Table of contents for December - January 2017 in Huck

In years to come, people may ask: where were you in 2016? But not in the way that we spark conversation about planet-spinning years of the past: 1968 (Martin Luther King Jr.’s assassination at a cheap motel), 1989 (the fall of the Berlin Wall) or even 1994 (Nelson Mandela, first President of South Africa, putting a final kibosh on Apartheid). Instead they’ll be angling for where you sit on the new paradigm: did you vote for the first female president of the United States, or did you help elect Donald Trump? Did you choose to cut ties with Europe, or did you fight for a united future? 2016 is the year the world split in two, forcing everyone to pick a side. You couldn’t miss it. At every turn, in…

Until recently, there were no female voices in Icelandic hip hop. For all the genre’s growth over four decades, its national scene remained insular and male-dominated. “One female rapper released a song and she got so much hate for it,” says Bergþóra Einarsdóttir, now known as MC Bein. “But that hate flared up the willpower to do something about it.” The story goes like this: two 22-year-old women who love to rap (Þuríður Blær and Kolfinna Nikulásdóttir) want to find more women who love to rap. They tell their friends they’re going to hold a female hip hop night and word spreads around town until all the schools are talking about it. A private Facebook event is made public and over 200 people turn up to a 50-capacity basement club.…

THERE ARE 195 countries in the world and Alastor Gray has been to almost all of them. It’s a Sunday morning in Chicago and the 30-year-old is sitting at the foot of a dark leather couch, trying to name the places he hasn’t visited. There’s Colombia, Somalia, DR Congo, Sudan, Antarctica, Palestine, Uzbekistan and Kazakhstan – but that’s about it. “Mostly due to political unrest,” he says, the sound of a trainrattling by in the distance. “I’m hoping to get to them eventually.” Alastor speaks with a shapeshifting accent – part Irish, part Australian, part Cornish, part American – that immediately sparks questions of identity. But Alastor isn’t from anywhere. He has grown up around the world, living on the move, rarely spending more than a few months in one…

Growing up in the shadow of Eritrea’s highest mountain, the stony Emba Soira, Rahel Gebretsadik developed a thirst for the extreme. At 16 years old, she runs twice daily – at the crack of dawn and at the dim of dusk, preferring cross-country to track – earning her a reputation as the fastest girl in the land. But Rahel isn’t running in the highlands of her home country. She’s swapped the forest-covered mountains for the bare streets of Tel Aviv. The journey that brought Rahel to Israel is a hard-edged memory. She recalls carrying her young sister on her back while she, her mother and seven siblings made the arduous trek across the Sinai desert, sharing rations with 34 others. Rahel doesn’t know what happened to the friends she left…

Early one morning, Archie Fairhurst was wandering the streets of Paris with friends when he stumbled across an unexpected sight. An old man had set up an impromptu flea market in a small square, spreading out assorted trinkets like faded animal skins and an antique globe. In among them sat a pile of battered vintage records. Archie (better known as Romare) leafed through the disintegrating cardboard sleeves until one jumped out. He couldn’t understand the French liner notes, but something about its artwork seemed special. It later became the vocal sample for ‘The Blues’ on his debut EP from 2012. “Each time I hear it being played now, it brings back the feeling of that place, linking me to a certain point in time,” he says. “There’s something special about…

Up a narrow flight of stairs, past buzzing pink neon and a wall of vinyl records, an array of pinball machines flicker and glow like otherworldly relics. This is North Star Machines à Piastres, Montreal’s first pinball bar. “We had some backlash from people who say these games don’t belong in public, that they belong in collectors’ basements where they’ll be taken care of,” says Adam Kiesler, the bar’s co-founder. “But the impetus for creating North Star was trying to get pinball back on the street: pinball for the people.” Adam is a pinball obsessive, having re-discovered a passion for the game a few years ago. He started spending more and more time seeking out vintage pinball machines, buying them, fixing them up and meeting the people who built them…

MY MAP IS my most prized possession. It has all my secret locations on it: empty houses, factories, theatres... anywhere that might be unoccupied. I’m lucky in that from where I live in Liège, in the French part of Belgium, I can just drive off and find new locations to shoot within half an hour. As a kid, my dad was forever taking pictures and there was always at least one camera in the house. We even had a darkroom, so he taught me how to develop my own images. During my twenties, I began hanging out with skateboarders and got into the habit of taking pictures of them. My attention gradually turned to urban exploring after I found a group of friends who loved to look into empty buildings,…

THERE’S A SMALL town deep in central Finland, surrounded by lakes and covered in snow, where nothing really happens. The winters are severe, everybody knows everybody and there are no real attractions. This is Saarijärvi, where most young people’s idea of a good time is playing ice hockey or football. But 18-year-old Jaakko Saavalainen never really got into team sports. He’s been skating since the age of four, growing inseparable from his plank – “as long as I’m not ill or too tired from skating the previous day.” When he was about seven, Jaakko’s dad built a mini-ramp in the family’s backyard. As he grew older, Jaakko longed for more to skate on and started taking things into his own hands. “We live on a farm, so there’s always been…

Skateboarder Jerry Mraz stands in a vacant lot in Willets Point, Queens. As a kid living an hour from Detroit, he was an avid baseball player and loved the Mets. Now a New Yorker, he loves the decay and urban explorat ion opportunities available in Willets Point, a derelict quadrant of streets in the shadow of Citi Field stadium, where the Mets play. “When shooting his story for this issue, we ended up here as an interesting locat ion where Jerry could be surrounded by some of his favourite things,” says photographer Jonathan Mehring. “It seemed like a good place to bat some balls for the hell of i t . ” Photography: Jonathan Mehring…

From surf pros to samurai, Airbnb Trips offers a break from the ordinary – connecting you to a world of experts sharing authentic encounters. Travel should be transformational. Yet in an era of massproduced tourism, when trips are driven by aggregated reviews, getting off the beaten path can feel harder than ever. The best way of squeezing the most out of a city, however, has always been the same. It takes a mix of unique access, insider knowledge and a little bit of spontaneity. Imagine spending time with a samurai master in Tokyo, a burlesque dancer in London or a truffle hunter in Tuscany. This is the world of Airbnb Trips: a platform that connects one-of-a-kind characters with unforgettable places, allowing you to live like a local through meaningful experiences.…

In late ’60s New York, anyone wandering between Sixth Avenue and West 52nd Street would be swamped with suits – some filing in and out of the newly built CBS building, some swarming around the nearby ad agencies and corporate headquarters. Yet in the middle of it all stood a unique figure: a blind man wearing a cloak and Viking helmet, either composing music, selling art or having his photograph taken with tourists. “He brought such an unusual thing to such a banal place,” says Jim Sclavunos of Nick Cave & the Bad Seeds. Jim is speaking in The Viking of 6th Avenue, a new documentary about the inimitable street poet, avant-garde musician and underground icon known as Moondog. The film gathers a spectrum of fans and collaborators to tell…

Lauren Howland’s wrist was already bandaged up – broken, she thinks, by cops hitting her with batons – when she headed back to the front lines of the #NODAPL struggle a few days before Halloween. The 21-year-old, a member of the Jicarilla Apache Nation in New Mexico, had been camping at Standing Rock since early August 2016, with thousands of others gathered in opposition to the Dakota Access oil pipeline (DAPL) and the threat it poses to the reservation’s water supply. A prayer march to sacred sites destroyed by pipeline construction the previous Saturday had been shut down by police, who surrounded the group as Lauren tried to get a young boy out of danger. “I was trying to plead with the cops to let him go,” she remembers. “He…

In the dungeon’s half light, you can just make out the glistening metal of a bedframe covered in chains, piled with restraints and racks of various shapes and sizes. The space feels eerily quiet but as the evening gets into full swing, these rooms will echo with a cacophony of sound: leather striking bare flesh, unbridled moans of pleasure and prolonged screams of pain. This is the Flying Dutchman: a pub that, upstairs at least, looks like just another neighbourhood boozer. Tonight its basement hosts Toppers: a BDSM event that bills itself as ‘London’s friendliest fetish club’. As the guests arrive and begin mingling over drinks, their latex and long black boots are the only clue that this might not be your average Friday night. At the end of one…

One night, while working at a fast-food outlet called Long John Silver’s, Wayne Coyne was held up at gunpoint. A spate of armed robberies in Oklahoma City had left several restaurant employees dead and now Wayne found himself face-down on the floor, thinking: ‘Is this it?’ “It was such a horrible thing that when I didn’t get killed, I felt like nothing could hurt me,” he says. “After that happened I thought, ‘This matters. I’m going to do it because what do I have to lose?’” The ‘it’ was music. Wayne dreamed of being an artist but, in reality, he was a 16-year-old dropout frying fish in a costume. The path to success would take longer than imagined – another six years before forming psych-rock weirdos The Flaming Lips in…

July 02. 2008: Spera District, Khost Province, Afghanistan. Hot thick air, window grease, an endless brown horizon. Four Humvees filled with armoured men trail through the ridgelines, kicking up a cloak of dust that bounces in sync with the convoy. Minutes become hours in an un-air-conditioned fuzz. Sweat drips. Eyes close. Men begin to doze. RAFAL GERSZAK WAS never more fresh faced than the day he first arrived in Afghanistan. It was 2008, Obama’s debut year, and the Canadian photographer decided to face an urge: a desire he had to better understand the contours of his Polish roots. In 1989, Rafal was a 10-year-old child living in a refugee camp in West Germany awaiting a visa to Canada with his family. He recalls his father’s friends rushing off to witness “a…