With love in your heart and skin in the game: Huck’s February 2024 Newsletter

In 2017, I found myself at a Super Bowl par­ty in Brook­lyn. It was a few weeks after Don­ald Trump’s inau­gu­ra­tion and the nation­al mood was, let’s say, ​“bad.” An ambi­ent mix­ture of shell­shock and dread hung in the air, but the new time­line, our cur­rent time­line, hadn’t prop­er­ly set in yet. Things still felt rel­a­tive­ly endurable. Tall boys, blunts, and chick­en wings were passed around. Some­one came dressed as the Left Shark. At the end of the open­ing cer­e­mo­ny, a silence fell in the room and my friend Kyle made this dead­pan joke that has haunt­ed me ever since: ​“Ah, the drones are spelling Pep­si. Things are good in America.”

From our cur­rent van­tage point, drones spelling Pep­si while a washed real­i­ty TV per­son­al­i­ty fon­dles the nuclear codes feels like child’s play as far as dis­so­nance goes. At this stage – in pol­i­tics, jour­nal­is­tic integri­ty, the his­to­ry of the inter­net – real­i­ty isn’t just inco­her­ent, it’s dis­in­te­grat­ed. For instance, it was impos­si­ble to rec­on­cile the way cov­er­age of the Super Bowl ran along­side news of Israel’s unlaw­ful assault on Rafah ear­li­er this month. 

This wasn’t just anoth­er case of social media becom­ing a meet­ing point for the jar­ring but dis­tinct­ly sep­a­rate spheres of ​‘celebri­ty gos­sip’ and ​‘war crimes.’ The Super Bowl is a pan­tomime of Amer­i­can patri­o­tism in which the sick­ly rela­tion­ship between pol­i­tics and enter­tain­ment takes cen­tre stage. Between foot­ball plays, Bey­on­cé launch­ing her coun­try era, and Ush­er per­form­ing ​“Love In This Club,” CBS grant­ed space for a series of 30-sec­ond ads from the Israeli gov­ern­ment. One called for ​“all the dads held in cap­tiv­i­ty” to be brought home. Anoth­er showed a packed sta­di­um with the words: ​“In a roar­ing sta­di­um, their silence is deaf­en­ing. 136 peo­ple are still being held hostage by Hamas.” Mean­while, Israel car­ried out US-fund­ed raids of one of the most dense­ly pop­u­lat­ed areas on earth. The civil­ian death toll in Gaza is now near­ly 30,000.

I’ve said it in this newslet­ter before, but the reports com­ing out of Pales­tine are so har­row­ing they oblit­er­ate a part of your soul just to read. There are 1 mil­lion refugees – at least half of Gaza’s pop­u­la­tion – crammed into Rafah, which Israel car­pet bombed despite advis­ing hun­dreds of thou­sands of dis­placed Pales­tini­ans to seek shel­ter there. Images cir­cu­lat­ed of dis­mem­bered bod­ies, snipers fir­ing into over­crowd­ed hos­pi­tals, chil­dren forced to endure hor­rors beyond com­pre­hen­sion. A six-year-old girl, Hind Rajab, was trapped alone among the bod­ies of her dead rel­a­tives after her family’s car came under fire. She plead­ed with emer­gency ser­vices for hours only to be killed by Israeli forces along with the para­medics sent to res­cue her. Two orphaned teens man­aged to get their sev­en sib­lings to Rafah, where they are liv­ing in a tent while Israel seems poised to launch a ground inva­sion of the city.

Sto­ries like this are end­less, and there will be more. There is nowhere left for peo­ple to go. ​“Rafah was the final des­ti­na­tion for most peo­ple,” said Yousef Ham­mash of the Nor­we­gian Refugee Coun­cil, shel­ter­ing in Rafah with his fam­i­ly. ​“The fam­i­lies that are here have fled four or five times now, and they are now locked between the Egypt­ian bor­der and the Israeli tanks that are con­duct­ing ground oper­a­tions in Khan Younis.”

The fact that this isn’t, at the bare min­i­mum, being con­demned in the strongest pos­si­ble terms by the US and UK only under­scores how frag­ile and moral­ly bank­rupt our polit­i­cal mod­el has become. It’s only now, with the last sup­pos­ed­ly ​‘safe’ area in Gaza under siege, that terms like ​“slaugh­ter” and ​“geno­cide” are being quot­ed in the media to real­is­ti­cal­ly describe what is and has been hap­pen­ing. Mean­while, lib­er­al politi­cians con­tin­ue to fal­ter. As Nes­rine Malik put it in an op-ed for The Guardian, they ​“express unequiv­o­cal sup­port for Israel’s actions while also express­ing con­cern for civil­ians in Gaza.” The feed­back loop per­pet­u­ates inac­tion while the num­bers of the dead and dis­placed sky-rock­et. ​“This dis­so­nance is a prod­uct of attempt­ing to rec­on­cile an irrec­on­cil­able posi­tion,” Malik writes. ​“The facts are sim­ply too stark for any­one to con­front them while plau­si­bly con­tin­u­ing to sup­port Israel’s actions in Gaza.”

The Super Bowl is a spec­ta­cle that, like all sport­ing events, posi­tions itself as a polit­i­cal vac­u­um while being any­thing but. The biggest Amer­i­can TV audi­ence since the moon land­ing watched the Kansas City Chiefs and the San Fran­cis­co 49ers go at it, cheered on by a host of pop stars who, for the most part, have not spo­ken pub­licly about Israel or Pales­tine. I’m not even in the busi­ness of think­ing celebri­ties should com­ment on cur­rent affairs; pre­cious few peo­ple are wait­ing for Ice Spice, per­former of the hot new sin­gle ​“Think U The Shit (Fart),” to come through with a scin­til­lat­ing take on geopol­i­tics. But in this case the over­whelm­ing silence from almost every con­tem­po­rary Amer­i­can idol – com­pound­ed by a $7M advert about how silence breeds hatred, paid for by Patri­ots own­er Robert Kraft, who reg­u­lar­ly donates to Israeli lob­by­ists – feels beyond delusional. 

What’s even more insane is that, in the mid­dle of all this, the social media accounts for not­ed POTUS Joe Biden, whose admin­is­tra­tion con­tin­ues to sell and sup­ply weapons to Israel while call­ing for an end to civil­ian deaths in Gaza, post­ed a image of him shoot­ing red lasers from his eyes accom­pa­nied by the cap­tion ​“Just like we drew it up.” So yeah, if you’re search­ing for a voice of rea­son in these dark and vio­lent times then I’m afraid it won’t be found in the world’s high­est polit­i­cal offices either. When the self-appoint­ed cus­to­di­ans of basic human rights have noth­ing to offer but lethal inco­her­ence and memes, you would actu­al­ly have more luck turn­ing to some­one like Tay­lor Swift, who has the pow­er to shift the nee­dle on social dis­course if not actu­al pol­i­cy… were she ever to speak.

As ever, none of this is hap­pen­ing in a vac­u­um. There’s an insis­tence on the sep­a­ra­tion of art and pol­i­tics across the board, along with more mea­sures clamp­ing down on free­dom of expres­sion. Artists in Berlin are fac­ing cen­sor­ship and event can­cel­la­tions as Ger­man author­i­ties come down hard on expres­sions of Pales­tin­ian sol­i­dar­i­ty. In the UK, Arts Coun­cil Eng­land qui­et­ly updat­ed its poli­cies to warn that ​“overt­ly polit­i­cal or activist state­ments” could breach fund­ing agree­ments. Mean­while, Belfast rap trio Kneecap have accused the UK gov­ern­ment of try­ing to ​“silence” them after it blocked their appli­ca­tion for a British Phono­graph­ic Indus­try (BPI) fund­ing award, seem­ing­ly over their anti-Union stance. The BPI board had already approved the fund­ing and called the move ​“dis­ap­point­ing.” It fell to Trade Sec­re­tary, Kemi Bade­noch, to say the qui­et part out loud: ​“It’s hard­ly sur­pris­ing that we don’t want to hand out UK tax­pay­ers’ mon­ey to peo­ple that oppose the Unit­ed King­dom itself.” (Nev­er mind that the Home Office has been using tax­pay­er mon­ey to pay Tik­Tok influ­encers to cre­ate con­tent deter­ring migrants from cross­ing the Channel…) 

Clear­ly one of the fears in play is that art can and will affect how peo­ple think. It fol­lows, then, that it does actu­al­ly mat­ter what artists say, and whether they choose to say any­thing at all – through their work or oth­er­wise. Art is pow­er­ful. It’s a form of com­mu­ni­ca­tion, com­fort, edu­ca­tion occa­sion­al­ly. When the cre­ative indus­tries – over­run by nepo­tism and finan­cial­ly incom­pat­i­ble with the cost of liv­ing as they already are – start to close ranks around the wealthy, it is a sign that here be mon­sters. All the best (by which I mean the most endur­ing) art is made with love in one’s heart and skin in the game. It’s a fight for rel­e­vance, now, between those who could speak but choose not to, and those who do speak and are repressed for it. Which way, West­ern history?

Emma: I saw a tweet the oth­er day that did my head in. It was a cutesy joke about gam­blers being addict­ed to hope, and it wasn’t that deep, but it made me despair how all social media plat­forms have become dump­ing grounds for meme-pilled, low-risk regur­gi­ta­tions of ideas that pro­vide the foun­da­tions of so much great art. Unfor­tu­nate­ly that art – which, a lot of the time, isn’t even obscure – is nev­er shared or sig­nalled to. Instead we’re spoon-fed the most flip­pant ver­sions, for free, as con­tent. All of which is to say: any­one would do well to read the late come­di­an Norm MacDonald’s incred­i­ble ​“non-mem­oir,” Based On A True Sto­ry. It’s delib­er­ate­ly half-fab­ri­cat­ed but con­tains some of the most beau­ti­ful writ­ing ever com­mit­ted to paper on (his very real) gam­bling addiction.

Josh (Print Edi­tor): I’m going to go all nepo here with my book rec­om­men­da­tion, but I worked hard on it so why shouldn’t I? Out­side of Huck, I spent the last three and a half years mak­ing an oral his­to­ry book of the infa­mous Drag­on Bar that was open in Old Street, 1998 – 2008. Made with James-Lee Duffy, artist and co-founder of our art zine Pave­ment Lick­er, it is the only book to doc­u­ment the birth of the street art move­ment, and fea­tures con­tri­bu­tions from the pio­neers of street art, who sprayed and played there, includ­ing Banksy, Faile, INVAD­ER, ELK, Mode 2, EINE, Lucie Fly­nn, CEPT, Sweet Toof, AIKO, James Jes­sop and many more. It wasn’t obvi­ous at the time that the Drag­on Bar in London’s Old Street was to be an era-defin­ing place filled with decade-defin­ing artists. The toi­lets were leg­en­dar­i­ly graf­fi­tied, there were block par­ties out the back and the gallery space upstairs was giv­en to artists for free. And then it mys­te­ri­ous­ly burned down… you can cop it here and also keep an eye on the Huck site for Q&A between James and I..

Isaac (Social Edi­tor & Pho­tog­ra­phy Writer): I’ve Nev­er Been Here Before, the debut solo album from Erick the Archi­tect – aka the pro­duc­er of NYC hip-hop trio Flat­bush Zom­bies – is very good. Across the 16 tracks there’s for­ward think­ing, glitch­ing son­ics, a sprin­kle of psych rock (‘Break­ing Point’), and a star-stud­ded line­up of fea­tures. Chan­nel Tres, Lalah Hath­away, James Blake and Joey Bada$$ to name a hand­ful. My per­son­al high­light: ​‘Leukemia / AM ft. Kim­bra’ – a heart­break­ing, cin­e­mat­ic breakup mono­logue that grieves the loss of a part­ner, but also touch­es on the pass­ing of his moth­er, who forms the ​“spir­i­tu­al influ­ence” of the LP.

Andrea (Edi­tor-in-chief): It was around mid Novem­ber that things final­ly broke. I’d been sit­ting in my car for an hour — I was meant to be some­where else but that’s where my body was so that’s where I stayed; a sta­t­ic ves­sel dis­con­nect­ed from a pan­icked brain. There’s no cure for this con­di­tion. It’s a symp­tom of our times as we con­tin­ue to bear wit­ness to the des­e­cra­tion of Pales­tin­ian life. There is, how­ev­er, respite; and it comes when we connect.

I felt it that day, sit­ting zom­bie-like in my car, lis­ten­ing to jour­nal­ist Mona Cha­l­abi​’s voice quiver while giv­ing an inter­view on the Long­form pod­cast. Since Octo­ber, Cha­l­abi has been using her one-of-a-kind brand of visu­al jour­nal­ism, invent­ed out of a frus­tra­tion that she was con­stant­ly side­lined and ignored in the news­room, to draw atten­tion to the main­stream media’s silence, bias and wil­ful dis­tor­tion (weapons of war, make no mis­take) that have become a tent­pole of Israeli impunity. 

Her episode on Long­form is absolute­ly dev­as­tat­ing — it’s heart­felt, heart­break­ing, full of pan­ic and rage, which is exact­ly what this moment calls for. (Hold on till the end for a real­ly deli­cious mic drop when she name-drops the worst offend­ing editors).

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