benjaminteicher.com – freelance writer

Why are some spaces conducive to creativity? I have found a spot, near my home, in the hood of Footscray, which is just such a place. It is a cafe.

The interior is forgettable, it may even be a liability. It is slick and tasteless and way overdone with its metal tables and polished concrete floors, dual LCD televisions both playing their soundtracks at once over the top of background music poorly chosen.

But forget about such spaces.

What really matters is this:
The cafe has a balcony that sits at the rear of the building and overlooks two pairs of railway lines, one of which crosses over the other, the lower descending into a subterranean world strewn with rubbish and graffiti.

In the distance you can make out the walkway that spans across the platforms of Footscray station, and the small figures with their diverse gaits, speeds and intensities to their movements. Further afield you can see another railway line leading to the station and in the far distance, the docklands of Melbourne’s ports with the city skyline spread behind.

It is an unplanned poetry. I think it is the confluence of human destinies and intentions which I find so electrifying. It hints, suggests that at the boundaries of intelligibility lies the dynamism of human life. A dynamism that exists between the lines, so to speak, of the instrumental, functional intentions of the ordered human world.

And yet another cross current, a small park, a reserve with a gazebo across the railway lines and at the top of an embankment covered with rocks shrubs and trees.

Here gathers human detritus with the unofficial sanction of government and police to drink from cans and goon bags, whose laughs carry across the wind, a call high pitched, an answer deep and gnarled.

Why is it that the music I enjoy most is that which lies at the borders of credibility, and by credibility I mean that which has currency within my peer group first, and society in general second?

A whole raft of act are now unpalatable to me, initially because they came to be enjoyed by my friends, and more recently because as they have found space on commercial nostalgia outlets like Gold 104 and TT.

I refer to Human League, to name one outfit subject to my love-cum-disgust. And Modern Talking as a group newly assimilated into this schema.

This impulse is most bizarre, not an endeavour to venture forwards, but to retreat into a personal musical paradise in which I am both supreme and alone.

It is especially bizarre given that I am compelled when discovering something new to show it to my friends, to selectively and strategically play it in their ear shot until it gains recognition and, as time passes, the very currency that leads me to turn my head in disgust.

I am sure that I am by no means alone in this anti-populist music idiosyncracy. Take Beethoven-fanboy and social theorist Theodor Adorno, for example. He despised jazz just as it was beginning to find fans among the intellectual class of the 1930s to which he belonged. And he went to incredible lengths to justify his contempt, basing a theory of human freedom on contempt for Glen Miller.

I submit that this movement to and away from music be designated a topic of high importance for the social sciences.

I remember hearing a very interesting conversation on >Late Night Live some time ago, to the effect that, although the American university system was more exclusive than the Australian, because students paid (more) for their degrees, they were much more demanding on their educators, and that because this provided more revenue, academics were to match these expectations with a higher quality of education.

This implies that Australian students were willing to accept what was given, something which does not wholly accord with my experience, although there were dull, blank eyed student masses when I undertook studies in the more conventional social sciences. It also acknowledges the dwindling resources provided by governments in Australia.

The accuracy of these characterisations aside, hearsay from the USA suggests that the American model is more vulnerable than it previously seemed in the boom times, and now universities are already finding it hard to, for example, stock text books and provide basic services to students. We also hear that American students are finding it impossible to acquire student loans along with the tightening of credit.

I wonder if those in charge of the Juris Doctor will think again.

I’m not implying that I know the answer, that Glyn Davis is biting his nails over this one, I am genuinely wondering if the change in the economic paradigm that we have taken for granted will have an effect.