I have a new review up at the Voices of NOLA website: Stories Care Forgot. It's a collection of about twenty different zines that were published before Katrina. It is a very mixed collection - everything from zines chronicling the bicycle culture of the city (messengers, repair shops, etc.) to rants on urban planning screw-ups and stories about nearly getting attacked by wild dogs. You never know what you might find as you turn the page.
I felt a bit like an archivist as I was going through it - almost like I was reading about some vanished long gone city (any difference between me and the archaeologist who just found another tomb in the Valley of the Kings?). The zines represent a side of NOLA that has been largely absent from any other medium (pop culture or otherwise). They were written mostly by white middle class kids who were choosing to live a punk alternative lifestyle that kept them on the fringes of a society that revels in its fringiness. (Is that a word?) Fortunately, editor Ethan Clarke had been collecting the zines and took them with him when he moved away before Katrina. So when his friends began to show up, he still had a tangible piece of the life they all used to know. He put it all together in a very nice package and now we cant take a look at our leisure and see what we find - see what parts of the city we recognize from before the flood.
