“What’s your road, man? – holyboy road, madman road, rainbow road, guppy road, any road. It’s an anywhere road for anybody anyhow. Where body how?” Jack Kerouac, On the Road
The On the Road Issue : Beat Debate
Band of Horses - Eric Koston - Ben Gibbard Underground Vegas - Freight Hopping
9 771751 272039 35 £4.25 | issue 35 | Oct/Nov 2012
[RIDER: AYMERIC TONIN] WWW.PROTEST.EU
Share Your Discovery Hotel Indigo and HUCK sent out a call to arms, inviting people to share their favourite travel discoveries as part of an online photography competition. As a chain of boutique hotels connected to and inspired by the surrounding neighbourhood, Hotel Indigo prides itself on helping guests discover the local area for themselves. This competition was just another way to share those discoveries far and wide – starting with these inspiring winning shots.
1 Winner
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5 This summer, Hotel Indigo invited its Facebook followers to submit travel photos via Instagram inspired by the themes ‘See, Hear and Taste’. The hope was that people would capture something unexpected, authentic and inspiring, and share it with the world. And the five images shortlisted by HUCK tick every box. Hotel Indigo is a boutique hotel chain that prides itself on helping guests experience the local area to its fullest. So a competition themed around the idea of discovery was a natural fit. With daily prizes, and a grand prize package from Hotel Indigo and Lomography, the standard of entries was super high. But no one captured the essence of the competition better than Nicola Carter, whose image of a rearing horse in Menorca stood out from the pack. Here, she shares the story behind the winning shot: “I shot the image during the traditional jaleo of the Festes de la Mare de Déu de Gràcia, which is unique to Menorca. Apparently the word jaleo translates literally as ‘commotion’ or ‘pandemonium’. The magnificent and powerful Menorquina horse (an indigenous breed,
almost exclusively jet black) are adorned with brightly coloured ribbons and rosettes, and together with their caixers (horsemen and women) dressed in black tailcoats, white riding breeches and three-pointed hats, they parade through the crowded streets, which are lined with locals who gather around the makeshift bars that blast music into the night and sell pomada – a potent mix of Xoriguer gin and limon. “The first two or three of over 100 horses galloped into the square to cheers from the crowd, and the caixers encouraged their steeds to rear up, walk on their hind legs, some even danced in time to the jaleo melody! At this moment, infected by a wild madness, we fearless few surged forward to try and touch the horses’ hearts, to win our good luck for the year to come.” 1. Rearing horse at a traditional jaleo in Menorca – Nicola Carter 2. ‘The Flat Spell’, Kuta, Bali – Kyle Abram 3. Luggage porter on the Inca Trail – Jenn Knox 4. Open water swimming off the Isle of Wight – Simone Bramante 5. Disused warehouse in Sant Carles de la Rapita, Spain – Hannah King
Hotel Indigo is a collection of boutique hotels located in capital cities and cultural centres around the world. Connected to, and inspired by, the local neighbourhood, each hotel has its own story to tell. facebook.com/hotelindigoeurope - hotelindigo.com
“What’s your road, man? - holyboy road, madman road, rainbow road, guppy road, any road. It’s an anywhere road for anybody anyhow. Where body how?” Jack Kerouac, On the Road
huck 35
The Beat Generation and Beyond: Ben Gibbard Band of Horses - Eric Koston Underground Vegas - Freight Hopping
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9 771751 272039 35 £4.25 | issue 35 | Oct/Nov 2012
MIKKEL BANG
design unlikely futures / analogclothing.com
check out Mikkel in
, out now / photos by Dean Blotto Gray
Link-ups: connecting the dots between the news
Kaleidoscope’s two-day conference takes place at the Barbican Centre November 27-28, with masterclass workshops held at smaller venues from November 24. kaleidoscopefestivals.com
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Theotis Beasley (left) and Eric Koston (right). Barcelona, Spain, June 2012.
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ONE STYLE. TWO SIZES.
EXCLUSIVE VIDEO
dragonalliance.com
Winter was slowly creeping up on New York when we first
five days later we had 867 people waiting for our postcards to
met each other eight months ago. As it goes every winter, you
arrive in over sixty countries around the world.
start thinking about the warm days of summer and yearning
Over the following three months, our fun little side project
for escape. We were working together on a shoot one day in
turned into a full-time job: we stopped off at huge cities and single-
December when talk turned to the idea of the great American
street through-towns, ate countless hamburgers at backwater
road trip. Both being explorers at heart, we quickly discussed
diners, printed the postcards in motels where you had to bang on
the prospect of doing it together. We hammered out the details
the wall to turn on the lights, stood in line at the US Postal Service
over breakfast at an IHOP in Union Square, and by the time
every couple of days, confusing the mailmen with our stacks of 400
our pancakes had turned cold it was all planned out. In June,
postcards. But what better place to have an office than in motel
we would leave New York and head out across the country for
rooms, our friends’ houses and campgrounds across the country?
three months.
We weren’t sure what we were hoping to find when we left
Our goal was pretty simple: we would travel to all fifty states,
New York and drove across the bridge into New Jersey that first
and send postcards of the images we captured to anyone who
day in June, but somehow we both know that we’ve been changed
wanted one. The postcard project began as a small part of our
by it. We’ve seen a country that is full of kindness, that stops to
trip, as a fun thing to do and a cool way to share the journey with
say hello, and invites two strangers in for a bite to eat. And those
our friends and family who wished they could come along. But
memories are ours to keep.
we decided to open up the idea on Kickstarter, so everyone would have the chance to join in, and it just kind of blew up. Twenty-
goingnowhe.re
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There is a world beneath Las Vegas, forged from tunnels and underground lairs, that speaks of America’s tattered dream.
P h o t o g r ap h y & t e x t A d a m P a t t e r s o n A ND G r e g F u n n e l l
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FOREST SUN
JUST BEGUN
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very now and again the mainstream media likes
Nights such as Homework Club – founded by
to let rip on a story about the ‘New Literary
poetry collective Aisle 16 (Submarine author Joe
Generation.’ Like, ‘Omg! Young people can do smart!
Dunthorne’s crew) – exist purely to experiment with
They are saved!’ Nothing says potential and ‘not
new styles and structures, often using audience
gonna shank you’ more than a Moleskine journal con-
participation to engage people in other ways than
taining metaphors alluding to love or existentialism.
iambic pentameter and univocalism (although
But the outspoken, young (or at least not
there’s a lot of that stuff snuck in there, too).
geriatric) crew of writers that make up London’s
So, Ginsberg and his bros may have had
honky-tonk literary community are creating a new
whisky, weed, and San Francisco’s Six Gallery
kind of poetry that is unlikely to put a smile on
in the 1950s, but across the pond some sixty years
nanna’s face. Taking inspiration from stand-up
later, poetry is as hot as its ever been – from Ben
comedy, the poets of prominence in the capital
‘Plan B’ Drew casting Ramones-ish John Cooper
today – popping up in poetry jams, spoken-word
Clarke in his social realist romp Ill Manors to
nights and book clubs from Clapham and Notting
the hip gang of pen-pushers on the Faber New
Hill to Bethnal Green and Bermondsey – are
Poets roster.
bridging a gap between worthy word-smithery
HUCK invited three London-based writers to
and pop-culture crass that’s bringing the written
pull some poetry from their rad repertoires, and
medium back into contemporary circulation.
these crazy little verses popped right out.
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*Offer valid from 18/10/12 till 06/12/12. +No purchase necessary – this competition is not confined to new subscribers. To enter without subscribing, simply email huck.editorial@thechurchoflondon.com using the subject line BOARD or send your name and address on a funny postcard to HUCK BOARD COMP, 71a Leonard Street, London, EC2A 4QS. The lucky winner will be selected at random from all valid entries on 06/12/12 and the snowboard will be delivered to the winner from Capita. Competition not open to TCOLondon employees, relations and friends.
.
Books that never left us. Read them, and maybe they’ll never leave you.
Plexus by Henry Miller helped me to discover who I was and what I wanted in my life. I read it in my mid-twenties when I was a Yank living in Sydney. My pro-surfing career had recently declared bankruptcy and my first love had recently collapsed. I was lost, stoned, wounded. It was this kind of stuff that leapt off the page at me: “Suffering is unnecessary. But, one has to suffer before he is able to realise that this is so. It is only then, moreover, that the true significance of human suffering becomes clear. At the last desperate moment – when one can suffer no more! – something happens which is the nature of a miracle. The great wound which was draining the blood of life closes up, the organism blossoms like a rose. One is free at last, and not ‘with a yearning for Russia,’ but with a yearning for ever more freedom, ever more bliss. The tree of life is kept alive not by tears but the knowledge that freedom is real and everlasting.”
I was in Uruguay working with street children and feeling deliciously jaded about the evils of the world when my brother mailed me a copy of Gravity's Rainbow. It taught me that whatever evil you think you've seen, you ain’t seen shit: the world works in far, far nastier ways than you can ever imagine. There is a strange sort of power that comes with accepting that: a lot of possibilities open up to you creatively, professionally, personally. As Pynchon says, “You may never get to touch the Master, but you can tickle his creatures.”
I’ve been fascinated with American history, particularly from the first half of the twentieth century, from a young age. As a teenager John Steinbeck's The Grapes of Wrath opened up that world to me in a more profound way than any schoolbook I could lay my hands on. It was the first time I remember thinking that fiction could be immersive, evocative and educational all at the same time. “How can you frighten a man whose hunger is not only in his own cramped stomach but in the wretched bellies of his children? You can’t scare him - he has known a fear beyond every other.”
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I came across Tom Wolfe’s The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test as an Englishman in New York, where I'd retreated for three months in 1998, aged nineteen, after an ill-advised summer job in Nashville fell through. My psychedelic sense was already tingling, but it took Wolfe's crazed descriptions of Kesey’s acid odyssey to convince me that the hallucinogenic experience deserved my undivided attention. “And Sandy takes LSD and the lime :::::: light :::::: and the magical bower turns into particles, brilliant forestgreen particles, each one picking up the light, and all shimmering and flowing like an electronic mosaic, pure California neon dust. There is no way to describe how beautiful this discovery is, to actually see the atmosphere you have lived in for years for the first time and to feel that it is inside of you too… he and George Walker are in the big tree in front of the house, straddling a limb, and he experiences… intersubjectivity – he knows precisely what Walker is thinking. It isn’t necessary to say what the design is, just the part each will do. ‘You paint the cobwebs,’ Sandy says, ‘and I’ll paint the leaves behind them.’”
I first read The God of Small Things fifteen years ago, just before it won the Booker. It felt like the moment when Lucy pushes through the fur coats in The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe and finds an unknown world beyond. Roy showed me how words could move and dance and sing and stand together in ways that I had never known. And she made me see that there were no rules or restrictions on how language could be bent, shaped and stretched. She made me want to write. An extract from a scene where the tiny Rahel observes her great aunt having a wee: “Rahel held her handbag. Baby Kochamma lifted her rumpled sari... Baby Kochamma balanced like a big bird over a public pot. Blue veins like lumpy knitting running up her translucent shins. Fat knees dimpled. Hair on them. Poor little tiny feet to carry such a load! Baby Kochamma waited for half of half a moment. Head thrust forward. Silly smile. Bosom swinging low. Melons in a blouse. Bottom up and out. When the gurgling, bubbling sound came, she listened with her eyes. A yellow brook bubbling through a mountain pass. Rahel liked all this. Holding the handbag. Everyone pissing in front of everyone. Like friends. She knew nothing then of how precious a feeling this was. Like friends. They would never be together like this again.”
At twenty-five I read The Plague by Albert Camus. It is a great book, but a single line stuck. I was sitting in an airport in New York City, no fixed address, no money, no sleep, sprained ankle, I hadn’t eaten for a day and wouldn't until I arrived back in Seattle. I had thrown away my life, yet again, crossed the continent to the big city to find my fortune and lasted two weeks. Now I was retreating on a ticket bought with borrowed money. I came across this line: “Love asks something of the future.” I underlined it, copied it into my journal, kept it in my head. Back in Seattle, I fell for a girl, enrolled in university, visited my parents, and for the most part kept my distance from freight trains.
I first read Henry Miller’s Tropic of Cancer when I was around seventeen. I was nearing the end of high school in New York with a head full of Bad Brains. America was at war again – still is – and I was debating university in the face of an increasingly doomed economy and uncertain future. In these lines, I found a familiar approach to uncertainty under the ever-present specter of modern disaster. I found unique, eternal optimism despite it all, comfort in conviction and found wealth of the kind that can't be bought. Miller exposed a new way to write, a new way to read, a new way to live. “I have no money, no resources, no hopes. I am the happiest man alive. […] This is not a book. This is libel, slander, defamation of character. This is not a book, in the ordinary sense of the word. No, this is a prolonged insult, a gob of spit in the face of Art, a kick in the pants to God, Man, Destiny, Time, Love, Beauty… what you will. I am going to sing for you, a little off key perhaps, but I will sing. I will sing while you croak, I will dance over your dirty corpse. […] It is not necessary to have an accordion, or a guitar.a The essential thing is to want to sing. This then is a song. I am singing.”
Resting in Mississippi during our bicycle trip, we encountered an enthusiastic young man with endless questions and unflinching eye contact. Insisting he had something I needed, he demanded I close my eyes. A slim book fell softly into my hands. Absorbing its intimidating eloquence under the stars, I realised how eager I had become to define our story and impose order over its chaos. Rilke's tempered wisdom reminded me once again that destination is a mere byproduct of journey, and utterly meaningless without it. “I beg you to have patience with everything unresolved in your heart and to try to love the questions themselves as if they were locked rooms or books written in a very foreign language. Don't search for the answers, which could not be given to you now, because you would not be able to live them - and the point is to live everything. Live the questions now. Perhaps then, someday far in the future, you will gradually, without even noticing it, live your way into the answer.”
Dostoyevsky’s Crime and Punishment was the only book in the smoking room of a psychiatric hospital in which I spent a fairly unpleasant two and a half years or so back in the mid-1980s, and even though the boredom in that place hourly tested one’s mortality, the image on the cover of that book – an impressionistic portrait in raw umber of a slumped depressive with an oily beard – and the book itself – stained, torn, creased, a fluorescing orange price sticker at hideous odds with the otherwise shadowy palette – was so repulsive that I always turned instead to its only reading alternative: stacks of ancient housekeeping magazines. But one day the magazines were not there. I was out of cigarettes. I opened Crime and Punishment. Soon I was not where I was, but rather in midNineteenth Century St. Petersburg, its icy garrets, inebriation, street odours, dram-shops and taverns, in all their sublime dreariness, far more inhabitable than anywhere I’d ever been. I stole that copy from the smoking room and ran away, imagining that I might someday be able to write escapes for others. “Don’t be overwise; fling yourself straight into life, without deliberation; don’t be afraid - the flood will bear you to the bank and set you safe on your feet again.”
A friend gave me this book, coincidentally, when the structures of the life I'd been leading for nearly a decade came tumbling down. He didn't know that was what was going on in my life, but it happens the novel deals with the unravelling of an idyllic marriage and life. I read about this house coming apart while mine was being packed up in boxes. Testament to Salter that I couldn't stop reading despite all that. Looking back, it's kind of hilarious. “There are really two kinds of life. There is, as Viri says, the one people believe you are living, and there is the other. It is this other which causes the trouble, this other we long to see.”
When we were young, two friends and I drove down to Central America and spent the winter living in a van. Right before we left the US, I bought Animal Liberation by Peter Singer from a used bookstore in Arizona, written the year I was born. We had a very visceral lifestyle, closer to our food sources than usual. I was already a pescatarian and most of the information I had was from the hardcore scene, but Singer really opened my eyes to the health, enviro and ethical issues of agribusiness. I wound up eating a lot of rice and beans, but at least I didn't get duped into goat quesadillas and I still have that copy of the book. “Forests and meat animals compete for the same land. The prodigious appetite of the affluent nations for meat means that agribusiness can pay more than those who want to preserve or restore the forest. We are, quite literally, gambling with the future of our planet – for the sake of hamburgers.”
I picked up a dog-eared yellow papered copy of Kerouac's The Dharma Bums on the book swap shelf of a shitty old-man hotel in Denver, Colorado. I was eighteen and it was 1986 and at the time I'd never heard of the Beats or Kerouac, but I was unwittingly going through my own Beat period – hitching and hopping buses with pack on my back not really caring where I was ending up. The soaring simplicity of the storytelling looks naive and pie-eyed through the gauze of the years – but at the time and in that place the book spoke directly to my heart. The Dharma Bums lived for the now and were mad to delve into the raw planet's pleasures - engaging their body as well as their minds in a joyful expectation of the possible. I've strived to live with that open-hearted way of apprehending the world ever since. “I felt like lying down by the side of the trail and remembering it all. The woods do that to you, they always look familiar, long lost, like the face of a long-dead relative, like an old dream, like a piece of forgotten song drifting across the water, most of all like golden eternities of past childhood or past manhood and all the living and the dying and the heartbreak that went on a million years ago and the clouds as they pass overhead seem to testify (by their own lonesome familiarity) to this feeling.”
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Scott Stevens Mike Azevedo photography / coalheadwear.com
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