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:

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.

CATALLAXY FILES, THE AUSTRALIAN right-wing blog that was central to the local mid-2000s early-2010s blogging culture, and Larvatus Prodeo’s counterpart across ideology, has closed. Its domain points to its own archive held by the Commonwealth.

AUSTRALIAN SOCIETY IN THE present moment fulfils all of Joh Bjelke-Petersen's promises to the future. Joh, Premier of Queensland 1968–1987 presided over a State with all the qualities Australia enjoys today: it was parochial, violent, hypocritical, complacent, as crooked as a broken finger, as racist as the day is long. Since he failed to become Prime Minister, we have no sense of how Joh would have treated the border, but we can infer his probable attitudes from today's current affairs, a strongman Fortress Australia that looks inward, punishing the vulnerable, wondering why anyone would want to leave.

THE SIMPLE CARDTALK RECORD player was developed to play phonograph records without electricity.

(In the spirit of the web log I am going to post more things that I read)

IN 1988 THE KLF published The Manual, or How To Have A Number One The Easy Way. Like the band’s music, it’s both instantly dated and completely timeless. It might be one of the most significant manifestoes of the 20thC or it might be a worthless cynical PR pamphlet. A fan has transcribed it into plaintext and hosted it.

Money is a very strange concept. There will be points in the forthcoming months when you might not have the change in your pockets to get the bus into town at the same time as you are talking to people on the telephone in terms of tens of thousands of pounds. Some of the following might seem contradictory but in matters of money they often are. We spoke earlier of how being on the dole gives you a clearer vision of how society works. What it doesn’t do is give you a clear idea of how money works…