Saturday, May 29, 2021

Where did you see it last? Antipodean Hungarian Les Eric Gönye of Legislative Fame

 Because our destiny is across the other side. Together we'll rise with the currents. Growing up and taking pride. Take a chance with the river. Because our destiny is across the other side. The water's rising and we're going in. It's time to either sink or swim.


Vale Frances Grove


Parliamentary memories of young Sarah-Jane and her dad  Russell - Six thousand bills, but just one quiet Russell


I thought of my cousin Andrej and his favourite quote from the Bible, the New Testament that he shared also with non believer Vaclav Havel on several occasions. This is a letter from Saint Paul to Timothy. I think it sums up not just Andrej’s feelings but everybody else who is a recycled teenager: 

I have fought the good fight, I have finished the course, I have kept the faith; in the future there is laid up for me the crown of righteousness, which the Lord, the righteous Judge, will award me on that day—and not only to me, but to all who have longed for his appearing




Les is on a left and his international connections on the right. Les was envied by many as he was selected as the clerk to the Select Committee on Prostitution and he travelled with Pat Rogan, the chair, and few other lucky MPs to Amsterdam… to study the adult industry like no other committee on earth



Les's length of service on the staff of the Assembly is unparalleled. When he started here in 1978, the Hon. Neville Wran was Premier, the Hon. Lawrence Kelly was Speaker, the Hon. Frank Walker was Leader of the House and Ron Ward was the Clerk of the Legislative Assembly. Les has served under 11 Premiers, 15 Leaders of the Opposition, seven Speakers, 13 Leaders of the House and six Clerks of the Legislative Assembly.

Clerk of the Parliaments. 3 RETIREMENT OF RUSSELL DAVID GROVE FROM THE POSITION OF CLERK OF THE LEGISLATIVE ASSEMBLY


My vintage Hungarian Antipodean Les Gonye has retired this week from NSW Parliament so Judith will be able to spent more time with Les who recovered well from his heart operation

RETIREMENT OF LESLIE ERIC GöNYE, DEPUTY CLERK OF THE LEGISLATIVE ASSEMBLY


Pennies In Bags of Water Make Flies Flee Tennessee Farm Bureau 


All I can do is be me, whoever that is.

— Bob Dylan, born on this month in 1941

 

Bob Dylan’s Poetics: by Timothy Hampton


There is much to love in the book, from Hampton’s tour de force reading of Blood on the Tracks and its poetics of evasion—which manages, among other things, to combine Kerouac and Petrarch—to his bravura readings of “Jokerman” and “Every Grain of Sand.” Rich and indispensable endnotes tease out a fascinating array of implications from even the minutest observation.


Happiness now 



Honey, I Found A Guarneri In The Attic

“A violin found in an attic in Italy has been confirmed as a priceless instrument made by Giuseppe Guarneri ‘filius Andreae’ in c.1705. The age of the wood was confirmed using dendrochronology, and the researchers were even able to prove it came from the same tree as the wood in an already-identified violin by the same maker.” – The Strad


Where did you see it last?


One of the first analogies we ever had for ‘things’ was a website like a filing cabinet, a place into which stuff could be placed for later retrieval. Today, even our archives need archives (thank you to the kind people, usually PRs, who pop up every now and again and request that we change a broken URL from 2011. Even if we knew how to do this, broken URLs serve as empty manila folders in the filing cabinet; tantalising but infuriating). Writer Craig Robertson’s piece on The Filing Cabinet for Places Journal delves into the history of organising information, a task that swiftly threatens to overwhelm every collective endeavour unless it is snapped into place with logic and consistency at an early stage. 

Robertson traces the gendered advertising of early filing cabinets, and how the object came to represent bureaucratic stasis: “Today a cabinet jam-packed with files symbolizes the particular anxiety that is provoked by our awareness that paper records can create an alternative paper-based reality to which officials reflexively defer.” (shades of Douglas Adams: “It was on display in the bottom of a locked filing cabinet stuck in a disused lavatory with a sign on the door saying ‘Beware of the Leopard’.”). The piece also delves into the evolution of the ‘desktop metaphor’ in computer interfaces, of which the original filing cabinet was an integral part. His chance discovery of a ‘Mr Google’ from 1921 is also worth a mention. Closely related, ‘The Memex Method: When your commonplace book is a public database’. Cory Doctorow on writing, being online, writing online and how blogs function as a weird in-between space between thought and finished work. Both pieces are well worth a read if, like us, you struggle with the often contradictory values of ‘file and forget’ and ‘write down to remember’. 

Some other things. Paintings by Francine Hsu Davis / When Cell Phone Towers Cosplay as Trees, photographs by Annette LeMay Burke, via tmn, which also links to Which country’s Emergency Alert System siren is the most alarming? / a deep dive into a painting by Alice Neel / the ‘opaque industry’ of superyacht design, construction and ownership. Perhaps Bellingcat could look into the fleet allegedly belonging to one Mr Putin, but helpfully ‘owned’ by a bunch of his friends. Related, the story of the vintage yacht Nahlin, now owned by James Dyson. Big boats are shuffled around a very small pool of very rich people / a bit of tech-driven juvenalia, What Three Rude Words? See also Four Kings Maps / upcoming post-rock project by Held by Trees / Behind Closed Doors, a YouTube channel about usually inaccessible architecture presented by Tarek Merlin (via Wallpaper*). Urban exploration with an invitation.


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