Table of contents for Issue 61 in Huck

This issue started out as a failure – a collection of failures, to be precise. We wanted to talk to people about the greatest mistakes they’ve ever made, the true disasters hidden in their past. But conversations about cock-ups only get interesting when you ask about what happened next. There are few things as divisive in life as the idea of regret. Some people are consumed by the thought of all the things they did and did not do. Others see it as a waste of time, a ball-and-chain that holds us back. But there is a more productive middle ground between these two extremes. Henry David Thoreau perhaps put it best when he said, “To regret deeply is to live afresh.” Regret doesn’t have to be about some great…

NICK BROOMFIELD HAS made a career out of turning setbacks into strengths. It started, he says, while filming a documentary on Lily Tomlin’s one-woman show The Search for Signs of Intelligent Life... in 1986. The comedian restricted access, believing it would give too much away, and sued the production for millions. “I was so frustrated,” he says. “We had all these great stories that we would tell our friends at dinner – and none of them were in the film. So on the next film I thought, ‘I’m gonna put it all in as an experiment.’” That proved to be Driving Me Crazy: a documentary about an out-of-control musical that forced Broomfield to step in front of the camera, boom mic in hand, just to navigate the chaos. It was…

SWISS REBELS, 1958 - 1989 Karlheinz Weinberger lived in the same apartment block his entire life. He spent every weekday, from 1955 until his retirement in 1986, working in the warehouse of a Siemens factory in Zurich. “My life started Fridays and ended Mondays,” he said. But in 1958, the self-taught photographer discovered the Halbstarken – a group of denim-clad Swiss teens, hell-bent on rebellion, who would go on to form motorcycle clans – and his whole world sprang to life. Weinberger captured their antics on his Rolleiflex 2.8 – then got up every Monday and went back to work. Swiss Rebels is published by Steidl. WILSHIRE BOULEVARD, LA, 1966 The ‘debut book’ is a landmark event in the life of any photographer. But for a New York street snapper…

Along day of music is coming to an end when Against Me! take to the stage at a festival in Hertfordshire, an hour north of London. Laura Jane Grace’s long brown hair is cascading in front of her face, intermittently slipping into her mouth as she belts the lyrics of ‘True Trans Soul Rebel’ – sending a black–clad crowd into what feels like a sweaty spiritual awakening. “You should’ve been a mother, you should’ve been a wife... You should’ve been gone from here years ago, you should be living a different life.” Rewind to a couple of hours before the gig and Laura is sitting on a small concrete bench backstage, reflecting on the story that inspired those words. Her tall frame is dressed in black jeans and a black…

ATHENS STINKS. PILES of rubbish are mounting on street corners across the city, growing more pungent every day they’re left in the summer heat. Municipal refuse collectors are striking nationwide – just the latest protest against the Greek government’s austerity programme. There’s clearly a crisis here – it’s just unevenly distributed. You can see it in the crumbling infrastructure; in the parks taken over by drug addicts and the homeless; in the faces of people begging for change on the metro. But beneath the surface, in unassuming pockets scattered across the city, a grassroots movement is giving Athens a new lease of life. When the Greek debt crisis erupted in 2009, it almost brought the Eurozone down with it. The sight of riot police herding protesters became a regular backdrop…

When Al Diaz showed up at the premiere of Jean-Michel Basquiat: The Radiant Child, a documentary about his old friend, it should’ve been a point of pride. The graffiti they developed together in 1970s New York City was now being celebrated as pioneering street art. But when Al saw a picture of himself at the event, he looked like shit. There was no hiding the signs of heroin. That the film lamented Jean-Michel’s death from an overdose at 27 only made it worse. “Addicts don’t learn from other people’s mistakes,” Al says now. “You can tell me a thousand times that the flame is hot but until I stick my hand in the fire, I won’t believe you. It’s what I have done throughout my entire life – but that…

The moment Shaun Ryder picks up the phone, it sounds like an impersonator. All the singer’s most distinctive traits have been ramped up: he’s foulmouthed, straight-talking and full of effervescent humour. “Dead fucking right, mate! Heh heh heh...” There’s just one major difference, though: the partying is long over. Too many burnouts, too many mistakes. “There are people who think I am just at it, going to nightclubs all the time,” he says. “I’m always getting stopped. ‘Do you want a line? Do you want an E?’ I mean c’mon, fella! I’m 55 years old. But knock yourself out, by all means.” Shaun Ryder shot to fame as the surrealist street poet behind two seminal groups, Happy Mondays and Black Grape, which blew pop music apart in the 1990s. But…

Makasi Tshikeva stands beside a line of punch bags in the gym at White Hart Lane’s New River Stadium. He’s barking instructions like a drill sergeant at a group of young teenagers practising different holds on the mats. “Wrestling is not playing – no more playing!” he shouts in his lilting, accented English. Makasi, a 57-year-old fondly known as ‘Coach’, is an imposing figure: his enormous frame squeezed into a t-shirt at least two sizes too small. “You should have seen me when I was a young wrestler,” he says, laughing. “I was massive. I was dangerous. I was doing 1,000 sit-ups and 3,000 pressups in one go.” Back in Makasi’s native Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC), wrestling is widely considered the national sport. Its champions become household names. Known…

Lee Craigie has just scratched out of the Tour Divide, a 2,745-mile mountain bike race that starts in Canada and finishes at the Mexican border. It requires covering around 20 hours and 140 miles a day with everything you need to eat or sleep strapped to the bike. But one week into that challenge, Lee’s body began to swell up. “I noticed I was getting shorter and shorter of breath but I was like, ‘Come on, Lee. You’re just tired, push through it.’” By the time she reached Wyoming, however, her lips were turning blue, her face grey. It was an inexplicable allergic reaction. Determined not to let a year of preparation go to waste, she hitched a ride to the nearest hospital, took a rigorous two-day course of steroids,…

Pete Reed’s blood-spattered combat boots stand out among the business shoes and sneakers worn by other aid workers. It’s a mid-November afternoon at the UN compound in Erbil, northern Iraq, where a far-flung collection of humanitarian aid organisations is searching for a solution. The goal? A medical response to the military campaign currently driving Islamic State out of Mosul, 80 kilometres to the west. Most of those gathered are desk workers but Pete, an American medic, has come straight from a rudimentary field clinic, where he’s spent a week treating trauma patients just behind the frontlines. He hasn’t even changed out of his filthy fatigues. “I probably smelled terrible,” Pete recalls today. “I thought it would be good to bring some reality to the meeting.” The 27-year-old two-time Afghan war…

Born and raised in Akron, Ohio – a flyover state that has never known the breath of a morning wave – Curren Caples moved to Ventura, California, at the age of five and quickly adapted to life on the coast. “Surfing and skating means everything to me,” says Curren, whose namesake happens to be World Champion Surfer Tom Curren. “It is such an integral part of my life. I can’t really ever remember not doing it. They go hand in hand: skating came from surfing, after all.” To look at Curren’s style both in and out of the water, you can see where the texture of the concrete and the ocean coincide. It’s all one ceaseless flow. And a powerful one at that. Whether he’s tackling a suburban stair-set or…