PLEASE ALLOW ME TO INTRODUCE myself, I am a man of wealth and taste. I’ve been around for many a long year… and while Liam hasn’t been looking I’ve pinched the keys to the blog and I’m fanging it around for a joyride—or at least the closest thing to it you can get between speed bumps and school zones and chicanes and traffic lights in this pissant Nanny State. I’ve got the ghost of Hunter S. Thompson polishing a Smith & Wesson M&P .38 Special in the passenger seat and the ghost of someone who says she’s Janis Joplin in the back. Hunter seems to believe her, and if 66.6% of the car says that’s who she is, who am I to go against a majority? Especially as half the majority is holding a gun. But I digress.

LISTEN TO ANOTHER PARABLE. THERE was a landowner who planted a vineyard, put a fence around it, dug a wine press in it, and built a watch-tower. Then he leased it to tenants and went to another country…
—Matthew 21:33

If you’ve skimmed the Gospel, you know the story. After making sound property and infrastructure investments, a vineyard’s owner’s slaves and sons go to collect the dues, but meet gruesome ends. The landowner, as you’d expect in a story told by the Son of Man, “[puts] those wretches to a miserable death”.

The moral, of course, is if you’re a tenant with a garden, don’t stop paying rent no matter what the dispute, put all communications in writing, have the number for the CTTT handy, and read your Residential Tenancy Agreement.

My favourite TV show when I was ten was the A-Team. You know the plot: someone attractive needs saving from drug lords, Communists or an African dictator, BA Baracus refuses to fly, the A-Team scrounge together very improvised weapons, there’s a car chase or action scene and George Peppard smokes a cigar wearing leather gloves. Wholesome entertainment.

I already have an office chair, a hoodie, some old sneakers and paint-spattered jeans. Now all I need is an FAL and I can be light anti-aircraft defence.

(The full series is terrifying and amazing in about equal measure, and reminds you that despite smartarse beret-wearing Westerners there’s kind of a war still going on).

AUSTRALIA IS SUSPENDING ALL LIVE animal exports to Indonesia. This is remarkable not because it’s a good thing, which it is, but because it’s an example of a political effect with significant policy and financial implications being forced by an outsider-body to the political process. I’ve seen estimates printed of the value of the trade between $300 million and $1 billion yearly, and it’s been cut indefinitely—with, presumably, entailing loss of jobs—after a Four Corners programme. How often do you get to see that happen?

I’VE BEEN READING A BIT of old Len Deighton recently. For the uninitiated, Harry Palmer is a very modern spy, a working-class London version of Bond, who alternates work for WOOC(P), a super-secret British spying outfit, with cooking and fine dining. They’re great novels, and they exist at this moment just at the point where datedness caramelises seamlessly into fascinating curio (well, except for Deighton’s/Palmer’s sexual politics, which deserve a nameless shallow grave somewhere off an unsealed road in the back country of the early 1960s).

The appeal of the novels was in the liberal use of bureaucrat-ese, acronyms and procedural detail to suggest insider knowledge of a sophisticated gourmet Cold War. Apparently, however, Deighton wrote forty years too early. MI6 are crawling the web for bombs and cupcakes:

…the choice of “The Best Cupcakes in America” as the text debris source is just too perfect: a simultaneous comment on the terrifying vapidity of online culture (the only thing missing is a cat or some Rick Astley lyrics) and the infantilising, self-indulgent, and individualistic overtones of the cupcake trend. Even if it isn’t a joke, it’s a pretty good joke.

YOU’VE ALREADY SEEN AND HEARD Deborah Harry commit history’s worst rap crime. Whoop, whoop, that’s the sound of the police…

THE HEADQUARTERS OF THE AUSTRALIAN Labor Party, NSW Branch, stand at 377 Sussex St, above a bland marble and carpet lobby and, at the time of writing, no outward signage. Unions NSW—which used to go by the nineteenth-century name of “Labor Council”—occupies the back part of the building and parades its workerist murals, its flags, badges and colours, with all the ceremony they deserve, but the political wing goes incognito.

AT SOME POINT IN 1997, at about 1.30am, in a loading dock opposite Railway Square in Sydney, I swore a sacred unbreakable oath. “As God is my witness,” I said to myself, “I’ll never work in the food industry again”. It’s one of the few promises to myself amongst the many I’ve made I can honestly say I’ve kept. Should any freebooting restaurant manager come sauntering up the steps of Rancho Estanmore, out to press-gang me into kitchenhand or service work, I’d not hesitate to defend my honour.

YOU BUY OR RENT A HOUSE in a suburb of Sydney’s inner west, and you move to a vibrant, diverse, community, with a sense of a common aesthetic. You recycle your plastics, and compost your kitchen scraps. Your children go to public schools—the good ones, mind, not the ones with disciplinary problems—and on the weekends they hang around the local cafes, independent cinemas and parks, not large commercialised shopping centres. You disapprove of mandatory detention of refugees, Australian participation in American wars in the Middle East, and the old Part 3A of the Planning Act. You look down on the Western suburbs where it’s all McMansions and four wheel drives, the North Shore where there’s no vitality, and the Shire most of all where they spend their public holidays organising race riot barbecues. You vote Labor in the lower house, Green in the upper, and if you vote Liberal, you have the good taste to keep your mouth shut about it. Everyone’s happy!

Then, you make the mistake of painting your wall in a Federation beige in accordance with the Council’s notes about the surrounding heritage environment. Did you submit your application to paint over that derivative bit of graffiti piece of important public art with the local insufferable hipsters community of street artists? Apparently not.

Slogan: THIS WALL USED TO HAVE ART ON IT, NOW IT HAS COCKS. Mallett St, Camperdown, Sydney.

As Lenin might have said of the infantile disorder of anarchism, scratch a public artist, find a parochial art snob who likes drawing cock.

PSEUDOCYCLICAL TIME IS ASSOCIATED WITH the consumption of modern economic survival—the augmented survival in which everyday experience is cut off from decisionmaking and subjected no longer to the natural order, but to the pseudo-nature created by alienated labor. It is thus quite natural that it echoes the old cyclical rhythm that governed survival in preindustrial societies, incorporating the natural vestiges of cyclical time while generating new variants: day and night, work and weekend, periodic vacations.¹

So said Guy Debord about the rules governing when one can and cannot eat particular meals. Michael Douglas’s character D-FENS, the classically alienated man, transformed by industry and excluded from power and the communal experience of history, made a similar declaration.