Dear Readers,
Good morning, and welcome to Off The Fence. We are a newsletter, and a good one at that: we have another plump edition for you today.
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We’ve been very lucky to have two Stars of Tomorrow in the office with us recently. Lotte Brundle and Tommy Gilhooly have been in for a week’s work, and both have bylines in upcoming print editions of the magazine, which is pretty impressive stuff.
Let’s get it going. Today, we’ve got a dispatch from Camden, speculation on Timothée Chalamet’s bone structure and some gems from Betty Boothroyd’s estate.
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Stop all the clocks, cut off the telephone, prevent the dog from barking with a juicy bone, silence the pianos and with muffled drum, bring out the ‘collection of frog related items’, let the auctioneers come. At long last, the estate of Britain’s first female Speaker, the late Baroness Betty Boothroyd, is being auctioned off on January 23rd, with all manner of strange political tchotchkes on the catalogue for lucky bidders.
Every father in the country will, at some point, have waved off a request from their child for a signed first edition of Denis Healey’s photographic memoir, Healey’s Eye – now, for between £50 and £80, you can make their dreams come true (unless another father outbids you and pleases their child instead). Peruse the books, the frog trinkets and all other items in the Boothroyd estate sale right here.
Alan Bennett’s Diary
We’re pretty sure that not many of you live in Camden. Very few people have much business there, either. It’s a place that you pass through. But most Londoners have, in some shape of form, ‘come of age’ in the skunk-laced streets by the canal.
Clive Martin took a series of trips to NW1, retracing the contours of his teenage years as he tries to work out who Camden is really for these days. As you would expect, it’s a fantastic dispatch.
Pevsner’s Delight
Earlier this week, the editor asked the good people of ‘architecture Twitter’ a question: which modernist and contemporary buildings should be Grade 1-listed? You might think the secular brutalist cathedrals that are the National Theatre and the Barbican complex would be part of that elite 9,000-or-so number. But they’re Grade II* and Grade II respectively (and you might imagine that most of the Barbican residents would want to keep it that way).
As we found out from many readers, there are actually a series of beautiful and important modernist churches in Britain, none of which enjoy a Grade 1-listing. Here’s our pick of the bunch, the interior of St Paul’s, Bow Common.
Sideboob De-Kleined
Calvin Klein, sick of their long-held reputation as ‘boring staple Christmas present for distant male relative’, are trying to be sexy again. They recently pivoted back to their ‘just make customers horny’ strategy with ads featuring Jeremy Allen White and FKA Twigs. The only problem being that the former, starring the diminutive chef White prancing over rooftops in his pants, was not banned, and the former, which featured FKA Twigs’s sideboob, was pulled from Instagram. The UK’s Advertising Standards Authority did not enjoy the fact that FKA was styled as a ‘stereotypical sexual object’ bemoaning that the ‘image’s composition placed viewers’ focus on the model’s body rather than on the clothing being advertised’.
As John Berger defines in his seminal Ways of Seeing, ‘Men act and women appear. Men look at women. Women watch themselves being looked at. This determines not only most relations between men and women but also the relation of women to themselves’. Anyway, despite FKA taking to Instagram saying that she doesn't feel sexualised by the advert, the ASA doubled down that ‘the ad broke the rules by irresponsibly objectifying a woman.’ Good thing those feminists at ASA are looking out for FKA and that things haven't changed since Berger's dig at the male gaze in the art world in 1972. Not a good way for FKA Twigs to celebrate her birthday (which is today, happy birthday, Tahliah, you Gloucestershire siren).
Not a Threat, but a Spoiler
You’ll see it if you stroll past Good News, the famed Soho newsagents on Berwick Street: not one, not two, not even ten, but twenty-four posters of Issue 18 slapped all over the wall, as The UK’s Only Magazine becomes – in this shop at least – the one & only magazine on display.
World domination is continuing apace for our august little publication – why not get on board while things are heating up? A subscription to the magazine is only £30 a year, and for that, you’ll get our last (and best-ever) issue, as well as the delectable set of four that we’re putting together for 2024. Hit that button below and join us, you’ll love it.
The God of Beginnings
January! How do you feel about it? Probably negative, we’d assume – at least right now, where the breeze is bitingly cold, the pubs are empty and the working week is right back where it was in November. You’d have to be deranged to say anything positive about the month of January. Fortunately, we received just the screed from our friend & contributor Josh Mcloughlin, stalwart of our pages, who has written a convincing case that this long, poor, freezing month might just be the most beautiful of all. Read it and weep.
Over the Borderline
Last week, we ran one of the finest stories of our last issue: an essay from Patrick Galbraith on his most beloved schoolteacher, James Rainy Brown, who took his own life hours after being informed of a police investigation into his behaviour toward pupils. It’s a masterfully nuanced, tender and introspective piece of writing on a complicated subject, one that displays the depth of the writer’s feelings and the breadth of his talents. We urge you to read the story for yourself.
Beautiful Boy, Bad Kisser
Back to haunt the pop culture zeitgeist like the ghost of a Victorian chimney sweep comes Timothée Chalamet. Variety posted a video of his kiss with Kylie Jenner at the Golden Globes, where many of us discovered the horror of his side profile for the first time. It’s a surprisingly unenthusiastic snog from a man that was once papped with his tongue down Lily Rose Depp’s throat on a yacht. Is it possible that Chalamet was simply mewling his way towards being considered a sex symbol for all these years? The weirdos of Reddit do seem to think so; they speculate that mewling is the only answer, because he is a ‘nose breather’ and his face is ‘too feminine to be just testosterone’. All very normal stuff.
In Case You Missed It
David Roth (not the Van Halen one, as I’m sure both are sick of highlighting) takes a look at the outsized clout of the Gray Lady in modern American discourse.
The bossman Pankaj Mishra tackles the weight of historical memory beneath German and Israeli foreign policy.
Puce-coloured sweat hog Ron DeSantis is second in the race for the Republican candidacy. But who is his enforcer, and what did she learn from a billionaire Georgian kleptocrat?
Another corker from the Guardian’s inimitable ‘Experience’ column: ‘I fell off a 40ft cliff.’
A deep-dive on a subject of newsletters past, as ComputerWeekly looks into the Dad’s Army email cache of MI6’s Richard Dearlove.
And Finally
It’s Kate Moss’s half-century birthday today, and to celebrate that milestone we’ve dug deep into the archives to find these clips of her from Katherina Otto-Bernstein’s 1998 Sundance Film Festival documentary, Beautopia. The film, an insider look at the fashion industry, follows upcoming models and features baby-faced Kate, chain-smoking backstage.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yu7-0_7ajJ4
It’s quite hard to find post-90s interview gems when it comes to Mossy, presumably because in 2009 she gave one to Women’s Wear Daily in which she answered the question ‘any life matras?’ not with the expected media-trained answers of ‘be yourself!’ or ‘think positive!’ but instead with: ‘nothing tastes as good as skinny feels’. Unsurprisingly she then promptly and sensibly shut up for the next fifteen years.
Similarly leaving a bad taste in our mouths today is the rumours swirling online about Sir David Attenborough. Here he is looking unrecognisable as a 33-year-old in full safari gear, capturing the world’s first ever audio of Madagascar’s largest lemur. We wish him all the best.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SzTg3ztrgZ4
And that’s all folks. We’re now officially halfway through the hardest, longest month of the year, by the time the next OTF drops we’ll be 11 more minutes closer to it being light out at 5pm. If you’d like to speak to us before then about an order that you should email subscriptions@the-fence.com, and if you’d like to send us a pitch that should go to editorial@the-fence.com – and we will get back to you.
TF