Sommaire pour November - December 2015 de Huck

On August 21, 2008, mental health workers at a London hostel put in a 999 call to the Metropolitan Police. Sean Rigg, living in the halfway house, was suffering from serious mental health problems, and the team around him requested he be taken to a place of respite and safety, a hospital. Officers refused to attend. Five calls were made, but they were told it wasn’t a “police priority”. “He was a talented musician, my brother, and just forty-years-old,” Marci Rigg tells me, as we settle down to chat in a lively North London pub. Marci is visibly tired, as I pass over a glass of rosé, although above the humdrum her voice remains piercingly clear. With the Met refusing to attend, the hostel team had little they could do,…

As a skateboarder today, we’re repeatedly faced with piles of our own bullshit and left to take big nasally whiffs – eyes squinting, mouths drooling. We see things differently than everyone else, we say. We’re all family, we claim. Wherever we go in the world, we find friends and cohorts who - from the bottom of our thin, shared souls – understand one another on a level that cannot be reached through the sad and conditioned viewpoints of mainstream society. We’re united through our weirdness. Also, parents just don’t understand. Another also: skateboarding saves lives. When Emily Earring got her first skateboard, she’d never heard skateboarding’s thread-bare clichés, but even without the sales pitch, she saw skateboarding’s truths firsthand. “My dad got me a skateboard for Christmas,” Emily remembers. “A…

It was only when Julia Harriman crashed into the side of a taxi, launching her off her bike onto the concrete and into a pool of her own blood, that the switch finally clicked. Cutting her ties with London, Julia, with her friend Carla Thomas, bought a one-way ticket to Mexico. It had taken a long time to reach this point. E Every day for the previous year the wheels of Julia’s bike had spun forward, carting her to and from work, yet her mind was always locked motionless on one thought. “It was inside me, cycling to work every day, like a tape going round and round, ‘Get out, get out, get out.’” For a girl born and raised in the Scottish Highlands, the stresses of life in the…

A group of men huddle over a whole pig with a bloody spit penetrating the carcass. They lift the dead animal above a DIY barbeque on the side of the road. One guy slathers a thick oily marinade onto the pig’s skin then throws gasoline onto the charcoal beneath and sets it alight. Thick grey smoke swirls towards the sky and the heat that radiates makes the scorching midday sun unbearable. At that moment, Teresa, a curvaceous, larger-than-life lady wearing a bandana and tight clothing, appears with pink and white frosted cake and a bottle of white rum. She invites us to join their celebration. “It’s Mother’s Day so I’m not cooking – the boys are. I hate cooking,” she laughs. A ‘for sale’ sign is displayed outside her house.…

Bichkraft don’t do politics. The Kyiv-based four piece – that’s Dima Novichenko, Jenia Bichowski, Serzh Kupriychuk and Jenia Machina – see no reason why their debut LP Mascot, a menacing assault of industrial-edge rock, should have anything to do with their country’s political situation. Sure, there’s a tetchy sonic edge you could associate with Kyiv’s 2013/2014 protests, or the heavy undertone of bass guitar, which you might opine reflects the secession in the east. But what of the facts? Lyrically, at least, Bichkraft will not be drawn. “Into the cloud of sound / Red waves are covering you / There is no ringing in your ears / But this won’t ever go far / Loose dancing near our closed eyes,” sings Dima on ‘Sweater’, typical of an incongruity of ideas…

Polina Kelm’s work tackles the subject of change head on. The Kyiv-based filmmaker’s short documentary Positive is, she says, “about a disappearing profession and positive film editors” who are defiant to the digitalisation of film, to the allure of modern Hollywood production tricks – from 3D to Tom Cruise in a spacesuit – unattainable in their analogue attics. Positive follows four female film editors – Olena, Tamara, Taisiya and Kateryna – as they go about their daily routines, sipping tea, editing, smoking cigarettes, and hard at work on fiftyyear-old equipment inside the darkened rooms of a large stone Soviet structure. “I tried to make a film about a world that’s disappearing,” says Polina. “It’s related to our Eastern Europe, especially Ukraine, because now we have big changes. The old world…

Achingol Mayom drew stares on her first day of school in 2003. She was seven years old and the only Sudanese immigrant in her class in Newcastle, Australia. “Everyone seemed quite intrigued because I was very tall,” she recalls. “Did you used to live in a hut?” her classmates inquired. At that time, the second Sudanese civil war was entering its twentieth year, ceaselessly ravaging the dusty towns and undeveloped wilderness of the south. Achingol’s mother had fled from their family home near Rumbek, a provincial town in central South Sudan, in 1993. She sought safety across the border in Kenya’s Kakuma refugee camp, where Achingol was born two years later. The Mayoms – Achingol, her mother, four brothers and a cousin – were among the 19,000 Sudan-born refugees resettled…

IF YOU’RE READING THIS, chances are you’re one of the world’s frustrated children. You wanted to live a creative life, do something that allowed you to express yourself, and above all – mattered. So you jumped through all the hoops they set for you, sat more examinations than any generation before, went to uni or to art school – you worked hard (and partied hard because, hey, work’s stressful). You took on mountains of debt because that was the price of being able to do your thing, pursue your passion and live the life you wanted – or at least have more options than your parents did. So, what happened? THE CRACKS APPEAR You’re the most highly educated, globally connected, socially liberal and creatively minded generation yet – but you…

Walking into Chris Wilson’s Brixton studio is stepping into cluttered chaos. It has the manic brilliance of a Francis Bacon, with god-knows-what splattered over every nook and cranny. Every surface is littered with emotional debris – drawings, photos, slips of paper with scribbled quotes and yellowed newspaper clippings; images of god, death and other esoteric references that are the missing pieces of his life. But there’s also a serene vibe. The muffled sounds of kids working the South London council estate playground below occasionally interrupt the quiet, soundtracked by the loud purring of Tufty the Persian cat. But Chris doesn’t care because he’s focused on his newest book, The Glue Ponies, a collection of short stories about the rough life all told from the hustler’s POV. Like his paintings, Chris’s…

Even once you’ve sensed you’re on the wrong path in life, it often takes something big to bring things into focus. Paul Hewitt grew up with the “wrong people” in Southampton on England’s South Coast and got “dragged along” to Tenerife, Spain, where he ran bars and clubs – partying hard and barely seeing the sun. “It’s not real life, it’s just bollocks,” he reflects. “I just wasn’t living a good lifestyle.” The local scene had been growing more and more violent, but when he saw doormen beating a young guy on holiday, who later died of his injuries, that was it – he booked a plane ticket and left. Working out you’re on the wrong path is one thing, but finding your true direction is another matter. Paul was…

To all the people giving money to churches in Africa, make sure they’re delivering,” says rapper Octopizzo to a packed crowd at Rich Mix, London. “Because the pastors are driving Range Rovers, and the people are still poor.” Octopizzo is an immaculately dressed rapper, entrepreneur and actor with his own clothing brand, but one major detail separates him from other hip hop moguls: he’s from Kibera, Africa’s largest slum. Over the course of three albums, he’s used his platform to build youth projects in Kibera and in refugee camps across Kenya. Rapping in English and Swahili, he playfully pokes fun at corrupt government officials and the dysfunctional foreign aid system, alike. Kibera was once a forest on the western edge of Kenya’s capital, Nairobi. It was first settled around 1904…

I AM MUJTABA JALALI. I was born in Iran as an Afghan refugee to parents who fled the Afghanistan war thirty-five years ago. I come from a big family. There are eight of us: my two sisters and a brother are students at university in Iran, my father is working as a cook and my mother works at home. I was a student of English language and literature at university and a freelance journalist and photographer working on humanitarian issues in Iran for three years. I was also an English language teacher for Afghan kids without resident permits in a non-profit school in Mashhad, Iran. Like many kids who were born in Iran, from the day I opened my eyes I saw a label of ‘Afghan Refugee’ on my forehead.…

It’s mid-morning in Rio de Janeiro – barely eleven and already hot enough to sweat. I’m meeting Dr Dave in the garden of a rambling villa which belongs to his mate Jonathan Shaw, the tattoo godfather who’s inked celebs like Johnny Depp. It’s a paradoxical setting for our conversation about the work he does back in New York City, through his tattoo removal charity Fresh Start. When David Ores, MD, set up shop as a GP in New York’s Lower East Side back in 1987, he got into the scene straight away. “The East Village is a heavily tattooed neighbourhood, and I’m a biker,” he explains in a deadpan staccato that gives a tough-guy varnish to his tender-heartedness. “I had a lot of friends who were tattoo artists and they…

Early on an October morning, Gabriel Oliveira stares at the crowded lineup of São Conrado, a heavy beach break in the south of Rio de Janeiro, Brazil. A few minutes earlier, the nineteen-year-old, best known as ‘Popó’, was right there in the outside. It was the first of four times he would hit the waves until noon. These morning sessions have been the pattern of his daily life since he was six, when the carioca started spending the entire day at the beach, located in one of the city’s wealthiest districts. It was his way of keeping a distance from the reality that surrounds his home 1.5km away, in Favela da Rocinha, Latin America’s largest informal settlement, home to about 200,000 Brazilians. Popó lives with his parents and three brothers…

It’s Saturday night in Santa Rosa. A hundred or so people are crowded into the backyard of the Whiskey Tip, a venerable bro bar in this old California farm town. It’s cabaret night, with a lineup of local bands and comics on a makeshift stage, and three hours in, the drinking vibe has gotten loud and blurry. After a particularly naughty jokeslinger exits the stage to cheering, the MC steps to the mic and announces, “Gay Henry!” The name elicits giggles as a strapping six-foot-plus fellow steps onstage in a fur coat, black tights, and cherry red stilettos, a demure Coach purse dangling from one shoulder. The powdered face glares white in the spots. “Hey everybody,” he waves goofily. “I just wanted to talk about why online dating sucks.” But…