Fuzzy Needle Friday Newsletter: Remembering Alec
Greetings Fuzzy Needle friends,
Happy New Year y’all. We’ve been reflecting on 2025, and we have so much to be thankful for around the shop. We’ve put in a lot of work the past 12 months to expand and refine the best parts of Fuzzy Needle. We got a really cool New Year’s shipment of books and records that I’ll share more about in a few moments. Our lights are on, our incense supply is plentiful, and the beautiful little community of creative, smart and interesting people keeps coming back to hang out with us. For all of you especially, we are so grateful.
Yet for all the new beginnings 2026 has brought, it’s already brought sorrow. Today is the funeral service for a friend of the shop who was likely a friend of yours, too: Alec Chambers, who died on Dec. 30th. Alec was an incredibly gifted skateboarder and visual artist. He was also a bartender at Satellite, which is how a lot of us round town came to meet him. I only knew him as a familiar face on South Front, but he was particularly close with Tim and some of the other guys here at Fuzzy Needle. I asked Tim to share some words about Alec — here’s what he had to say:
“I was fortunate to know Alec Chambers for twenty years. I was endlessly inspired by his skating, his art, and his dogged pursuit of anything he set his mind to. I also loved how light-hearted, goofy, and joyful he could be. Most of all, what I admired about Alec was the way he treated his friends and how he always made sure they knew he loved them, including me.
The community’s response to both mourning and memorializing Alec has been deeply comforting. While the tragic loss of his life is unimaginable, I am hopeful that his beloved Greenfield Lake Skatepark will one day be named in his honor. He will be with us forever, and I look forward to explaining to my children how undeniably wonderful and special the person the park was named after truly was. Though the grief has been immense, it has also revealed the remarkable strength and compassion of our community.”
You can make a donation to his family’s GoFundMe here and read Thrasher Magazine’s remembrance of Alec here. Tomorrow, there’ll be a memorial skate session at Greenfield Park. That’ll be from 1 pm to sunset. We hope to see you there.
This week’s recommendations:
The Summer Book - Tove Jansson
Jansson is best known for creating the Moomins, but she was also a prolific and frankly underappreciated novelist. My personal favorite of hers is Fair Play, but I also love this gorgeous, almost Whitman-y story about a grandmother and a granddaughter summering together.
Some Lines of Poetry: From the Notebooks of bpNichol - bpNichol
The revered Canadian poet bpNichol died just five days shy of his 44th birthday, ending an already outstanding career in writing, art and children’s television. (Fraggle Rock fans might be surprised to know an all-star poet was on that show’s writers’ team.) This book, released 36 years later, is a collection of excerpts from his journals. It’s worth a look.
Oxford American Austin Live! - Various artists
The companion record to the Oxford American’s 2025 Austin Music issue, spotlighting the legend himself Willie Nelson. We’ve got copies of both the periodical and the record at the shop. Thanks Patrick for sharing this with us. Very excited to hear this one.
Mornings Without Mii - Mayumi Inaba
Recently, we’ve been stocking a lot of cool contemporary Japanese literature — this one, which came out only 11 months ago, is an author’s memoirs of her little cat Mii. It’s sweet and heart wrenching and pretty perfect.
Bread of Angels - Patti Smith
A must-read memoir from a brilliant artist. We also have a couple other titles by Patti.
Butter - Asako Yuzuki
Another Japanese book, this time inspired by a real life serial killer. It follows a journalist tasked with interviewing a woman who allegedly seduced and killed three men with her cooking.
Strange Houses - Uketsu
Fans of House of Leaves will want to tap into this one. It’s a horror novel about a mysterious house for sale. The author is the equally mysterious Uketsu, known for his enigmatic and often eerie Youtube videos.
Exercises in Style - Raymond Queneau
A few weeks ago, I recommended the Joe Brainard collection I Remember. This book reminds me a lot of that — only instead of repeating the same opening phrase, it repeats the same story — over and over in radically different forms, from opera to sonnet and so on.
Ego Death at a Bachelorette Party - Hayley Williams
A monster masterpiece from the queen of Tennessee. Love you Hayley.
The Brothers Karamazov - Fyodor Dostoevsky
Probably the coolest edition of any classic I’ve ever seen. This is my favorite by Dostoevsky (I’m not brave enough to tackle Anna Karenina yet).
Tulsa - Larry Clark
Clark was widely reviled for his candid depictions of Oklahoma’s troubled youth when this first came out in 1971. Since then, his photobook has become something of a standard for photographers seeking to document the harsh edges of America.
