Leaning With Intent to Fall
By Ethan Clark
Garrett County Press 2007
ISBN 1-891053-04-7
186 pages

As much as the press has tried to analyze and investigate the many different facets of New Orleans culture in the wake of Katrina and the failure of the levees, there are still aspects of the city’s culture that remained terminally overlooked. Reviewing Stories Care Forgot: An Anthology of New Orleans Zines provides readers with an introduction to the thriving zine pre-hurricane culture, but editor Ethan Clark’s new memoir provides an even more intimate look at the punks, partiers and endless array of questioning teenagers and twentysomethings who flow in and out of the city on vision quests they hardly acknowledge let alone are able to articulate. Clark ended up there after some time spent selling fireworks in Wisconsin and seeing way too much of a small segment of the interstate highway system while trying to hitchhike out of Kansas (in desperation he finally ended up on a bus). His reasons for choosing New Orleans made as much sense as the fireworks gig, but his recollections of his time spent there (and elsewhere) are a perfect window on one of those ever present but barely recorded aspects of American life. He’s very close in his new book, Leaning With Intent to Fall, to being the Sarah Vowell of low paying jobs, squats and living in your van, and readers wanting a clearer picture of New Orleans would do well to read what Clark has to say.

After chapters highlighting the disturbing antics of Midwestern fireworks buyers and the penchant for the people of Kansas to apparently drive back and forth between exits while ignoring increasingly desperate hitchhikers, Clark delves into his experiences in New Orleans. As a committed cyclist who depends on his bike to get back and forth to work (and make restaurant deliveries), the wild dog situation in his neighborhood is more than a bit disturbing, but Clark finds a way to take it in stride: “The poor bastards are just trying to get by, just like everyone else,�? he writes. In a series of essays ranging from really bad roommates to really scary moments with the patrons of the local bar, Clark chips away at the working class sections of New Orleans, proving that there is still more to see about this city; still so much we do not know. (It became a ritual of sorts to climb inside a local monument of Robert E. Lee, and Clark tells us all about the weirdness, including a thankfully aborted attempt to cut their way into it one evening with a blow torch. I swear I’m not making this up.) From one ramshackle houseful of crazed roommates to another, Clark maintains his determination to find a job that doesn’t suck and some kind of direction for his future. And the reader, alternately shocked (he is nearly killed one night) and endeared (Clark doesn’t just move, he packs up “…tools and my records, my books and my zines and my nervous little dogs; I took down my increasingly ragged show flyers and band posters, and I loaded them all up into my antiquated yellow Dodge Maxi Van…�?), stays along for the ride to see what Clark will do next, who he will meet and just what he is going to figure out in the end. The fact that he doesn’t know what he wants is infinitely reassuring and also very acutely what so much of young America understands all too well.

In the end, Clark leaves New Orleans for Asheville, North Carolina, before Katrina hits although he does include a couple of essays about returning to the city afterwards, and his sorrow over what was lost as well as the rather scary military police presence that sorely affects the casual and fun atmosphere that had so welcomed him in the past (the near death experience notwithstanding). The essays in Asheville are an excellent complement to the earlier pieces in New Orleans. They show Clark’s continued search for purpose, the significance of which he might have denied that summer in Wisconsin. In Asheville, this search becomes an increasing source of concern as he makes new friends, all of whom are also searching but doing it in a less self destructive manner. “Truth be told,�? he writes, “these days I’d rather sit around listening to Otis Redding than Black Flag.�?

There is a lot to enjoy in Clark’s essays; he’s honest about himself and his friends in a way that is quite disarming. He also earns points for not seeking pity. Upper class America would likely find parts of his life impossibly difficult (if not bizarre), but he is equally proud and delighted with his journey. Wisconsin, Kansas and New Orleans got Ethan Clark to Asheville, where he seems to have gotten his proverbial shit together in a big way. He is savvy enough to realize that the life he has lived is underrepresented among mainstream discussions on society and culture and he puts his words out there with this book insisting that his American dream be recognized and respected. Leaning With Intent to Fall is an excellent chance to see yet another aspect of what made New Orleans so vibrantly alive; here’s hoping Ethan Clark continues to record the lives of those around him, and doesn’t forget — for a minute — where he came from.