Author Liam Hogan

• Political Journalists Two Minutes Hate

  I READ THE NEWSPAPER, AND was infuriated: then I remember that above the level of incoherently muttering to one’s self, on the Maslow Pyramid of Internet Needs, lies the level of futilely declaiming to the void on one’s blog. “You’ve got one of those, remember”—I reminded myself.

  Here’s Peter Brent aka Mumble in (this will become important) The Australian.

  Posted 10 October 2011 | Author Liam Hogan | » Read more

• Lorikeet

  SPRING IN SYDNEY IS BOTTLEBRUSH season. Every LGA with the good taste to plant callistemon around the footpaths fills up with red trees and birds, as do the backyards of people with both bottlebrushes and flowering gums.

  

  Lorikeets are lovely birds. They’re a consolation for those foot-puncturing razor sharp gumnuts that drop for the rest of the year.

  Posted 7 October 2011 | Author Liam Hogan | » Read more

• Everything Is Possible Again

  THE ACCELERATION IS THOUGHT TO be driven by dark energy, but what that dark energy is remains an enigma—perhaps the greatest in physics today. What is known is that dark energy constitutes about three quarters of the Universe. Therefore the findings of the 2011 Nobel Laureates in Physics have helped to unveil a Universe that to a large extent is unknown to science. And everything is possible again.

  As usual, the italics are mine, as are the goosebumps. As the great scholar of romantic exploration reminds us, all men are Portuguese, and they are lost, seeking the Indies.

  Posted 4 October 2011 | Author Liam Hogan | » Read more

• Mt White Paddlepop

  IF YOU WANT TO HAVE a discussion about automobility, the way we live in our urban environment, the nature of the State and sustainability, I recommend not trying to do it on a platform like twitter, where big pointy-headed words like that tend to chew up your character limit. You end up trying to make your points like builders shouting at each other into crackly CB radios, in separate noisy corridors, in a building being demolished. This—old fashioned, finite but relatively unconstrained—blog entry arises from just such an exercise in ill communication.

  

  Posted 7 September 2011 | Author Liam Hogan | » Read more

• Forty Thousand Dollars

  THANKS TO ARTIST DENIS BEAUBOIS, we know what $20,000 in clean hundreds looks like. But it’s thanks to a crime story like this one, involving a drug trafficker, a real estate agent, and $40,000 in dirty notes, that we’ve had a bit more about Sydney’s political economy illustrated.

  Posted 4 September 2011 | Author Liam Hogan | » Read more

• Marrickville Meatball Roll

  IN THE MOST RECENT AUSTRALIAN Census, I registered myself as ethnically Australian, non-religious in outlook. Despite my stereotypically Irish name and culturally Catholic background they’re the most accurate descriptions of how I live my day-to-day life. This morning, though, I spent outside the office of my local Member of Parliament, there to take part in a battle of rent-a-crowds, and received a short sharp lesson in—for lack of a better phrase—the genealogy of my morals.

  “Tolerance is Our Demise”. Marrickville’s Convoy of No Confidence, 1 September 2011. Image copyright Anthony Albanese MP.

  Posted 1 September 2011 | Author Liam Hogan | » Read more

• Correction

  I WILL NOT PESTER YOU with further niceties applicable to the difference between houses of correction, and work-houses, and poor-houses, if any there should be, which are not work-houses; between the different modes of treatment that may be due to what are looked upon as the inferior degrees of dishonesty, to idleness as yet untainted with dishonesty, and to blameless indigence. The law herself has scarcely eyes for these microscopic differences. I bow down, therefore, for the present at least, to the counsel of so many sages, and shrink from the crime of being ‘wiser than the law.’

  That’s Jeremy Bentham, appealing to The Australian’s universal truth, that for every problem, no matter how simple or wicked, there exists a solution: thoroughgoing industrial relations reform.

  Update: No food blogging until further notice. Principles to weigh up. Faith to keep…

  Posted 29 August 2011 | Author Liam Hogan | » Read more

• Concordia Club Pork Knuckle

  AT THE HEART OF AUSTRALIAN multiculturalism lies a willingness on the part of migrants and migrant communities to self-organise. Yes, it’s true, there’s a lot more to it than the notorious three Fs—folkdancing, fashion and food—including a much larger discourse about the role of the State in endorsing, forbidding, legitimising and co-opting multiple linguistic, religious and cultural identities as aspects of the national habitus and the post-Bretton Woods political economy, but every Council has to have a Festival, and everybody needs lunch.

  Posted 21 August 2011 | Author Liam Hogan | » Read more

• Lemon Meringue Pie

  I SHARE MY LECTURES IN the Masters course I’m enrolled in with architects, civil engineers, a few property developers, and one or two landscape designers. I’m one of a very small minority, I find, who’ve ever spent any time down in the humanities or social science end of a university—and it’s something of a shock to jump over into the space of the other of The Two Cultures.¹

  Posted 14 August 2011 | Author Liam Hogan | » Read more

• Compulsory Riot Reading

  SCOFIELD TOUCHED MY ARM. “HERE we is,” he said.
  We had come to a huge tenement building.
  “Where are we?” I said.
  “This is the place where most of us live,” he said. “Come on.”
  So that was it, the meaning of the kerosene. I couldn’t believe it, couldn’t believe they had the nerve. All the windows seemed empty. They’d blacked it out themselves. I saw now only by flash or flame.
  “Where will you live?” I said, looking up, up.
  “You call this living?” Scofield said. “It’s the only way to get rid of it, man…”

  —from Ralph Ellison, Invisible Man, first published 1952

  Posted 9 August 2011 | Author Liam Hogan | » Read more