Off The Fence: Sixteen Cans of Tango
And a TikTok nightmare on the streets of Manhattan.
Dear Readers,
Good afternoon and welcome to Off The Fence, a newsletter that is frequently both sexy and cool. The sun is out and the cold brew & tonics are a-flowin’ at our Soho HQ as we make the finishing touches to Issue 20, a stellar instalment which will be coming to a newsstand or doormat to you very soon indeed.
If you haven’t signed up, you can become a subscriber at the link below, which will get you four mags for the princely sum of £29.99, including our forthcoming fifth birthday issue.
This week, to tide everyone over, we bring you meditations on the future of crime reporting, and some rumblings on TikTok. But first, we turn our eyes to the urban landscape once more.
Pressure Building
We were delighted to see our reanimated Carbuncle Cup get some nice coverage this week, and for it to prove a zesty little conversation starter everywhere that girders are measured and buttresses fly.
The C20 Society were one of the first to salute the winning entry, while Bristol 24/7 were delighted to address their local hero. The fine folk at the Merseyside Civic Society took to the streets to vox-pop locals about the newly crowned carbuncle. ‘Opinions were split 50/50’, they noted, outing the people of Liverpool as (ha-ha-ha) on the fence about the whole thing. Elsewhere, the Architects’ Journal gave it a fizzy write-up, with a standout pull-quote from Senior Lecturer in Architecture at the University of Liverpool, Barnabas Calder.
In our haste, we forgot to mention that the offending building – Liverpool’s 2019 redevelopment of Lime Street – was not solely a project of ISG, but also Broadway Malyan, Ion Development, Curlew Capital and, of course, Liverpool City Council. We regret the error and are happy to have the glory correctly apportioned.
But it wasn’t all laurels and gongs. Writing in the FT, that paper’s architecture critic Edwin Heathcote lamented the existence of the prize in a piece titled 'When it comes to architecture, there’s no point carping about carbuncles'. As that headline states, the thrust of Heathcote’s argument was that prizes for bad architecture are ‘pointless’. Key reasons include the fact that they happen after a building has already been erected, when nothing is to be done, and because the Carbuncle Cup doesn’t appear to have changed architecture for the better since it started in 2006.
To take that second charge first, it would seem a lofty goal of any prize to transform its entire field for the better inside two decades, and we’re delighted to report that we have no such ambitions.
On the first charge, one does wonder – short of time travel – how something can be critiqued before it exists? Does it not spring from such a thought that all arts criticism is folly? Well, elsewhere in the piece it seems that.. yes. Yes, it is. ‘Tastes change,’ writes Heathcote, ‘who is really to say what is beautiful?’ – a note of equanimity that would have been easier to parse, were it not within an article in which he himself describes various British buildings with the words ‘monster’, ‘hideous’, ‘execrable’, ‘mediocre’ and ‘dire’.
One way of describing the point of the Carbuncle Cup is to say: we too use words and descriptions like those, and then order said buildings sequentially in a press release.
Wining Incessantly
For anyone who missed last week’s bumper dispatch, our imperious editor-at-large, Fergus Butler-Gallie, picked out six of the best from the Jeroboams range, for our very first limited-run box o’ wine. If you want to drink as we do – with youthful, hung-under-if-anything zeal – then buy one of the few remaining boxes today, and get 15% off with promo code ‘FENCE15’.
Breaking Through the Screen
Over on TikTok, strange things are happening. Jake McKenna is trying to understand one tragic corner of the internet’s oddest app.
‘Wake up in the morning, throw some clothes on, check my phone,’ freestyles Joshua Block, a 19-year-old Staten Island native, dancing for his phone camera in 2020. ‘Run out the door, where do I go? Of course, to get some coffee and some boba tea…’. Josh, then making his earliest TikToks under the handle ‘worldoftshirts’, can neither sing nor dance – but this doesn’t stop him trying.
Josh doesn’t sing about boba tea these days. Instead, if you look at the present ‘worldoftshirts’ page, you’ll see an unending torrent of videos where Josh – slight, dorky, with big boxy glasses and a patchy goatee – drinks himself into a stupor to an audience of 2.6 million. Fans cheer on from the comments. ‘This calls for a drink, captain!’ one says, nodding to the sailor’s cap he’s turned into his trademark. Another: ‘That smirk he has. He thinks this is actually hilarious.’
Josh tried many styles of video before TikTok drinking brought him to further prominence. There was his period of lipsyncing to songs around New York landmarks and an extended run of reaction videos where he stared blankly at the video instead of reacting.
Nothing quite stuck until 2023, when he became of legal age to drink. This brought him a legion of new and invested fans, who immediately realised that the more they encouraged Josh to drink, the more outlandish the situations he’d find himself in would become.
As his fame metastasized, the power dynamic between Josh and his audience began to shift, upon their learning that Josh doesn’t react well when feeling threatened. In May 2023, Josh had his infamous sailor’s cap stolen. ‘Someone pranked me [...] Ran off with my hat [...] I found it hidden behind a garbage can,’ he wrote, in a frustrated response video. In doing so, in telling the internet all of his ticklish points, he invited the audience through the screen. For the next few months, Josh would be targeted for one sole reason – to get the hat.
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One group of fans snatched it from Josh’s head while he was on a solo trip to Iceland. ‘I can’t fucking believe it! I’m suing, you unemployed bitch!’ he howled over the livestream while giving chase as he tried to retrieve it. Clips from the stream would be taken, chopped up and posted by other accounts, moving millions more times through the circuitry of online media.
The drinking and the meltdowns intensified, often dovetailing, as is their wont to do. In the same month as his trip to Iceland, he had been caught on film kicking a car in New York and then being pursued by said car; Josh, visibly inebriated, then threw his hat to the ground and ran across the street screaming at passing strangers. In February 2024, Josh was arrested in a New York City subway station and when his mugshot was released, that too was circulated among fans. Josh had always had an avid devotion to filming his own life, but now others were beginning to turn their cameras on him; behind-the-scenes clips from the reality show Josh had been self-constructing.
Like any other creator of his kind, Josh has merch, and will entertain you for some kind of cash transfer – although he seems particularly nimble at evading the platform’s famed censure of alcohol-related content. A scan of his website shows you can buy a hoodie with his face on a whiskey label, yours for $44.95. Or, if you’re ever visiting the Big Apple and don’t fancy a trip to the Met or the Whitney, you can book a space on his guided tour of New York City, which, according to reviews, consists of drinking in Josh’s most frequented bars with him.
All of these ventures have been made possible with the backing of his middle-aged business manager, Michael Quinn. Quinn is a controversial, PT Barnum-esque figure among ‘worldoftshirts’ fans, who veer between calling out his evident exploitation, and recognising that he is essential to Josh’s latest output. Quinn’s fame has risen in lockstep with Josh; he lets Josh live with him, and in return, he serves as cameraman, cab driver and consigliere.
For the ventures to keep paying, Josh has to keep drinking – and the effects of this are starting to become apparent to him. One fan captured a TikTok of a drunken Josh on a train saying ‘I’m going to fucking die… I’m an alcoholic’. You don’t hear the fan consoling Josh, nor stepping in to intervene: instead they stand back and record, letting Josh stare into the distance, talking to himself.
Quinn’s own Instagram account – now swollen to over 50,000 followers – shows him making an effort to rebut growing fan criticism, in a reel from May captioned ‘Michael Quinn helping World of T Shirts get sober.’ A recent comment from Josh, however, outlines what ‘sober’ means to the pair: ‘I got sober and decided to cut down [...] I still drink during the week but I only get drunk on weekends’.
Josh’s audience knows that this pattern of behaviour can’t last forever. ‘Dreading the day I look at his profile, and his eyes are yellowing,’ noted one commenter, before being reassured of the good times by another. ‘His live streams over the summer were incredible. We will never see their kind again.’
Jake McKenna is on TikTok, but we should all probably stay off there, so here’s his Instagram instead.
Order Order
The true crime genre may be thriving, but the real life place that delivers the judgments that podcasters breathlessly debate for months on end is falling into disrepair. For Issue 19, Francisco Garcia took a trip to London’s Inner Crown Court to uncover the tedium, chaos and bureaucracy beyond the gavel. His resulting report, pondering what the future of crime reporting will hold, is caustic and damning and online now. Read it here.
Os Mutanfence
Work parties: gotta love ‘em. Gotta go to ‘em – unless you’re one of those doomed 9am kitchen-botherers, first in and last out to dodge the tyranny of the water cooler conversation. And if you are one of them, all power to you, because as our survey of the capital’s work parties outlines, absolutely everyone is as miserable as you’d expect.
If you’ve ever wondered what the sushi at a HarperCollins book launch is like, or whether the wolves of the BlackRock asset management team still prowl over the square mile like so many of Warren Zevon’s nightmares, then this is the only party guide you’ll ever need. Read it for free.
More of a Comment than a Section
Lucy Douglas chimes in with a modern horror story, capped in all its horror below.
Prompting all of us here at Fence Towers to ask: what’s the worst such interjection you’ve witnessed at a Q&A?
We’re not sure we can beat the time that one Red Bull Music Academy attendee sat through an entire interview with New York house music legend Louie Vega, only to ask a question about Mambo No. 5, by German chanteur, Lou Bega. But perhaps you can – answers on a postcard!
Put Your Kit Back On, Please
A few months back, Bethany Elliott lamented the sad decline of one of the only good and true great British pastimes – streaking. She spoke to Erika Roe, who streaked during a 1982 rugby game ‘on impulse’ in one of the naked canon’s great moments. Now, as we descend into the Aperol Spritz-soaked chaos of a Euros summer (sadly streakerless so far) The Atlantic has taken up the mantle of grief. Citing Elliott’s wisdom, they argue streaking has become harder, riskier, and less lucrative as we all stopped watching TV at the same time. Read our full eulogy here.
In Case You Missed It
A case for banning plus ones from weddings? Sure! Why not!
The Face journeys to the midpoint of the horny venn diagram that is OnlyFans v. Euro 2024.
A profile writing masterclass from William Finnegan on the legendary surfer, Jock Sutherland.
The Bad-Art-Friendification of American letters continues over at GQ, where Annie Hamilton – who we hope is OK – was allowed to write this about her friendship with Tavi Gevinson.
At Rolling Stone, EJ Dickson and Brittany Spanos on the tragic tale of an astrology influencer’s murder-suicide.
And Finally
A little less conversation, a little more Wogan, please. Here is a deathless Peter Serafinowicz imitation from his criminally underrated sketch show, which really belongs in the pantheon of cast-iron British classics.
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That’s it for this week. If you’ve got any issues, please send us an email to support@the-fence.com and we’ll get back to you promptly.
All the best,
TF
ah but the greatest Peter Serafinowicz / Wogan sketch is surely this one: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8Fj9O77jMKs