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.

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.

‘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.

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.

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…

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.