The First Year of Alfie's Newsletter

Readers, we’ve reached the second modest milestone for this newsletter: a year of existence. As I reflect on the paper anniversary of this document (as it were), I want to reflect on five of the best experiences and places this project has taken me.

1. Hamburg with Bea (she writes for Cider Review and we occasionally collaborate on this). Hamburg was a big, brash city. I’m not sure what I expected, but I tried to articulate it here. The visit generated a further article (excellent value) about the Elbphilharmonie, which elicited a more-than-usually angry reaction from yours truly.

2. Glasgow with Neil Scott of The Crop. We collaborated on an article about Glasgow, which was formed when we did a curious loop through the city. The place is fascinating, and putting together this dialogue was a great joy.

3. The cinema, in London… To see The Zone of Interest. ‘Best experiences’ I admit sounds a bit too positive for this one, but I found it a deeply rewarding film. It has such respect for its subject matter and treats the audience with a similar dignity, assuming they’re intelligent. An art film, for sure, and a great one.

4. Granada, also with Bea. In my article I sounded a bit grumpy I suspect, because I was trying to describe the distortions of a city from having one massive heritage site. However, the city, like most of Spain, is excellent. What I didn’t mention is the deep fried cone of mixed seafood (you can get this in most of Andalusia by the way) we had in the modern part of the city; nor the smash burger we queued for something like an hour and a half for, and still weren’t disappointed.

5. The non-places in between these places. I’m not sure I’ve finished working out why I find airports and bus-stops, factories and train stations so compelling. I don’t know whether it’s some Freudian pathology of mine or something more normal. Anyway, I thank those places for the liminal buzz I get from them.

   

   Exuberant neo Venetian Gothic, Glasgow

And here are some favourite things I read over my year on Substack:

1. Peter McLaughlin’s take on Taylor Swift, We Can’t Explain Taylor Swift on his Substack Her Fingers Bloomed. This is surely essential reading. The headline fact, that we don’t have a clue why Swift is that popular, is just so damn true. This gets to the heart of problems of cultural history more broadly: do we understand why anything is famous? (Maybe.) Are some instances of fame more just than others? (Yes.) We might like to pretend that Swift isn’t an important cultural problem. But she is massive, so we are compelled to understand her! Read the article and see if you can come up with an adequate explanation. I can’t.

2. Neil Scott’s take on Helmut Newton subtitled Intuition and the Power of Fantasy. A great introduction to a photographer who, though I knew he was famous, I was ignorant about. Neil has tightened up his Substack at the minute to focus on photographers, like miniature monographs in blog form. It’s quite a moreish format. More importantly, it’s opening my eyes up to photography, which was a medium my history of art degrees completely ignored. There’s always a balance and a generosity to the appraisal, which is particularly apparent in his piece on Martin Parr. This makes superb use out of several artist interviews to give you all the different possible interpretations of an ambiguous figure.

3. This is a bit cheeky as it has nothing to do with Substack per se, and I may well have read it long before starting, but anyway, Wired’s long read about Marcus Hutchins is a great piece. Hutchins is a hacker with a Westcountry accent who ended up in custody for alleged cybercrimes after being arrested in Vegas.

Thanks so much to all of you for reading! Here’s to another year…