I WORK IN NEWTOWN, in Sydney’s inner west. It’s a centre for graffiti and street art, which range from well-executed commissioned murals, to tags, to stickers; they’re artistic, political, commercial, pornographic, and everything in between. And occasionally they’re culturally significant:

This is ‘Foo’ or Kilroy, who is definitely more than 80 years old, and possibly dates to the First World War.

THE TRADITION OF ALL dead generations weighs like a nightmare on the brains of the living. And just as they seem to be occupied with revolutionizing themselves and things, creating something that did not exist before, precisely in such epochs of revolutionary crisis they anxiously conjure up the spirits of the past to their service, borrowing from them names, battle slogans, and costumes in order to present this new scene in world history in time-honored disguise and borrowed language.

—-Karl Marx, The 18th Brumaire of Louis Napoleon, 1852

The monument to Lenin that was installed in occupied Henichesk, Kherson Oblast, yesterday.
The photo was published by local collaborator Hennadiy Maliukov.

MODERN WAR, IN ITS present shape, calls for the sort of initiative that arises from democracy. That is, I believe, the principal meaning of this book...

---Tom Wintringham, 'English Captain', 1939

THE BUILDING CODE OF Australia categorises all buildings into one of ten classes. The buildings mentioned in Ike and Tina Turner’s Nutbush City Limits can be allocated the following categorisations:

Class 3: (common place of long term or transient living for a number of unrelated people)

• jail

Class 6: (a place for the sale of retail goods or the supply of services direct to the public)

• gin house
• store

Class 9(b): (assembly buildings in which people may gather for social, theatrical, political, religious or civil purposes)

• church house
• school house

Class 10(a) (non-habitable buildings including sheds, carports, and private garages)

• outhouse

I CALL THIS UGLY object the ‘NATO Standard NSW Investment Property light fitting’, and once you start looking you’ll see the prick everywhere. It’s been in every house I’ve ever rented. I hate it and everything it represents.

There’s an aesthetic to houses that have this horrible, specific, light fixture. None show any of the signs of being a long-term owner-occupied house (like family-specific renovations, obvious signs of children, or the kind of post-war immigrant vernacular concreting that is disappearing, displaced by money, throughout the Inner West Rental Belt). They aren’t in post-2000 flats which have a different aesthetic of empty money—-there it’s hangover-punishing halogen downlights. These horrible bastards are the Mark of Cain of housing which has been left to the vagaries of returns-on-investment. They are the light that signifies fungible shelter, rented at a yield, maintenance carried out at a fixed rate and schedule whether needed or not.