#1 What's Good

hot people on ig, etiquette, citrus-herb combo, good scent, sport, IDM (genre), more.

Hi, hope you’re well.

I moved things back a week because I was travelling everywhere and had a normal amount of work on and then it was Saturday and so that was that.

But now we begin the core (weekly) posting of:

What’s Good.
- A weekly letter of varying length and subject, centred around the things that are good and the principles: unaffiliated, intelligent, curation.

good:

GQ’s 125 Rules for Modern Gentlemen: GQ’s etiquette guide. Very Monocle/Fantastic Man/The Gentlewoman’s Modern Manners book of it all, but not something that hasn’t come out of GQ before – and always a pleasure to read when it does. The kinda thing you could get around the pub table or ‘watercooler’ and have a knees up to (as well as take a good few practical tips from). Exactly the sort of thing we want here.

Fergus and Margot Henderson celebrating the proof of a posthumous Anthony Bourdain cookbook from the Les Halles era (containing a foreword by Fergus) in a kitchen with a cigar, wine (port?), and a perfect tablecloth. Nice.

Jack Carlson at J Press is interesting. I can’t decide whether it’ll be a non-starter or the thing that propels Preppy to proper heights. Anyway, the IG game has been good so far enjoyed the Franklin Delano Roosevelt Jr. IG post as well as the more recent English Boarding Schools one. Some clobber there.

Also filed under ‘good looks on IG’: this poster girl post. Cunty pirouettes, in brand gear, snapped lofi, somewhere that doesn’t matter. That’s all, it’s great.

Fup by Jim Dodge. Easily read in a day, probably findable and tolerable as a PDF too. The master of many things but especially alcoholic men who make their money by gambling then uprooting their living situation and repeating in and around lesser cities on the West coast of America. In this case that’s Jake Santee, ninety-nine years young. Stone Junction is an all time favourite of mine, Fup is as good but less colossal in every way. That said, grief, consolation, chance. It’s all there. A top fable.

Lemon and tarragon (taste). In a world where dill has been allowed to decimate all palettes, tarragon’s lack of attention is a complete crime. After thyme it is my favourite herb. There.
I am a big roast chicken guy, I average a roast chicken twice a week, I might eat one in the roast dinner way, the other I tend to shred up into salads and sandwiches and stir-fries and other things beginning with an s perhaps but not necessarily. When you have a roast chicken consistency of this sort, the magic ingredient is variety in the seasoning department. I’m in a big lemon and tarragon phase at the moment generally, you’ll find it coating my courgettes with spaghetti, perfuming my braised cabbage. It’s hitting the chicken well too. L&T. There.
Cumin and sumac are also good with it.

Clove cinnamon sandalwood (scent). Lots of nouns beginning with C and S this week. Been smashing this blend incense-wise but also tempted to get it going as an autumnal roll-on fragrance. Anyway, incense-wise Aesop has a nice one, comes with a convenient one-stick holder – put it in an ashtray – say no more.

Tim Hecker - Harmony in Ultraviolet (2006): I like loud music and I know that’s not good for me but a lot of the things that bring joy have health implications and this record listened to loudly is merely one of them and I’m fine with the trade-off. The ambient, IDM, shoegaze genres make up most of my listening during the working week and this slots into ambient but it has a sort of disintegration and depth that is really good to treat in a sort of ~if my bloody valentine were ambient~ way which is to say headphones fucking blasting it making you feel like you’re inside a long drying cycle at the laundrette with the big machines. Warm and crashing and blissful. Ambient records on the sort of more arresting side often gets described as the soundtrack to purgatory but the general uninterrupted experience of albums like this (and disintegration loops, iykyk but it’ll feature one day, feel more like what I want from eternal whatever it is).

Brandon Aubrey: The Dallas Cowboy kicker. This one’s just a nice story. He was a retired soccer player turned software salesman, whose wife (Jenn) said would be better than most NFL kickers while they were watching someone miss a kick one match-day and so soon after he bought a ball and went to a field to give it a go, finding that he was slotting loads of them it turned out, yes, he might be. He got a coach to see if he was onto something, fast forward a couple years, he’s now one of the best in the game, breaking records and all sorts. An NFL debut at 28 years old is not how it’s meant to be done. But done it was.

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not good:
this might become an additional letter if it’s wanted. for now, one hit:

i-D’s substack pivot.

The EIC says “our publication was founded on the independence and attitude of DIY” and suggests the publication joining substack is a continuation of that.

Thing is, i-D is a company that should be changing the landscape from the top down, not trying to stick itself into a more ‘grassroots’ and independent media landscape.

”If Terry and Tricia Jones were starting i-D in 2025 (rather than 1980), it probably would have been a Substack.” Is potentially true, but tragic. Substack is great, but fuck me would I rather someone spawned the next i-D with staples and landscape paper.

More to the point, i-D is not new. It even sort of in a sense has billionaire backing. And a print magazine, and a website, and like literally everything it could ever need.

A DIY ethos for i-D in 2025 should be to build skateparks that host (and livestream) gigs, have physical magazine kiosks attached to them, and host pop-up stores for new designers situated across a bunch of not even capital cities but just good ones with strong in-person scenes globally, or something. Fucksake, like.

I’m not keen on NY Magazine being on here either ftr, but at least it didn’t try and pretend doing so was a radical act.

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This has been What’s Good. See you next time.