Off The Fence: On The Trail of Purple Aki
And a defence of Zadie Smith
Dear Readers,
Good afternoon, and welcome to Off The Fence, a plump little newsletter to the UK’s Only Magazine. There’s a lot happening at the moment: Issue 17 is being finalised tomorrow, and should be with us very soon. Next week, we’ll barrage you with some details about this issue – there are a couple of outstanding features within.
So, now, more than ever, there’s never been a better time to subscribe to the magazine – you’ll get two pieces of post in a fortnight from a quarterly magazine, which really is very exciting indeed. If you’d like to speak to us about an order, please email subscriptions@the-fence.com. We are also still open for pitches for Issue 18, too, but only till the end of the week – if you’ve got a pitch for us, please send it through to editorial@the-fence.com.
To business. Today, we’ve got some bits on a Scouse legend, Victoria Beckham, but we start with a small piece on Zadie Smith.
In The Leavisite Tradition
Few things are as likely to collectively irk the TF editorial team as a hatchet job on Zadie Smith. With her new novel, The Fraud, garnering good reviews and the odd rave, a note of dissent has come across the Atlantic from Andrea Long Chu, the Pulitzer-prize winning critic of New York magazine. It’s a shortish piece, as these things go, but seems wildly keen to skewer Smith for being insufficiently radical politically, and to make the slightly absurd claim that White Teeth – Smith’s novel – is her only good book.
It’s not a novel observation that Smith is a better essayist than she is a novelist: indeed, we made this point in joke form some years ago. Recently, Smith has written defences of old-fashioned liberalism, mainly in the pages of the New York Review of Books.
Chu has won a reputation for blistering takedowns – this piece on Hanya Yanagihara was a well-merited attack on that writer’s predilection to torture her gay male characters. But why is there such a market for literary takedowns? There are more than ever. We’re aware that we may have published a few in our time, but it’s interesting that a publication like New York magazine – not known historically for its literary coverage – has splashed the cash on putting Chu under contract.
Is it something to do with Twitter? Very possibly. The sound and the fury of the online discourse factory too often masks readings that seem to be written to be shared online. We would welcome, perhaps, a takedown of the takedown industry.
Selling Short
As if to prove our point, an even more tenuous takedown has surged through the commentariat this past week. We speak of Martin Short, comedian, actor, raconteur and unlikely first cousin of Blair era Minister for Development, Clare Short. Of all the pieces we’ve ever seen cause a real furore, Dan Kois’s excoriating takedown for Slate of the madcap Canadian comic is right up there with the strangest.
For one, Kois is a writer of real credibility, a stalwart of the American mediascape, and someone who doesn’t often slide in so two-footedly, nor get things so hideously incorrect. And yet, his op-ed – titled ‘Why We Keep Putting Up With Martin Short’ – has sparked an unholy Hollywood shitstorm, with figures like Ben Stiller, Mark Hamill and John Cusack throwing in surreal, breathless defences of Short to anyone who will listen.
The fervour of it all is bewildering. Why this? Why now? All of it speaks of an end-of-season malaise, post-heatwave tiredness, boredom and simply the lack of anything else to really bang on about – the discourse equivalent of starting a fight out of cabin fever. But to get ‘Off The Fence’ about things, Dan Kois is wrong, Martin Short is funny, and this seems like as good a time as any to re-up his cameo in Arrested Development. Swoop me!
What’s Roland Mouret Up To These Days?
Those of you who recall Victoria Beckham’s get-ups at the 2006 World Cup can only applaud her transition: once a WAG, now a doyenne of fashion, with her own-name brand reportedly £54 million in debt, but with a serious reputation on the catwalk, at least. Headquartered in London, Victoria runs the brand meticulously. And we are told that she micromanages all the details too: we hear that employees are banned from eating hot food in the office.
Riders On The Storm
Northern Ireland voted the motorbike racer Joey Dunlop its greatest ever sportsperson, over Rory McIlroy and a footballer called George Best. That’s how much they love the sport. Killian Faith-Kelly travelled to Clough, in County Antrim, which is the location for one of the eight annual road races held in this part of the country, where bikes whizz through villages at speeds of 200mph. But as Killian discovers, the sectarian strife that Northern Ireland suffers from spills over into sport, too – it’s a fantastic piece of journalism, beautifully written and available to read here.
(On a side note, here’s a particularly mind-blowing fact: there have been 269 deaths on the Isle of Man TT mountain course since its inception. Why are no right-wing commentators campaigning to shut it down, as they do every summer with the Notting Hill Carnival?)
Winter On The Fens
Have you ever heard of Bandy? It’s a sport a lot like ice hockey, very popular in Russia and Scandinavia, but originating, like nearly every codified game, in Victorian England, where it was wildly popular for 20 years. Archie Cornish went to Littleport, a village in Cambridgeshire, to meet Lynn Gibb de Swarte, a remarkable woman trying to revive the game on its home territory. Here’s hoping her dreams might come true.
Fergie’s Fledglings
The two pieces above are pretty extensive pieces of reportage from two young writers who’ve never written at that sort of length before – and we do this every issue. No ever publication in the UK is championing fresh talent like we do. You can read interviews with over-the-hill politicians or dashed-off copy about the culture wars elsewhere. But we need your help to keep growing. Subscribe today, from as little as £14.99 for the year, and we can publish more expansive features, and lots of silly little jokes, too.
Sweet As A Nut
A few newsletters back, we unleashed our archive of Danny Dyer clips unto the world, and thought no one would be able to equal it. We have never been happier to have been proved wrong. Chris Lochery, prince of Popbitch, spent some time listing all the provincial nightclubs that the Eastenders hardman visited in his 2010s prime: here he is, cigarette in hand, at Tokyo Huddersfield ‘what a gaff’, being interviewed at Libertys in Harlow, ‘a proper gaff’, and perhaps our favourite, at Mantra in Windsor, where he downs shots of a vile-looking liquid in the back office of the club – a printer visible in the background – before licking the camera. Lovely jubbly!
In Case You Missed It
Liz Cookman meets the Ukrainian man recovering from trauma, alone in the forest by himself.
Rotten Tomato! Lane Brown explores how the film website has Hollywood in its pulpy grip.
And here our revels end: why Burning Man festival will never be the same again.
Tom Morris remembers his teenage days as a Frisbee champion.
Moya Lothian-McLean, a British comment journalist, explains why British comment journalism is in the gutter.
And Finally
The worldwide Scouse diaspora was briefly scandalised last week upon rumour of the passing of its most enduring urban legend, Akinwale Arobieke, known insensitively but universally as ‘Purple Aki’. Few figures loom larger, in every sense, than Purple Aki: he is a cultural symbol, a supernatural spectre, a real physical threat and both a racist and homophobic punchline across the streets and schoolyards of Liverpool.
For the uninitiated, Arobieke is a gargantuan bodybuilder who has, since the 1980s, purportedly accosted young men in gyms to ask if he can feel their biceps for his own sexual gratification. In 1986, one such boy – 16 year old Gary Kelly – was electrocuted by a live rail at New Brighton station while running away from him; Arobieke was convicted of manslaughter, but successfully appealed the conviction. From here, a bogeyman was born.
Practically everyone born in the North West seems to have some basic understanding of the Purple Aki phenomenon; many have recorded ‘sightings’ of him, stamped in the memory much as you would if you saw Bigfoot. Some even speak of near-misses, times when Arobieke has approached them, or chased them, or even looked at them askance. As one Reddit user, DesertIslandDisc, recounts: ‘Me & my mate got chased by him through Birkenhead Park once when we were 14/15. We thought it'd be hilarious to start doing press-ups on the path shouting 'Got some biceps for you here Aki lad' until he came towards us. Lad is fast as fuck, one of the stupidest things I ever did, that could have ended badly.’
Not to say that Arobieke doesn’t provide good cause for being so feared: he has been convicted and reprimanded hundreds of times, with Merseyside Police going as far as to explicitly ban him from feeling up people’s muscles, or from entering certain parts of the city without police permission. The phenomenon, however, precedes him. All the jokes about him – jokes handily shared amongst adults and children of all ages – are, you can trust, unprintable. He often finds himself cleared of charges brought against him, given that many people accusing him seem to do it for a laugh. BBC Three even made a documentary on him, titled – again, ungenerously but accurately – The Man Who Squeezes Muscles.
Whenever he’s spotted these days, young Scousers often take to pulling out their phones to record him as they chase him off, hurl abuse or, in the case of the video below, shoot fireworks directly at his face as he retrieves something from the boot of his car. It’s the inimitable mob justice of the city at play: direct, crass and yet playful and sort-of undeniably funny on its own terms, doing with humour what your Stinson Hunter vigilante types do with performative overseriousness.
Anyway, The Fence can exclusively confirm – through our sources on the Scouse whisper networks – that reports of his passing have been grossly exaggerated. Akinwale Arobieke is still alive, although his flat has recently flooded, and he has had to move out for a while. He’s even been spotted out and about in Leeds, stopping a lad on his bike and inspecting his calves. So if you live above the M1, maybe skip the gym for a few weeks and go for a run instead.
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And there it is, another Tuesletter put to bed. We hope you enjoyed this one, and if it stirred anything up in you to reach out and contact us, you can do so at editorial@the-fence.com. Catch you again next week.
All the best,
TF