Dear Readers,
Good morning, and welcome to Off The Fence, a newsletter that usually arrives on a Monday, but today lands on a Tuesday. Issue 13 will be at our depot any moment now and, all being well, with subscribers this Friday, so this is your final opportunity to change your address. It’s also the last chance saloon to pick up a copy of Issue 12, which is sold out on the webstore – there are a few remaining copies at some of these stockists here, and we know that Magculture, who ship internationally, have a couple left at their online shop.
From October 21, the price of an annual subscription is going to rise to £30 to reflect the increased costs in printing and mailing the mags. So, this is your penultimate opportunity to score a sub for £25, which certainly makes for remarkable value for four magazines and 50 newsletters for the year: sign up today and save yourself a fiver.
Now, we’ve got some good bits on Mike Tyson, a very horny bird and the strange goings-on at the Royal Institute of British Architects. But as Liz Truss is threatening to be the shortest-lived leader in British political history, we thought we’d start with something from Westminster.
A Shepherd’s Market Special
Generally speaking, political secretaries to the Prime Minister have been seasoned operatives – past incumbents include Pat McFadden, John McTernan and Sally Morgan. Sophie Jarvis, who is the current political secretary to Liz Truss, is only 28 years old, and three years ago was working as a junior on the Evening Standard’s diary section. Now, she is responsible for managing the relationship between her PM and a rebellious party, keen to ditch Truss.
Speaking to a number of insiders, a picture emerges of a capable woman with ‘good vibes’ who did much to help Truss into Downing Street, specifically by managing relations with the ERG and Iain Duncan Smith in particular, and has been ‘terrifically loyal’ to her boss, who has needed extensive assistance at maintaining and developing relationships in government.
But there are other dissenting voices, who cite her inexperience and lack of nous, and who point to the Gabriel Pogrund scoop from earlier this year, where it was revealed that Liz Truss had booked the Mayfair members club, 5 Hertford Street (nicknamed the ‘Brexit sex dungeon’) for a meeting with the US Trade Secretary, Katherine Tai.
As the documents show, Sophie Jarvis ‘insisted’ that the meeting take place at 5 Hertford Street, where the bill came to a stonking £1300, and managed to piss off the civil servants involved so much that they then leaked the emails to the press. But – a small mercy – the taxpayer didn’t have to cover the £500 fee for the room hire.
Live at the Belasco
Plaudits to Guy Burton, who has shared a photo that has loaded our hearts with joy – a full set of TF miscellany, comprising the magazines, the book and a set of Pandemillions.
If you’d like to ‘do a Burton’, then you can pick up a copy of SLS from Waterstones right here – the book has been featured by Anna Cafolla in The Face’s autumn books round-up.
And we still have a few copies of Pandemillions left. If you’d like one, email us and we’ll get back to you with further details.
Jaunts to Daunts
Some exciting news: we’re going to be expanding the books coverage in this newsletter. So far, we’ve had featurettes on Katy Hessel’s The Story of Art Without Men and Oliver Bullough’s Butler to the World – two books which would have been bestsellers without us, truth be told. But there are now more than 5,000 of you signed up to this mail-out, and quite a lot of you are very much ‘into’ books, so we thought we might dial it up on the literary front.
So, if you’ve got some titles that you think would be of interest to our readership, then do get in touch with the editorial team by replying to this email.
Sunshine on Leith
A few newsletters back, we told the story of how the sinking of the Arandora Star devastated the Italian community in Soho, and how the reverberations can still be felt today.
When the ocean liner was sunk by a German U-boat in 1940, it destroyed the Paolozzi family, who had left Viticuso in Lazio for Edinburgh, where they ran an ice cream shop. The young 16-year-old Eduardo Paolozzi, then a schoolboy, was locked up in Saughton Prison, where he learned the news of the death of his father, grandfather and uncle, who had all drowned in the Atlantic Ocean.
As some of you will know, Paolozzi became a world-famous sculptor – he was knighted in 1989, and died in 2005. In a series of heart-rendering phone calls, he recounts the end of his childhood. It has all been transcribed here at the British Library website, and the relevant part begins at page 21.
Waxing Lyrical
For an everyday household item, the candle is rich in allegorical potential: sex, death, the afterlife and all the rest of it. In a zippy and witty piece, Danielle Thom offers a brief history of the handy object, which you can read here.
This is also the last piece to be put online from Issue 12 – we do only put 30 percent of the content on the website. Next year, we will be publishing much more, but it will be behind a paywall of terrifying capability. Yet another reason to subscribe now at the very cheap price of £25 for the year!
Educating RIBA
The Stirling Prize is the most prestigious event in the British architectural calendar. So why, one might ask, is this year’s party being headlined by nineties rap-funk outfit, the Stereo MC’s? Have they, in the words of their famous Carphone Warehouse jingle, ‘got themselves connected’? Or do they speak to a wider malaise at the heart of one of Britain’s great professional institutions?
It would appear that there has been something an institutional capture of the Royal Institute of British Architects, led by entryists from the lower reaches of the pop industry, and the lingering impact of Rob Dickins: the former Chairman of Warner Music UK (a regional sub-office of the proper Warner Music) whose claim to fame was launching Howard Jones on an unsuspecting British public, and getting a name-drop on Enya’s wifty-wafty classic, Orinoco Flow.
A compulsive, habitual trustee, Dickins became Chair of the British Architectural Trust Board, which oversees the RIBA’s public programming, in 2018. Having hoped to turn the RIBA’s HQ at Portland Place into a ritzy hive of hustle and bustle like the ICA of old, he lasted but two short years, spending big with little glamour to show for it. First was a weekly cabaret, The Architects Underground, which he promised would become ‘a magazine event’ and ‘a whirlwind of inspirational minds’. Sadly, the launch – featuring Suggs from Madness and Siobhan from Bananarama – failed to ignite the public’s passions for an architectural salon.
His undisclosed grander plans for the 2020 Stirling Prize were stymied, like everything, by Covid; a bump in the road that triggered his resignation, citing 'bureaucratic greyness' within the 'detached and inward-looking' RIBA. But he did get his wish for a groovy bar off the ground, the ‘Bauhaus Bar’ – a converted ground floor meeting room which is open between 10:30am and 2:30pm, Monday to Friday.
He managed to hire a good few ex-label lackeys before his departure, and their influence is most certainly felt in the booking of the Stereo MC’s to play their inimitable style of naff Nottinghamshire hip-hop to a room of fizz-sodden trade journos. Maybe that is tantamount to Dickins’ legacy; or, maybe, it could be the 20 redundancies that the RIBA had to make in January this year, after posting £8.2m in losses in the time he was helming their public offering.
Dropping Science
Thanks to two of our readers, some choice Mike Tyson anecdotage has come our way. At a party held by the fashion designer, Fernando Sanchez, the young Tyson was trying to force himself on Naomi Campbell, and one of her friends asked the guests to make him stop.
Enter A.J Ayer, a diminutive British philosopher, who came into the room and demanded that Tyson relent. Tyson bellowed ‘Do you know who the fuck I am? I’m the heavyweight champion of the world!’
Ayer retorted ‘And I am the former Wykeham Professor of Logic at Oxford University. We are both pre-eminent in our field – I suggest we talk about this like rational men.’
Tyson, momentarily stunned by such bravado, allowed Campbell to slip outside to safety.
We Always Knew Ye
Now that Kanye West has broken out the goose steps online, there has been a long-overdue appraisal of his behaviour. With his social media accounts locked, it seems brands may be thinking twice about associating with a man threatening to go ‘death con 3 on JEWISH PEOPLE’.
Note that these are still ‘second thoughts’ rather than immediate abandonment, since his Yeezy deal with Adidas is believed to be the German mega-brand’s most profitable line by some distance. In fairness, their collaboration already survived a recent altercation in which the superstar showed porn to Adidas execs during a business meeting.
Whatever his mental state, and whatever he says, it would appear that West is too useful a tool for certain political factions to abandon at this juncture, so it looks likely that such outbursts will continue to be tolerated for as long as he remains the world’s most famous quasi-conservative contrarian.
And to be honest, West would have been called out – long ago – for his truly revolting clothes, which look like condoms (both used and unused).
West was enabled by a number of fashion industry leaders who immediately understood a man given to trumpeting his own genius. One of those people was Louise Wilson, the legendary course director of the MA programme at Central Saint Martin. Wilson, who died in 2014, was a key inspiration for West (and many other more lauded designers) and sent many of her best students to work for the Chicagoan in California and Paris.
The Fence has heard some shocking stories about how West treats his employees – unfortunately, they’re all temporarily locked under a complex series of non-disclosure agreements. We hope to bring you some soon.
In Case You Missed It
Fed up of reading pieces that gauge inequality using the same old metrics, time and time again? Jack Nicas has you covered, with this piece exploring the differing fates of two Michael Jackson impersonators in Buenos Aires.
Christian Bale has been famous for a very long time, which makes it all the stranger that he’s never been allowed to speak for very long. That is until Zach Baron conducted this deep and probing interview with the actor.
For Asian American Writers’ Workshop, Nur Nasreen Ibrahim discusses the ecstasy and agony of writing sex scenes.
1843 Magazine! We would love to italicise you, but we can’t until you bring your print run back! Anyway, here’s a cracking piece: the secret diary of a Ukrainian soldier training for the front line.
How many jokes are there in one two-minute section of golden era Simpsons? A lot, according to this phenomenal breakdown by Framley Examiner scribe, Joel Morris.
If you share a secret, scandalous craving for stories about eccentric daredevils, Ben Taub’s profile of Bertrand Piccard, the man attempting to circumnavigate the world in a very large balloon for some reason, is seriously worth a read.
And Finally
One other book which we’ve featured this year is Patrick Galbraith’s In Search of One Last Song, a particularly brilliant debut that really should be on a few more prize shortlists (you can read one of its many glowing notices here).
In the book, Patrick travels to Strathspey to encounter the capercaillie, a Schwarzenegger-proportioned grouse which is now threatened with extinction in the British Isles.
While the capercaillie is regarded as ‘shy and elusive’ in this country, it flourishes in Eastern Europe – as you can see in this video here, where a vast capercaillie tries to mate with an unsuspecting Russian man’s head. Maybe the RSPB should study this video for breeding tips? We do want to maintain a rich, diverse wildlife in this country…
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That’s it for this week, and we will join you next week when Issue 13 is nestled up with subscribers. Please do share snaps of the magazine on Twitter and also on Instagram – it really does make our harried contributors and editors thrilled to see the magazine ‘out in the wild’. And one last reminder for those at the back, in case you missed it any of the other times: this is the penultimate week when a year’s sub will cost £25 – there’s a link just below. We’ll join you next Monday: you can get in touch with the editorial team by replying to this email. Until then.
All the best,
TF
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