Orange Juice & Ryvita

Food, politics, underemployment and the consumption of time and leisure

Author Liam Hogan

  • Ground floor

    BUILDING DESIGN SHARES A lot of similarity to the spread of memes on the internet. A successful configuration that resonates with people’s experience of the world, or to the experiences of some group of them, will reproduce itself in self-similar ways. Designs that become popular are that way because they respond to specific needs and desires, and carry symbolic meaning, not because they are intrinsically good. Surviving designs, like memes, don’t last because people like them, they survive because they’ve outlasted other worse ones.

    Posted · Author

  • The Cheapo Stuff Wins

    DEAR EDITORS,
    “WHY IS Everything So Ugly?” (Issue 44) was a pleasingly dyspeptic essay about something I’ve been giving a lot of thought to lately: the unremitting ugliness of life in early 2020s America. But since the editors were more preoccupied with describing the ugliness than explaining it (a few references to supply chains and global capital aside), I thought I’d try to actually answer their rhetorical question by looking at the economic transformations of the post–New Deal era that led us here. I see us as the victims of four interlocking phenomena, tackled below in no particular order.

    Letters to the Editor: The Cheapo Stuff Wins (Nplusone)

    Posted · Author

  • The art of politics

    THE WIRE TAPS THAT captured conversations between Daryl Maguire and Gladys Berejiklian were extraordinary. At various points, Maguire complained about the Icac’s powers, warned Berejiklian they could be listening in on their conversations, and said the watchdog was “marginalising the art of politics”.

    This is actually right.

    Posted · Author

  • Badges

    LAST WEEKEND I PUT on my uniform, for the volunteer emergency services of which I’m a member, and attended an awards ceremony. It’s a strange experience but also at the same time an oddly familiar one. Some people take these civilian honours very seriously. The world of uniforms and medals, of long service awards, citations for service, of badges and recognition, is strange—-it imitates military models unpleasantly—-but to me it also mimics a world I’m too familiar with: the academic world where titles and qualifications and baroque regalia are joked at, but also taken deadly seriously.

    Posted · Author

  • Camping

    ‘CAMPING’, THE ACT OF leaving one’s house to sleep outdoors, for the sole purpose of recreation, is a very recent thing in human history, that nobody did before the Victorian era. It’s associated with the late 19th century development of cities and the anti-urbanism that is part of ‘modernity’, that grab-bag of new attitudes to living as an industrial species. I enjoy the irony that I, a professional old building noticer, really enjoy it.

    Posted · Author

  • Moderation

    TWITTER HAS BECOME ANOTHER Elonian project, which is to say, a heroic and misguided attempt to build a personal brand out of someone else’s work, and great grand ideas replacing the ordinary work of upkeep and repair. Whether it’s rockets or websites, they’re about overvaluing ideology over maintenance. And it’s becoming more and more obvious, as less of it is being done, that the everyday invisible maintenance of the moderators at twitter was critical to its success. That should surprise nobody who remembers talkback radio.

    Posted · Author

  • Locations

    TWITTER HAS BEEN BOUGHT, and will become, presumably, Elonian, meaning heroic, disorganised, and centred on the self-image of its owner above any function. As it, and other highly-centralised social media ‘places’ appear to be at inflection points of utility, perhaps we can find other smaller and disaggregated places to be.

    I post at aus.social, put pictures up at flickr, and at instagram (though rarely). And I aim to blog here more frequently…

    Posted · Author

  • Foo

    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.

    Posted · Author

  • Time Honoured Disguise And Borrowed Language

    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.

    Posted · Author

  • Try It For A Change

    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

    Posted · Author