Author Liam Hogan

• The Best And Worst Of Sussex Street

  THE HEADQUARTERS OF THE AUSTRALIAN Labor Party, NSW Branch, stand at 377 Sussex St, above a bland marble and carpet lobby and, at the time of writing, no outward signage. Unions NSW—which used to go by the nineteenth-century name of “Labor Council”—occupies the back part of the building and parades its workerist murals, its flags, badges and colours, with all the ceremony they deserve, but the political wing goes incognito.

  Posted 20 May 2011 | Author Liam Hogan | » Read more

• Empanadas

  AT SOME POINT IN 1997, at about 1.30am, in a loading dock opposite Railway Square in Sydney, I swore a sacred unbreakable oath. “As God is my witness,” I said to myself, “I’ll never work in the food industry again”. It’s one of the few promises to myself amongst the many I’ve made I can honestly say I’ve kept. Should any freebooting restaurant manager come sauntering up the steps of Rancho Estanmore, out to press-gang me into kitchenhand or service work, I’d not hesitate to defend my honour.

  Posted 18 May 2011 | Author Liam Hogan | » Read more

• Quick Post: Inner Western Public Art

  YOU BUY OR RENT A HOUSE in a suburb of Sydney’s inner west, and you move to a vibrant, diverse, community, with a sense of a common aesthetic. You recycle your plastics, and compost your kitchen scraps. Your children go to public schools—the good ones, mind, not the ones with disciplinary problems—and on the weekends they hang around the local cafes, independent cinemas and parks, not large commercialised shopping centres. You disapprove of mandatory detention of refugees, Australian participation in American wars in the Middle East, and the old Part 3A of the Planning Act. You look down on the Western suburbs where it’s all McMansions and four wheel drives, the North Shore where there’s no vitality, and the Shire most of all where they spend their public holidays organising race riot barbecues. You vote Labor in the lower house, Green in the upper, and if you vote Liberal, you have the good taste to keep your mouth shut about it. Everyone’s happy!

  Then, you make the mistake of painting your wall in a Federation beige in accordance with the Council’s notes about the surrounding heritage environment. Did you submit your application to paint over that derivative bit of graffiti piece of important public art with the local insufferable hipsters community of street artists? Apparently not.

  Slogan: THIS WALL USED TO HAVE ART ON IT, NOW IT HAS COCKS. Mallett St, Camperdown, Sydney.

  As Lenin might have said of the infantile disorder of anarchism, scratch a public artist, find a parochial art snob who likes drawing cock.

  Posted 5 May 2011 | Author Liam Hogan | » Read more

• Breakfast At The Wrong Time Of Day

  PSEUDOCYCLICAL TIME IS ASSOCIATED WITH the consumption of modern economic survival—the augmented survival in which everyday experience is cut off from decisionmaking and subjected no longer to the natural order, but to the pseudo-nature created by alienated labor. It is thus quite natural that it echoes the old cyclical rhythm that governed survival in preindustrial societies, incorporating the natural vestiges of cyclical time while generating new variants: day and night, work and weekend, periodic vacations.¹

  So said Guy Debord about the rules governing when one can and cannot eat particular meals. Michael Douglas’s character D-FENS, the classically alienated man, transformed by industry and excluded from power and the communal experience of history, made a similar declaration.

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

• Amatriciana Rovinata

  I’ve been thinking, it’s all the fried crap you’ve been eating.
  Now. Show me how you can ruin a pasta dish and do it in style.

  When a witch tells you your diet isn’t up to scratch, man, you’d better listen. I listened. At least I think I was listening, but at some point I blinked and found myself mentally wandering down Norton Street for a short black and a couple of almond biscotti, taking in the fumes. Sorry about that.

  Posted 28 April 2011 | Author Liam Hogan | » Read more

• Quick Post: Flu Drugs (We Care A Lot)

  SINCE LATE FRIDAY I’VE BEEN laid flat with the kind of headcold that I find comes around about once every two years or so, like swift kicks in the face and throat followed up with rabbit punches to elbows, knees and each vertebra.

  In the past I’ve been quite happy to call up my boss, claim some of that lovely sick leave hard-won in the EBA by the power of collective bargaining, tuck myself into bed with a packet of Codral Day & Night and sleep about eighteen hours a day. Being sick just isn’t the same, though, when I’m not leaving someone else with my work or shirking my responsibilities.

  Not, of course, that I expect sympathy. Indeed, here’s some Faith No More, telling the world (and Bono, whom I met just the other day) just how much the universe empathises.

  Posted 18 April 2011 | Author Liam Hogan | » Read more

• Appointment In Parramatta Road: El-Jannah Chicken

  PORT JACKSON, SYDNEY’S NATURAL HARBOUR, appears in all of the tourist brochures and Lonely Planet guides as the centre of the city, and its spiritual heart: but they are all wrong. The harbour has a rather good-looking Bridge (though the Gladesville Bridge, the Cinderella stepsister arch of the city, is always overlooked). It’s got a freaky egg-shaped warehouse for elitist affairs. I admit, the ferries are good fun, but what’s left? A Navy base or two, the Casino, a few bits of National Park, and the rest is pure pleasure garden for fund-manager multimillionnaires and shiny stockbrokers gorging on derivatives.

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

• Quick Post: The Religious Right, From The Religious Right

  DR GORDON MOYES WAS a member of the upper house of the NSW Parliament from 2003 2002 until the most recent election in March this year. Originally standing with Fred Nile’s Christian Democrats, he broke with his Parliamentary colleague in spectacular fashion and ran unsuccessfully as a Family First candidate. He is very traditional, very conservative, and very religious. When someone like that warns you about extremism on the Right, it’s worth cocking an ear.

  Posted 8 April 2011 | Author Liam Hogan | » Read more

• Feijoada

  TAKE FIVE HUNDRED YEARS OF cross-Atlantic commerce and movement of people, voluntary and otherwise, stir in massive amounts of energy, add misery, guns, money, Portuguese forts in unexpected places, and scorched earth everywhere else, leave it be for the benign neglect of time to assimilate everything, and you might just wind up with something as good as feijoada.

  Posted 6 April 2011 | Author Liam Hogan | » Read more

• Quick Post: Hope, For A Good War

  “Agricultural land has not increased at anything like the same rate [as population] so things are going to have to change, as simple as that.
  “[Either that] or you put up with the food riots, or hope for a good war to reduce numbers. These are not alternatives.”
  Professor Batterham is the deputy chair of a working group which advised Prime Minister Julia Gillard on food security.

  If there’s one thing I’m grateful for about having had a liberal education, it’s an appreciation for academic freedom.

  Posted 5 April 2011 | Author Liam Hogan | » Read more