Orange Juice & Ryvita

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

Author Liam Hogan

  • Excellent Bones

    ELIZABETH FARRELLY, A MASTER of her art, wrote these sentences with apparent sincerity.

    Newcastle has excellent bones. Its pretty, gridded sandstone core drapes over a headland set between river and ocean. Sure, the surrounding sprawl is ugly, but rail lets you ignore all that, popping up like a meerkat right in its heart. Newcastle is as close to a European-style town as you’ll find in this country.

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  • Student housing in The Saturday Paper

    BECAUSE THIS BLOG EXISTS, AND because I get to choose what I do with it, I’m going to start putting up excerpts and links to things on the internet that I have read that I think you, reader, would also enjoy. I understand that’s the original definition of ‘web log’. But what’s historicisation of technologies between web-‘social’ acquaintances in a relationship mediated by marketing? Call this post the first in a beginning form of adaptive re-use.

    There’s increasing discussion about the role of the public sector in setting standards that mandate design quality in housing. Projects such as this remind us that authorities have another potent form of intervention at their disposal. With deep institutional knowledge and a desire to chase more than the bottom line, they are well placed to lead the development of innovative and life-affirming housing models. Wielded strategically, by a range of authorities across metropolitan areas, projects of this type could visibly lift the bar of housing quality for all of us.

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  • Red Red Wine

    IT’S BEEN A DAY for all of the ex-Labor staffers I know to relish. Premier of New South Wales is becoming one of those jobs you just don’t stay in very long, like the Chief Taster to the Sultan, or the coach of an AFL side coming ninth. We kept losing ‘em to the loathsome effects of Parliamentary crooks and it’s hard not to bleakly laugh when our right-wing friends and family complain that ‘he was one of the good ones brought down’. Yeah, aren’t they all.

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  • Moderation

    INSTEAD OF READING THIS article by Julia Baird on ‘trolling’, read this essay by Jason Wilson on industrial moderation.

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  • Liam corresponds

    I’M PROUDLY A MEMBER of the NTEU, because on and off, I’m a casual academic, amongst other places, at the University of NSW. Generally they’re a pretty good union, but every now and then they drop some piece of communication to their members which sets me off. Boom! Papers go flying around my ‘office’, cups of tea get drunk, drafts get drafted. This morning the following made me breathe deeply and try to imagine calming blue surf while I was on my bus:

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  • Voting for Albo

    I VOTED JUST NOW for Anthony Albanese in the Australian Labor Party’s leadership ballot.

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  • Reheated Leftovers

    THERE ARE NOW, WITHOUT a doubt, young people studying sculpture at Central Saint Martin’s College who are younger than Pulp’s infamous song.

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  • Morning Coffee: Post-Work

    ROUTINES MATTER. MY GRANDFATHER could roll and light a cigarette one-handed, without spilling any of the tobacco from his pouch. My own morning routine involves dismantling and refilling a stovetop coffee maker, which I’ve discovered I prefer even to someone else making me a coffee at a shop, in a much better machine. I think my grandfather and I—apart from respective addictions to habit-forming substances—share a taste for ordinary rituals of making and busy-work. Disassembling, washing, refilling and heating the machine does a wonderful job of occupying time and activity while I wake up, and it’s not the same if I just hand over $3 for the same drink in a paper cup. I can well understand the dilemma of the quitting smoker, who asks herself or himself, hanging desperately out for a denied cigarette, never mind the actual drug, what am I supposed to do with my hands?

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  • Feta Margherita

    YOU WAKE UP UNDER a slowly rotating fan, the sweat pouring from your body onto the sheets of the bed you barely remember sleeping in. A tatty venetian blind casts narrow shadows across the room in sepia. One of The Doors’ songs, naturally, plays slowly, as you give a monologue describing your mental disintegration, and the progress of your terminal journey through another country’s trauma.

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  • Fried Onion

    WHO DIDN’T TELL ME about this? Who neglected to mention the simple process, that could have delighted me so well in the years since I have been old enough to be trusted with a sharp knife and a hotplate? What horrible self-censorship stopped me ever doing this, and what shameful ignorance ever ruled the process out of bounds, non-decision, un-knowledge?

    Take half an onion, chop it very finely, toss it in a teaspoon of flour, and fry it in lots of sunflower oil.

    The recipe is that simple, if you want lovely crispy onions like burger places put on their hamburgers, like Indian places put on top of rice, like anybody would want an onion to turn into. The italics are mine for importance: this has been an honest-to-Protestant-American-come-to-Jesus-moment-cliché revelation. Open palms in the air, dancing, call-and-response, Billy Graham with fried food, genuine hallelujah-and-pass-the-chicken-salt stuff.

    Put it all over your messy-as-hell omelette. Yeeeeahhhhh.

    Fried onions on an omelette

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