Fluke fanzine features NLR skateboarder
Issue No. 18 of “Fluke” fanzine is out and is filled with stories about skateboarding, graffiti, music and more.
It’s all the neat, nostalgia-tinged, left-of-center obsessions and interests that “Fluke” publisher Matthew Thompson has been exploring since he founded the ’zine in 1991 in North Little Rock with his friends Jason White and Steve Schmidt.
Copies are $4 and can be ordered at fluke.bigcartel.com.
The 56-page issue features “Dog town, USA,” an essay by Thompson, who now lives in Phoenix, about first meeting North Little Rock skateboarder Paige Hearn in summer 1985. Hearn had built a huge, fiberglass half-pipe behind his family’s furniture store in Levy, and Thompson describes watching as Hearn, wearing high-top Vans and sipping a 7-11 Thirstburster, nonchalantly skates between the columns of a nearby movie theater.
Paige was a real-life, bona fide skateboarder, he writes. To me, he looked like the West Coast skaters I saw in [skate magazine] ‘‘Thrasher.’’
Skating is further explored with four pages of photos by Paris-based photographer, ’zine-maker, skater and musician Sergej Vutuc, whose black-and-white photographs of skateboarders in action have an eerie atmosphere that seem almost like charcoal drawings.
Thompson also interviews Bill Daniel, the photographer and filmmaker whose 2005 documentary “Who Is Bozo Texino?” searched out hobo artists and train moniker writers and featured Gurdon artist and longtime “Fluke” friend buz blurr.
Two of blurr’s portraits of Daniel as well as a 2006 photograph he took of the filmmaker help illustrate the interview.
Gary Floyd, a Gurdon native and onetime singer for a Texas punk rock band whose name can’t be printed here, talks about the Austin, Texas, scene in the ’80s and touring with Nirvana (Floyd was also featured in Issue 15); and Susan A. Phillips, author of “Wallbangin’: Graffiti and Gangs in L.A.,” is interviewed about her new book, “The City Beneath: A Century of Los Angeles Graffiti.”
There’s more, including a review of a March 11 Shellac concert in Chicago just before concerts were shut down that captures the unease and nervousness of being part of a rock ’n’ roll crowd as the pandemic was taking hold and “Affle House,” a touching, handwritten Thompson essay from 1999 about old friends, punk rock, fading youth and home.