An Interview With Lurker Lou About Card Boards

Lurker Lou FSNS Barrier

Photo by Trevor Macculley

If you are ready to forgive Lurker Lou for ruining skateboarding, he’s been working on a pretty cool project entitled Card Boards. Rather than allowing childhood baseball cards to collect dust and tossing old boards by the curb, Lou combined the two into a collection for the entire Major League. He has a show this Saturday featuring all the boards, so we spoke to him about how Card Boards came to fruition.

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Everyone has a story about how they first got into collecting things as a kid. How did you get into baseball cards?

My dad was into baseball throughout his life. He was born in 1947 and collected during the forties and fifties. When he went to college, his mom threw out his collection.

Baseball card collecting got hot again in the eighties. I had a brother who was five years older than me, and when he was eight or nine, my dad started buying him all these cards. By the time I started at six or seven, he was already over them. I got all my brother’s cards and went from there. The eighties were sort of the peak of collecting cards.

Why was it the peak?

All the baby boomers, like my dad, were in their forties. They didn’t want you to just throw them away like they did. That’s why they became rare, because no one thought to hold onto them when they first got big in the forties and fifties.

My dad had a liquor store and he would carry baseball cards there. He’d buy boxes for me at wholesale, like as a treat when I got As on my report card. We’d take the good ones, put them aside and make team sets. At 11 years old, I started skating, and completely left anything having to do with baseball or cards behind. Card collecting was on its way out anyway. The market got over saturated.

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How’d you decide to start making boards with cards twenty years down the line?

I was bored, going through old stuff in maybe winter 2012. An old roommate had left a bunch of cards behind. He had Shawn Kemp rookie cards, Gretzkys and other shit. I wanted to get rid of the cards to make back some of the money this dude owed me. I went onto Beckett.com, which was the website of this monthly magazine that would tell you card prices back in the day. The cards are worth nothing. A mint condition 1987 Gretzky is maybe $8-16. I wasn’t going to go through the trouble of selling some cards for $10.

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An Interview With Lurker Lou

Lurker Lou ruined skateboarding. When he snapped Matt Militano’s board during Slap’s One in a Million show (not even first try!), he singlehandedly took away all the fun there was to be had in riding a skateboard. We sat down with Lou to discuss why he is so hell-bent on destroying skateboarding, and why he hates America’s children.

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Where are you from, and how did you get into skating?

I’m from Cape Cod, Massachusetts. The actual town is Dennisport, which is a small town, kinda white trash, dead all year, crazy in the summertime. My dad used to own a liquor store, and it had a drive-thru, and all these kids used to skate in there. My older brother had two friends who skated, and they sold me a used board for super cheap, so I started going out with them. I was turning 11, and they were 16.

How’d you end up moving to New York?

That was all Zered.

When did you originally meet him?

I met him when I was in 8th grade, he was the talk of Cape Cod. I never got out of my town to skate much, but as I got older, I’d go to other towns and link up with different dudes to skate. I met Zered at a contest. He won, and I think I got 3rd place. He lived two towns away, and after that, I just started going to his skatepark. He got on Zoo, and they got him an apartment here with Billy [Rohan] and Brian Brown. I’d just crash on an air bed, then Billy got kicked off and I took over his room. As soon as I moved here, we started filming Vicious Cycle.

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Hang Time — An Interview With Brian Reid

Intro + Interview by Adam Abada
Photos by Liam Annis

Following a now-growing list of skaters making Cape Cod, Massachusetts a proving ground for east coast talent, Brian Reid has been adding to his repertoire this year. At 26 years, he is deceptively young for his wealth of wisdom. His hometown of Hyannis (yes – adjacent to that Hyannisport where the Kennedys famously summered) serves as a base for excursions into the northeast’s city centers, where he has a keen eye for a brick-and-mortar aesthetic.

Right after finishing up my interview, Orchard dropped “The Trail” with Mr. Reid front and center. That’s before mentioning Tim Savage’s “Brian, Brandon, and Will,” DGK’s Zeitgeist, and the Boston-area based AM Scramble Brian was invited to this summer — so honestly, I’m patting myself on the back for the timing of this one. Let’s get this man a board.

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Lurker Lou’s ‘Purple Shoe Lou’ Part

A running topic of conversation during Lou’s premiere / art show on Saturday was the unavoidable rant he was gonna go on when some company steals his idea of premiering a skate video on a box truck covered in L.E.D. screens. It’s one of those brilliant “how has nobody thought of this?” ideas that anyone would be jealous of, and all the more viable in an age when holding a skate premiere in New York is becoming an increasing pain in the ass. He already seems at peace with the inevitable though ;)

Lou swore off skateparks two-plus years ago, and has wisely observed that our days on this earth are far too numbered to waste away at Blue Park. Recent years have found him skating hellish-looking bank spots that my colleagues and I have zero interest in knowing the location of, that just over board-width slab of cement that runs down the entrance of Brower Park, and Chauncey Ledges — admittedly his only concession to the topsoil of New York skate spots — in an otherwise stubborn crusade to avoid any of the familiar trappings of 2k19 spot selection.

Village Psychic has the web premiere. Bonus Portugal section at the end, sponsored by Uber Eats.

With so much of the Vicious Cycle alumni still putting out solid parts, it begs the question: when is the new Brian Brown part dropping?

An Interview with Dave Caddo

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Words & Interview by Zach Baker / Photos by Trevor Culley

One of the cool things about having the privilege of knowing how to ride one of these things, besides being able to find pot no matter where you are in the world, is that it keeps you exploring. It sends you out to uncover weird parts of familiar places, makes you creep into all sorts of alleys and ditches and post-industrial shit-piles, and on many occasions, you’ll leave feeling a lot happier than when you got there.

Every time I see Caddo, he’s having a pretty good time. Then, every time I see some Caddo footage or photos, he’s having a pretty sweet time. He skates all these spots I’ve never seen before, in cities I’ve never thought to go to. He’s gotten clips at like, the Holy Trinity of New York busts: the Roosevelt Island Monument, Forbidden Banks and the Holy Grail on Nostrand Avenue. Caddo goes out of his way to keep skateboarding interesting for himself, which is why his skating is so much fun to watch.

His part in Politic’s Division, which is his second full part in as many years, is loaded with all kinds of new approaches to familiar spots, fun lines down hills and in all kinds of parking lots. Here’s a chat I had with him about Enid’s, longevity, and kickflips.

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Tell me about when you kickflipped into the Roosevelt Island monument.

That was when it first opened up. I don’t know why, but the Parks Department would close it one day a week. You get maybe ten minutes before the old security guard comes out and starts yelling at you. But the guy is like sixty-years-old, it takes him a while to mosey over. The guy got there and his technique was to stand right in the way. He’s just mellow about it, kept repeating over and over again “no, no, no.” He was just saying that for ten minutes. [John] Valenti was walking backwards with the camera as I’m trying the last one and luckily I made it. I almost rolled into the guy.

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