Category Not Even Food

• 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 22 March 2023 | Author Liam Hogan

• 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 29 November 2022 | Author Liam Hogan

• Chainsaws

  TREES ARE RARELY ASSESSED as significant cultural heritage in Australia; the bar is too high. When a project manager gets on the blower and asks ‘now listen, but is it heritage?’, a professional applies the standard frameworks of his or her calling, and decides—with a standardised process—either a yes/no significance answer, or a level of significance (from ‘little’ to ‘exceptional’). Human involvement in the thing or place is the most important: places where historical events happened, buildings made by specific people, artefacts of a known history. The reason trees rarely meet the ‘but is it heritage?’ test is because they’re ephemeral by nature, growing and reproducing themselves and dying by themselves, without people needing to be involved. ‘Cultural landscapes’, the fashion of the 2000s, remedy part of the question of individual trees by seeing the forests, but there’s generally no such thing as a ‘heritage tree’. You see the problem already.

  Posted 28 October 2020 | Author Liam Hogan

• Delusion

  THE NSW CIVIL AND Administrative Tribunal, which rules on the correctness of decisions made in some lower decision-making bodies, was asked to decide whether a ‘Qanon’ blog, run by a psychiatrist, was itself evidence of mental impairment, for the purposes of deregistration. It decided it was, and with the—extremely, as they say, wild—other behaviours, upheld the decision. ‘Qanon’, for the uninitiated, is an umbrella-term for a set of far-right conspiracy theories largely to do with imagined opponents of President Trump, and range from the banal, to the tediously anti-semitic, to the truly, literarily, strange.

  I am personally fascinated by the question of delusions, and where they can be drawn as separate to merely unusual political or religious beliefs. I don’t think it’s possible to easily identify one from the other, at least not permanently. N Hennessy ADCJ, obiter dicta:

  Posted 5 February 2020 | Author Liam Hogan

• The Importance of Being Earnest

  I HAVE LATELY BECOME slightly fixated on music and other cultural artefacts that have a specific quality to them: that they are straightforward, uncomplicated, unashamedly enthusiastic, and completely lack sardonic detachment. There is almost a dialectic here, between works that have the quality, and works on the other end of the scale, which must be appreciated only as context. Bluey, the children’s show about talking dogs, is earnest, straightforward, lovely. Muppets films like Muppets Christmas Carol and Muppet Treasure Island have the quality too. Seinfeld, on the other hand, can only work as comedy at multiple levels of awareness of humour, that the nothingness of the show’s jokes are key. It’s impossible to enjoy TISM, for example, without enjoying the double- and triple-entendres, and being aware of the many levels of irony going on, and appreciating that the jokes come mainly at the expense of the band themselves (if only because the rhymes don’t often scan, and the music isn’t very good). Movies by Tarantino are just violence and slurs on the surface, on top of a context of layered, appreciative irony and meta-context, that is, if you can stomach the blood.

  Let’s call it earnest vs. ironic. Neither is inherently better than the other, this is simply a model I’m proposing. Salt ‘n’ Pepa were earnest, the Wu-Tang Clan ironic. The best of punk music is earnest, but the moment any kind of punk music requires a ‘scene’ to be enjoyed it shifts to the other end entirely. Folk music is earnest, shoe gaze ironic. Sometimes it’s counterintuitive: WWE wrestling is earnest, despite none of it the ‘kayfabe’ being technically true, because it’s the single-level appreciation of fans that matters, while all ‘mixed martial arts’, Ultimate Fighting, combat sports, and the like are essentially ironic riffs on their fans’ weird ideas, on multiple levels, about violence. Prince, despite the many layers of his pop performances, was essentially an upfront, simple, earnest soul singer at heart. Madonna was infinitely ironic from the beginning, and challenges everyone to find the next onion layer of meaning there. Some cultural products have shifted in time between the poles, like Star Wars, which started out as deadpan-earnest Western Ninja Space Opera pastiche, and has gained an accretion of context-driven catchphrase fan-service.

  The apotheosis of earnest, I think, of this is Neil Diamond’s 1972 double album Hot August Night. How can anyone resist lyrics like:

  I got a song been on my mind
  And the tune can be sung, and the words all rhyme…

  Posted 20 December 2019 | Author Liam Hogan

• Old Sydney Town

  IN 1975, A THEME park called Old Sydney Town outside Gosford in NSW was opened in the spirit of authenticity, recreationism, and heritage, and drew heavily on the example of Colonial Williamsburg in Virginia in the United States, in the sense that it was to be a living museum. Its organisers drew on academic expertise to get the very most knowledge, and to mimic as closely as possible the evolution of immediately post-contact Sydney. Professors of history were consulted and appointed, professional conservationists involved for their built environment expertise, antiquarians set to providing antiques, and traditionalist tradesmen hired as masons, carpenters, thatchers, limeburners, wood turners, plasterers, blacksmiths, potters, leatherworkers, ad infinitum. Soldier-reenactors were fitted for shakos, crossbelts and red jackets, gunsmiths supplied replica Brown Besses.

  It goes without saying that there was no Aboriginal presence at Old Sydney Town.

  

  Posted 13 December 2019 | Author Liam Hogan

• Lavarch Report

  THE NEW SOUTH WALES Labor Party has released its review document, the Lavarch Report, which recommends some superficial administrative changes to the workings of Head Office in response to decades of carpetbagging behaviour and unprincipled, shameless, grifting on the part of the NSW Right.

  Posted 6 December 2019 | Author Liam Hogan

• The end of the world

  A MATCHED PAIR OF articles I'm reading this time begin this blog entry, which seem to suit each other; Niv M. Sultan's The End? and Patrick Hicks' V-2 and Saturn: A Tale Of Two Rockets.

  The world has, time and time again, survived mostly intact. Life has gone on with some degree of recognizability. The current moment, however, feels different...

  Posted 14 January 2019 | Author Liam Hogan

• Stop the x save the y

  I CAN’T FEEL THE outrage. It’s true that Westconnex, the planned motorway to be constructed through and underneath Sydney’s inner west, is bad. It’s a model of combined woeful planning, culture war assumptions about transport, shocking public relations, and kleptonomics: a chuckleheaded set of map lines straight from love-in seminars between baked-in NSW Treasury headcases and cynical bagmen from the usual consultancies. It’s a highway project that would shame Robert Moses, who, when all was said, at least believed in the public good and not simply transport efficiency. It has been and will be a crappy project from the get-go to the eventual ribbon-cutting ceremony, and it should justify every vociferous demonstration, tree ribbon, and lie-in. Yet I can’t quite gather the strength to be infuriated. What is worth saving?

  Posted 21 November 2016 | Author Liam Hogan

• Cup Day Spew

  THE FIRST TUESDAY IN November, Melbourne Cup Day, is marked not by the excessive consumption of food and drink, but rather, by its regurgitation. The race that stops a nation also stops it in mid-sentence (‘um, hang on a minute’), bends it at about forty-five degrees at the waist, puts its hands on its knees, then floor-pancakes its lunch across the footpath, or bus floor, or office carpet. There, doesn’t that feel better out than in?

  Posted 1 November 2016 | Author Liam Hogan