Reviewed here: Stories Care Forgot: An Anthology of New Orleans Zines
Edited by Ethan Clark
Last Gasp 2006
ISBN0-86719-661-0
149 pages

The coolest thing about zines is that anyone can make and distribute one in their community. And while blogs allow millions of people to spout off to an endless Internet audience, zines are more local, more personal, and by their pen and paper nature, much more permanent. They can be political, cultural or strictly for adherents of the most arcane hobbies. Basically, you must only have something you want to share with the world and then be willing to do the work required to get your message out in a zine. I was not surprised at all to discover that there was a vibrant zine community in New Orleans prior to Hurricane Katrina; it makes perfect sense to me that the same people who would demand innovation in art and music would embrace this unique form of communication. By their very nature though, zines are not the sort of thing that a person will reach for, will try to save, when they are fleeing a hurricane. That makes the excerpts in the new collection Stories Care Forgot all that much more important. These are voices from the street telling us how it was before the storm and for most of them, sadly, this volume is the only way anyone is ever going to hear these words again.

Editor Ethan Clark was in Ashville, NC, when the storm hit, having recently moved there after five years in New Orleans. In his introduction he recounts the friends who came to him seeking refuge and the frustration he felt over watching the city collapse. "All I had was a big pile of New Orleans zines, some of the best writing to come out of the punk underground in the last decade, and that’s what I could use to try to help against not just hurricane damage, but the damage done by Bush and Michael Browne’s ‘Let them eat cake’ reaction to the storm.” As a way to most effectively help others through publication of the book, Clark also arranged for the proceeds to go to Community Labor United, a “coalition of grass-roots organizations that want to ensure New Orleans will be rebuilt for New Orleanians and not as some tourist play-land.”

What Clark created from his zine collection is difficult to qualify and even harder to describe. By their very nature, zines are independent productions, so to see the work of almost 20 different zine creators all gathered in one place is overwhelming to say the least. Should a reader begin first with the selections about bicycles and bike mechanics from issues of “Chainbreaker”? Or opt instead for stories about life in the Ninth Ward from “Factory Direct,” or “Dear ____, I Wrote This Zine For You.” There are comics, collages and notices torn off of telephone poles. Writers share their thoughts about work, home and fights in the street. And as I read this collection from cover to cover, I realized that what Ethan Clark had held onto after he moved was a slice of certain lives in a certain city around the turn of the 21st century. Where else could you read about bike messengers, strippers and being chased by wild dogs? To be perfectly honest, where else would you even know to look for those stories?

Or more importantly, even know what to look for?

I honestly had no idea what to expect when I picked up Stories Care Forgot, although I suspected it would include sometimes funny and sometimes cynical insights into life in the city. I enjoyed the stories about bicycles and messengers, particularly Shelley Jackson’s essay, “…are you the mechanic?” from "Chainbreaker.” (Jackson still lives in New Orleans.) What took me by surprise though were the many insightful articles about the urban planning and development issues that have had detrimental affects on the city. In “Treme,” author Skot! provides the history of the Faubourg Treme neighborhood, America’s oldest black neighborhood and the construction of the I-10 elevated expressway that destroyed it. Treme is incredibly significant in American history, as Skot! recounts in his article: “The first African American daily newspaper (The Crusader) was started here, and the first book of African American poetry (Les Cenelles, 1845) came outta the treme. One of the key civil rights cases, (Plessy v. Ferguson) was fought by locals to desegregate the passenger trains.”

In 1967, Claiborne Avenue, the main street in the Treme, had 10 acres of parkland and was lined with trees. When the city wanted to build the I-10 freeway extension, there were two choices: the French Quarter, or Claiborne. Its construction resulted in an elevated highway over concrete parking lots that extended for miles through the neighborhood. “People moved, property values plummeted, houses were deserted and now Claiborne is fucked,” writes Skot! “Hey, but at least you get a nice view of the city, way up there … most life-long residents of the treme agree that the freeway was what killed the area.”

Oddly, this is the neighborhood where jazz legend Louis Armstrong grew up, but it was somehow more appropriate to devastate the park named in his honor than to preserve it for the future. I'm sure Armstrong would have preferred the park to the honor of an airport; it would have been much more helpful for the people to have a place to live rather than a place to fly.

What Skot! and other writers in the collection point out is that neighborhoods are not planned to end in despair and poverty, but poor urban planning is what will create these tragedies in the making. In “Gentrification,” Skot! puzzles over the demolition of the St. Thomas Housing Project, one of the oldest in the city. Plagued by crime and in disrepair, nearby homeowners and businessmen successfully petitioned to have it torn down. The question posed by the author, though, is why putting money into the projects for the betterment of those who lived there was not even considered. This theme is taken up in another article, “Bywater/9th Ward” from the zine “I Hate This Part of Texas” by John Gerken. In that essay, Gerken wonders why so much money has been poured into controlling the Mississippi (and so many people were forced to work at those efforts under slavelike conditions) all “for this insane quest to control this huge river, just so that eventually, entire shiploads of Nike shoes could be shipped into the middle of the country on the final leg of their journey from China. A quest through time, space and history to remove ourselves completely from every object we encounter in our everyday lives.”

Tear it down, build it up, but never consider the long-term effects of what you are doing. That is the message that these zine writers have received loud and clear from living in New Orleans, yet it’s something that city planners seem woefully oblivious to, certainly before Katrina and from all appearances, even more so afterwards.

Overall, Stories Care Forgot presents an unvarnished, painfully personal look at the New Orleans that was. It is funny and sad and all too often heartbreaking because readers know that most of it, and perhaps none of it, is there anymore. Reading this collection is another way to learn about the city though, to enter into different areas, other corners, than most visitors will never see.

It’s another way to know New Orleans.

As to the significance of any zine collection, I’ll leave that to the words of contributor John Gerken. In his introduction to the book, Gerken writes: “With stories we can locate ourselves in this world just as surely as with any map. Pen to paper, like a mother bird’s beak in her baby’s throat. A lifeline to walk like a tightrope from place to place.”

When they left New Orleans, it was “one million messages in one million bottles adrift,” according to Gerken. Consider Stories Care Forgot a chance to receive those words sent out on the run to the universe. Or better yet, consider it an invitation to find yourself in the stories of those who aren’t afraid to tell you exactly what they thought and felt in a place that once was New Orleans, Louisiana, in a time that did not know a storm called Katrina.