highbrow

These people serve as better models for us today than the highbrows who self-consciously detached themselves into the realm of high culture, capital-letter ideas, and bohemian alienation.

Still, McMurtry enjoys the America that so many highbrows deride: the America of chain stores, Burger Kings, and roadside billboards.

Both camps tended to fixate on the dirty-David-Lynch-makes- a-G-rated-movie aspect of the production, but while unctuous middlebrows like New York Times critic Janet Maslin were enthralled by the film's supposed wholesomeness, the highbrows were deeply suspicious.

She was busy raising temperatures - and one or two eyebrows among the highbrows who stumped up pounds 150 a head for the occasion.

So, too, jazz-junkie highbrows have tried to upgrade rap's uncouth standing through fusion with a more respectable genre under the Digable Planets' Rebirth of the Cool rubric.