Table of contents for May - June 2016 in Huck

Fear is not an abstract term when it’s got you by the throat. We all know how it feels. We’ve felt the chill of a white-hot panic clasp its hands around our chests, sending our hearts into overdrive and a wave of shivers down our backs. Fear, when you’re in it, when you’re full-on freaking out, is probably more real, more physical, more all-consuming than any other feeling in our short, emotional lives. But rationalising the things we fear is another thing altogether. In 1915, a physiologist called Walter Cannon coined the term ‘fight or flight’ to explain the chemical rollercoaster shooting through our bodies when we feel like we’re under attack. It’s helpful, in a way, to visualise that mess; to take that anxious cavity cowering behind your ribs…

Freaked out It’s a cold Monday morning in London and Yeasayer are looking a little worse for wear. They’re hunched around a table in the corner of a hotel, heads sagging, body clocks out of sync. Frontman Chris Keating’s demeanour makes it hard to tell whether he’s disillusioned or just hungover. “Yeah, you were right the first time,” he says, smiling wearily. “But that’s always been the case.” This doesn’t feel like the ideal opportunity to take stock of their career and the challenges it’s thrown up, but a certain transition needs to be addressed. Four years have passed since Yeasayer released an album, during which time they stopped touring and were dropped by their label. The Brooklyn-based trio of songwriters, singers and multi-instrumentalists has gone from being the world’s…

Our generation has been dealt a dirty hand, and it’s not just our wallets that are hurting. We’ve been spewed out of a system that tried to tell us success was a luxury that could be bought. Between sky-high debt, unaffordable rent and jobs that suck the meaning out of life, finding true fulfilment can feel like a dream when you’re too busy trying to get by. And here’s the best bit, fresh off the press: we’re selfentitled, lazy-ass ‘millennials’. But where our baby-boomer predecessors bought into a capitalist vision, we’ve begun to find another way. We don’t just want to work; we want to work in order to make a difference. We don’t just want to live; we want a sense of ownership over our own lives. And while…

Freaked out April 2000, Washington dc: Ripples of civil unrest have spread across the United States, as protests in Seattle the previous year triggered antiglobalisation marches in other cities. Protesters descend on the capital for a week-long demonstration, timed to coincide with a meeting of the IMF and World Bank, to target the shady powers held by multinational corporations. The marches are met with dramatic shows of police force, with many participants – along with journalists, bystanders and tourists – swept up in mass arrests. For a seventeen-year-old Fatima Al Qadiri, it was a wakeup call. “The number of police there was like an army,” she says. “They had every possible form of transport – bikes, horses, helicopters – and there was a blockade with a fifteenblock radius. It was…

BRONX, NYC Hebh Jamal, a fifteen-year-old Muslim, does homework at her family’s home in the Bronx while a promotion for CNN’s presidential debates flashes across the screen featuring an image of presidential candidate Donald J. Trump. When this photograph was first published in a New York Times article about young Muslims living under the strain of suspicion, many people questioned whether it was staged. But as photographer Sam Hodgson knows too well, life is stranger than fiction. CENTRAL STATION, ST. PETERSBURG Twenty-seven-year old Ruslan, a ballet dancer at The Academy of Russian Ballet, smokes a cigarette at the Central Station, an LGBT nightclub in St. Petersburg, Russia. He was once married to a woman for five years but following their divorce, he came out as gay. On 30 June 2013,…

Freaked out It was the biggest day anyone had ever seen at Cloudbreak, the infamous surf spot in Fiji. Fifty-foot waves were crashing down on the reef as the world’s best surfers paddled into the monster swell. Surf photographer Lucia Griggi was shooting from the back of a jet-ski in the channel. As she and the driver pulled into the lineup to rescue surfer Kala Alexander, a wave hit. Suddenly the jet-ski was flipped upside down. “I remember being dragged over the reef and I couldn’t even keep my head above the amount of whitewater,” she says. “I got pulled back on the ski eventually, but it was awful. I drowned all my camera gear – about ten grand’s worth of kit.” The day went down in surfing history as…

IN THE BEATING HEAT of a summer’s day, Evie cycles across a bridge in East Los Angeles on her way home from work at Starbucks. Passing cars veer dangerously closeby, the drivers honking, yelling and catcalling as she powers on unperturbed. Later that evening, she returns to the same streets, but this time en masse with her sisters: cycling collective Ovarian Psycos. Although their faces are masked by black bandannas emblazoned with their own ovaryshaped logo, their message is clear. “Whose streets? Our streets!” they shout in unison, startling onlookers. The bridge Evie rode over is that of the sixth street viaduct, one that connects downtown LA to the Eastside, where more than ninety-seven per cent of residents are Hispanic or Latino. It’s a place synonymous with the Chicano civil…

Freaked out Big Momma’s not a monster but I’ll rip your fuckin’ face loose. Have your shit leakin’ blood, spewin’ like it’s baby puke... Servin’ notes to these rappers, there ain’t no faggot who’s realer.” The first time I heard those lines snarled by Big Momma, a Florida rapper guesting on Cakes Da Killa’s ‘Break ’Em Off’, it hit me like a sucker-punch. I was en route to a warehouse party in Paris, feeling bored and alone. Hearing rappers, gay rappers, reclaiming the word that had been spat at me too many times, in too many places, before too many homophobic attacks, was nothing short of an epiphany. Here was someone rapping about sacrificing straight guys he was in love with and resurrecting them as gay lovers, before proudly crooning,…

Stepping off the plane in Ürümqi, the capital of Xinjiang, from anywhere else in China is disorienting. The first thing you notice is the faces; taxi drivers who would look at home in the Mediterranean offer to take you where you need to go. Next you notice the light; here sunrise is at 8am and ‘noonday’ doesn’t come until after 2pm, as the sun refuses to obey the clocks set by rulers two time-zones and 3,000 kilometres away in Beijing. Then there is the dawning realisation that you are now at the furthest point on Earth from any sea in this territory bordered by Mongolia to the north, Tibet to the east and Afghanistan and Kashmir to the west. Xinjiang (pronounced Sin-jang) means new territory in Chinese and through accident…

Zomba prison is a crumbling, high-security penitentiary in the south of Malawi, blighted by years of overcrowding. Designed to house 300 people, it now holds over 2,000. Food shortages are frequent, HIV is commonplace and there is little electricity or running water. But in February, inmates at Zomba became the first Malawians to be nominated for a Grammy Award. Their album I Have No Everything Here is a project initiated by Ian Brennan, a producer who has collaborated with everyone from Lucinda Williams to TV on the Radio. Ian has worked in Malawi for years, both as a music producer as well as a specialist in violence prevention and anger management. Together with his wife Marilena Delli, a filmmaker and photographer, they set out to translate marginalised voices into song.…

There’s a chilling moment at the end of The Big Short, the Oscar-winning dark comedy about the 2008 financial crisis and the men who saw it coming, but it has nothing to do with economic collapse. At least, that’s what we think – for now. Michael Burry, the hedge-fund manager played by Christian Bale, dismissed by his peers as an eccentric freak, has just proven himself a soothsayer after being ridiculed and ostracised by every big-wig in high-finance. Having spent years researching the mortgage market – a simmering mess of subprime loans doled out to anyone with a signature – Burry gambles that the real estate bubble is about to burst and send a shit-storm across the planet. He bets big, is deftly ignored, and the banks keep rolling out…

Freaked out Aball of fire belches into the sky, casting a ghostly orange light over Stanley Donwood’s face. As he gazes upwards, the explosion forms into a rising mushroom cloud. It’s easy to imagine the world outside this darkened basement has been obliterated by a nuclear apocalypse – but this isn’t a military bunker or a fallout shelter, it’s the United Visual Artists HQ in South London, where Donwood is putting finishing touches to a secretive project, known only as the bomb. Artist and writer Stanley Donwood is best-known as Glastonbury festival’s artist-in-residence and for his close partnership with Radiohead, having produced all of the band’s iconic artwork since their 1995 breakthrough The Bends. He’s also a longtime anti-nuclear campaigner and the bomb is a terrifyingly immersive installation conceived to…

CONVERSATIONS WITH STRANGERS in Rwanda usually go one of two ways: people burst with optimism for their future or begin retelling horrifying experiences from their past. Rwanda’s 1994 genocide, when a million people were killed in a hundred days, still casts a shadow over the country – and every Rwandan is connected to it in one way or another. In the decades since, Rwanda has risen like a phoenix from the flames to achieve the greatest progress on the United Nation’s Human Development Index. The health system has become a shining emblem of its recovery, achieving near universal coverage and treatment rates for diseases such as tuberculosis and AIDS that put wealthy countries of the West to shame – and all this in a nation that, despite huge progress, remains…

IF, LIKE US, YOU LOSE SLEEP AT NIGHT worrying about the future, it’s worth knowing that some good news lies on the horizon. Ed Gillespie and Mark Stevenson are both future ‘possiblists’, drawn together through their respective work in cultural change, as well as an inspirational and occasionally irascible belief in building a better tomorrow. In his best-selling book, An Optimist’s Tour of the Future, Mark Stevenson goes on a whirlwind journey through the future of technology and meets the futurists, farmers and professional geeks tackling the planet’s greatest challenges – from nanotechnology that could spell the end of capitalism, to permaculture systems that suck CO2 out of the sky. Ed Gillespie, meanwhile, is the founder of sustainability agency Futerra and a celebrated ‘slow traveller’ who criss-crosses the world without…

Maurice Montgomery, aka Big Momma, is a twenty-seven-year-old rapper from Lakeland, Flor ida, who describes his aesthetic as a combinat ion between Lil' Kim and WWE's The Undertaker. He taps into the dark side, conjuring up demons, graveyards and terror for his lyrics which often masquerade as metaphors for being gay. The back pat io of one of Lakeland, Flor ida's two gay bars, Pulse Lakeland, provided an awesome backdrop and an interesting juxtaposition for Maurice's Big Momma alter ego. The cheesy tropical mural of palm trees and beach scenes instantly captured photographer Melissa Lyttle's imaginat ion. "When we stepped outside, the wind started whipping up and Big Momma’s wig was blowing around, tangling in the breeze," she says. "He took a few moments to fix it, and the candidness…