Orange Juice & Ryvita

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

Author Liam Hogan

  • Parcel

    ‘YOUR PARCEL HAS BEEN delivered and is waiting’ reads the text message. The parcel locker system is one of the best recent innovations of the public sector; instead of having internet-ordered things delivered (if you’re lucky) to your house, or more usually, delivered to a post office open 9am–5pm, you get a six-digit number to your phone to open a secure box in the wall. It’s like a PO box but without the costs or size restrictions.

    This package is from Japan, has camera parts in it, and is—I hope—going to be the difference between my having a working camera and an expensive shiny paperweight. The model of camera has been out of production since 1972, and the company has long since shut, so it’s a wonderful discovery to find that there are still people in Japan making and selling things like shutter ribbon, and replacement coverings. Hooray for enthusiasts.

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  • Rations

    ON SATURDAY 22nd I was part of the NSW Bush Search and Rescue (BSAR) Navshield, from this year an event organised by the NSW State Emergency Service (SES). It’s like a rogaine, or orienteering, only more so. One of the policies of the NSW SES is that its volunteers are fed on training and operational activity. We were offered, and I, out of curiosity, accepted, a Ration Pack, promised as equivalent to those issued to the Australian Defence Force.

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  • Designing a jail

    IN THE NEW INQUIRY, Monica Mohapatra writes about the uneasy appeal of design thinking to make better prisons. The piece is excellent. Read it.

    Design approaches to jail have recently become appealing to ruling classes because they garner a profit from aesthetic changes that are easily branded as prison reform. Underlying this facade of reform is the fact that architectural improvements serve to make jails more palatable for a future where jails will neighbor more communities...

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  • The years have made me bitter

    THE YEARS HAVE MADE me bitter, the gargle dims my brain
    'cause Dublin keeps on changing, and nothing seems the same
    The Pillar and the Met have gone, the Royal long since pulled down
    As the great unyielding concrete makes a city of my town.

    On the 23rd of March, last Saturday, NSW went to a State election and narrowly re-elected its government. The Coalition, unpopular for its performance but with a well-respected leader, faced a Labor Party with an unremarkable campaign and an unknown leader whose comments about Asian demographic change were reported in the last week, to catastrophic effect.

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  • Detail accounts

    BECAUSE ONE BLOG IS never enough I started recently taking photographs of, and making commentary about, architectural vents and grilles. It's an extremely niche and (I hope) harmless thing to do with my time, and seems to fit what I realise is a broader interest I've got in other people's projects of documenting specific urban environmental characteristics.

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  • 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...

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  • What I'm reading

    A City Plans For War (Emma Shaw Crane, Public Books):

    Urban planning’s promise of an improved city of the future is especially bright in postconflict cities, where planning is expected to bring not only the usual modernist improvements—development, growth—but also peace. Yet in postconflict Beirut, planners, developers, and architects, instead of designing for a peaceful city, plan for the war yet to come.

    It's time to let Canberra picturesquely decay (Ian Warden, Canberra Times):

    When Australians, in their endearingly muddleheaded and inarticulate way, complain that there is something “artificial” about their nation’s capital, one of the things they mean (without being able to put a muddleheaded finger on it) is that Canberra has no ruins.

    Conspiracy Theories (David Runciman, TLS):

    ...for the conspiracy theorist the absence of truth can only be explained by some sinister forces having decided to conceal it. And of course that is a conspiracy theory that many liberals find hard to resist. Why did people vote for Brexit? Because the ignorant voters were misled by nefarious forces. The same with the election of Trump. What are those forces? Take your pick...

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  • What I'm reading

    Thea Riofrancos: Populism Without The People

    POPULISM IS THE SHADOW of representative democracy. Again and again, populist movements emerge and come to thrive in the gap between the promise of collective sovereignty and the disappointing experience of politics as usual.

    The Last Psychiatrist: The Maintenance of Certification Exam as Fetish

    Last year there was a large cheating scandal at Harvard, over a hundred students were accused of plagiarism in a government class, and amidst the usual self-aggrandizing criticisms of the college kids as entitled, lazy, or stupid, what no one wondered is why, in an introductory survey course predicated on institutionalized grade inflation and no wrong answers, did the students feel compelled to cheat when they were all going to get As anyway? The terrifying answer is that they weren’t cheating to get the right answer, there was no right answer, they were forced to cheat to concoct the answer the professor wanted— because that’s the system. Meanwhile, while they were spending their time “cheating”, what real learning could be done? None. So—- why bother with an exam at all? Why not just offer the course and give everyone an A anyway? Because the purpose of the test is to say a test was given, to prove to some hypothetically gullible entity that learning occurred— and to prove it to ourselves. Which is why our reflex was to criticize the kids, not the system: we are products of that system, to criticize the reliability, let alone validity, of that system would be to open ourselves to scrutiny, to deprive us of a core part of our own identity. “Things were a lot more rigorous when I went to college.” First of all, they weren’t. Second, even if they were, why, when you got to be in charge, did you change the system to this?

    David Roth: This is all Donald Trump has left, (thanks to @hamonryen on twitter)

    Like many in his generation, Trump has mistaken the end of his life for the end of the world.

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  • What I'm reading

    Catherine Zimmer: THE BINGEWATCH: “WE LIVE IN AN AGE OF DYNASTIES”

    Despite its internal incoherence, Dynasty is part of a narrative that, no matter how ridiculous the premise, has the vicious coherence of history. Connecting the dots leads right to here and now, where virtually no one wants to be.

    Nicolas Hausdorf: The decline of the Imperial Aesthetic

    With the territorialization of the future by techno-deterministic dystopia, of the countryside by suburban sprawl, of imagination by social networked quantifiable mimetic desire, the past becomes the only available outlet, a promise of infinite space to be selectively appropriated and colonized as a retreat from the ugliness of the present.

    Jacobite magazine really runs the gamut from broadly trad-reactionary, to accelerationist, to impenetrable right-critical philsophy, and I honestly don't know which one this fits into. From a heritage perspective, you'd respond to it by saying yeah, the reason modernist architecture is culturally significant is precisely because of these social effects, and de gustibus non est disputandum, anyway; 'taste is not a matter of deliberation'? As the famous wordsmith said, Explain yourself dopey.

    Matthew Walther: Principles for Dummies

    Probably you can imagine what it does for the reader’s expectations when he discovers less than a tenth of the way through a book called Principles that its author has no principles, not even ones governing the use of the word.

    Every now and then it's refreshing to read a review article so damning that it leaves scorch marks on the wall behind you. This one is spectacular.

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  • Total House

    On Twitter, Trav (@Br_Tr) posted an art print of the Total House car park in Melbourne. It’s a really good looking piece of architectural art, and like all good art, it creates an emotional and intellectual response. Mine, of course, was fury.

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