife._ _The suburban or inner city rock pub, jazz restaurant or dance nightclub has always played an important role not just in the lives and careers of individual musicians, but in the life of cities. In the particularly Australian context that I will discuss here, live rock, blues and jazz venues have similarly assumed local and national importance as sites where communities are formed, performance skills tested, and reputations earned. In this paper I consider the recent history of debates about the role of popular music in reconfigurations of the ‘civilised’ and ‘sophisticated’ city and the challenges in ensuring a diversity of nightlife and entertainment. Drawing on my recent involvement in music venue and liquor law reform in NSW, this paper also reflects on the ongoing politics of ‘cultural’ or ‘creative precinct’ conceptualisations of city music-making, and the desire for popular music to be contained within more orderly (gentrified) constructions of the night-time economy.

Music, Culture and Society: Peter Beilharz, Trevor Hogan, and Clinton Walker The Vinyl Age: Rock Music in Australia, 1945-1995 Peter Beilharz, Trevor Hogan, and Clinton Walker This paper represents a work in progress. This project promises the first coherent narrative and thematic work on rock and the postwar period, especially the sixties , with reference both to content and context . Team members - Clinton Walker, Peter Beilharz, and Trevor Hogan - will offer vignettes of enthusiasms including the idea of cultural traffic between cities outside and inside Australia, picking up themes like patterns of performance, innovation, imperfect mimesis, music technologies, production, consumption and youth culture. What happened in these spheres in the antipodes? What made these experiences different, as well as common, and what are the remaining resonances of these stories?

Music, Culture and Society | Joanne Cummings Trade Mark Registered: Sponsorship, Brand communities and Neo-tribalism within the Australian Indie Music Festival Scene Joanne Cummings The paper investigates the relationship between corporate sponsors and Australian indie music festivalgoers at two festivals, Big Day Out and the Falls festival. It is argued that through their consumption of indie music festivals, the festivalgoers have become a ‘brand community’ or neo-tribe. I look at the impacts of branding and commercialisation on the festival scene through an examination of the use of corporate sponsors. It is argued that festivalgoers through their consumption of indie music festivals have become a ‘brand community’ or neo-tribe. Drawing a comparison to the American Vans Warped tour, it is further argued that the commercialisation of the festival scene ultimately impacts on the meanings created by the festivalgoers. I argue that this relationship can have advantages as well as disadvantages due to the blurring of the lines between the meanings created by festivalgoers and the ‘experience enhancement’ techniques used by sponsors and festival organisers. Joanne Cummings recently completed a PhD in the Department of Sociology at the University of Western Sydney. Her thesis involved an ethnographic study of Australian indie music fesivals. Her main areas of interest are youth culture, popular music festivals, the sociology of everyday life and the role of popular music in the construction of late modern identities.

Music, Culture and Society: David Roberts Reflections on Cultural Secularization David Roberts The paper reads the theme of the conference against the grain: instead of treating music as an integral part of modern culture, I want to examine the conception - prevalent since the Romantics - of music as standing apart from the other arts through its power as absolute music to express the infinite (E. T. A. Hoffmann) and mirror the universe (Schelling), that is, music’s power to be an aesthetic substitute for religion and philosophy. The cultural secularization of the arts is examined with reference to Adolf Behne’s essay, Rebirth of Architecture and Hegel. The counter-movement against secularization is examined by reference to Proust and Wagner’s late essay, Religion and Art. In conclusion, I argue that cultural secularization is better understood as a dialectic of desacralization and resacralization, illustrated by a brief look at the ongoing significance of religious music in the twentieth century.

Music, Culture and Society: Joseph Borlagdan The Paradox of “Do-It-Yourself” in Unpopular Music: Power, Capital, and Social Relations Within a Local Music Community Joseph Borlagdan This paper examines the construction of ‘Do-It-Yourself’ (DIY) values in music-making. The importance of agency and participation as existing outside of the mainstream field of music is argued to be part of a process of music production, consumption and distribution that cannot be simplified according to a ‘mainstream versus alternative’ model. This dichotomy is a persistent one, but investigation into a small music making community revealed that social actors situating themselves in opposition to dominant norms will engage in complex and contradictory ways within the music field. It is more useful to talk of a continuum of music production rather than clearly bounded categorisations. To better conceptualise how this is negotiated within the milieu of social relationships, Bourdieu’s notion of cultural capital as operating within a field of restricted cultural production will be used to explain how forms of sociality are organised around symbolic forms of music made for ‘art’s sake’. By applying this conceptual framework, struggles emerge in which music makers attempt to create their own self-determined autonomous space. Paradoxically, however, these moves towards independence are largely enabled and facilitated by the actor’s dependence on the social networks that constitute the field. The DIY ethic is therefore a misnomer of sorts that belies the inherently social and co-operative manner in which music is pursued against the grain of ‘the mainstream’.

Algo-Rhythm and Mello-dy: A Consideration of the Relationship between Technology and the Embodied Performance of Music Dan Black Music, Culture and Society: Dan Black Algo-Rhythm and Mello-dy: A Consideration of the Relationship between Technology and the Embodied Performance of Music Dan Black For some time, a distinction between musical performance and practices such as sound engineering, arranging, playback, and even computer programming has been becoming progressively more difficult to draw. Harmonies can be constructed on the fly using computer algorithms and arrangements can be generated in a random and evolving fashion in realtime by computer programmes, while original music is produced in a way which precludes its live performance and DJs win fame as virtuoso performers despite being unable to play or compose music in any traditional sense. This paper considers the evolution of technology, changes to ideas of originality and reproduction, and the phenomenology of physical performance to reach some tentative conclusions about the nature of musical performance today. Dan Black is Lecturer in Communication and Media Studies, School of English, Communications and Performance Studies, Monash University. He has a BA(Honours) from Melbourne University and a Ph.D. from RMIT University, and has written for journals such as The Journal of Popular Culture, Fibreculture, and Continuum. His ongoing research interests focus on the relationship between the human body and technology. The impact of embodiment and our interactions with other human bodies on the design and use of technologies; attempts to simulate the human body using technological means; and the interplay between understandings of human life and technological artefacts are of particular concern in his current work.