Leaning with Intent to Fall: A Memoir

I don't want to give away too much by a review, but if you're looking for a memoir that will make you laugh, think and possibly inspire you, then get this book. The author has one of the best voices and the book is very easy to get lost in. There are stories here you won't get in any other kind of book from stories about wild dogs to hitchiking to working in a fireworks tent. All of it is told with heart, conviction and sometimes biting sarcasm. Bottom Line: If you're a fan of Kerouac, Bukowski, and/or Hunter S. Thompson, then you'll probably like this book just as much.

Ethan Clark in his book LEANING WITH INTENT TO FALL-- the trumped-up charge that drunks and punkers in New Orleans maintain that they have been arrested for by the hated NOPD-- gives the reader a glimpse of that city that few of us who have not lived on the fringes there, as the author did for about six years, will ever experience or want to, for that matter. It is a world of punk-rockers, strippers, around-the-clock drinkers, mindless jobs (Clark, riding his bike, often worked as a delivery-boy for restaurants), broken-down vans, broken lives. The author also includes a chapter on selling fireworks in Marshfield, Wisconsin, recounts the woes of trying to hitchhike a ride in Kansas and includes a few chapters on Asheville, North Carolina where he eventually winds up in a college, but the heart of the book-- and the best part for me-- is the material he includes on New Orleans. It is a world where Mr. Clark travels with his Chihuahua Pixote going from no-brain-nothing jobs and from one bad sleeping arrangement to another, the House of Bad Starts to his own van, etc. Mr. Clark writes with considerable flair and humor about a gaggle of memorable characters and their adventures or mis-adventures, depending on your point of view. Who of us will quickly forget the young man who, dressed in a pink tank top, cowboy hat and kilt, moons a New Orleans cop with the aid of a lit Roman candle placed in an obvious orifice or the author's own repeated trips into the statute of Robert E. Lee? Or his near catastrophic encounter with the drunken French Quarter tourists? Clark has the spirit of adventure of a Woody Guthrie or Lars Eighner (TRAVELS WITH LISBETH) but the iconoclasm of a Charles Bukowski. When I finished this brief memoir, I wondered how Mr. Clark would regard it 25 years from now and how he got to his view of the American landscape. While I think he is dead right about the war in Iraq, Wal-Marts, and the omnipresent yahoo culture in the United States, I am not sure that eating out of dumpsters, as Clark sometimes does, is the solution to the problem. He says little about his early life except that he ran away from his home in Jackson, Mississippi at the age of sixteen, a home that had a framed quotation of the famed Eudora Welty hanging in the bathroom so his homelife couldn't have been all bad. Clark closes by saying that he has settled down some-- being in school of course-- but that there will always be "moments of perfect, beautiful chaos" in his life. I suspect he is right.

I don't really like New Orleans. And in general, I tend to hate memoirs. So I wasn't expecting much when I cracked open this "memoir" by noted zinester Clark, much of which takes place in New Orleans, where he lived from 1999-2005. Fortunately, it's less a structured memoir than a collection of essays, and Clark pretty much hates all the same aspects of New Orleans that I do, while having the knowledge (and love) of the city to celebrate aspects of the city that I never encountered in my brief visits. Clark appears to be one of those DIY/live somewhat off the "grid"/bike messenger/artist/punk rock/'zine types (although to be fair, trying to apply these kinds of labels is oversimplifying) that have blossomed in American cities for the last twenty or so years. I'm not really of that ilk, although I did spend my formative years in the punk scene, have plenty of friends who've done zines, been in bands, been bike messengers, artists, etc. So, while I'm not "of" Clark's world, I'm certainly familiar with it, and sympathetic to many elements of it. The point is that you don't need to be a part of his world to appreciate Clark's slice-of-life storytelling abilities. For example, the book opens with, "Fireworks," a well-written story about a summer when he a buddy went up to Wisconsin to sell fireworks and how weird that all was. It's a great little piece which exposes the reader to something they probably never thought about "Kansas" is a similarly well-written vignette about trying to hitchhike in the heartland. A number of the pieces are very brief and specific, such as those about Sparks Malt Energy Drink, Clark's one sampling of crack, his return to college, etc. Roughly half the book is specifically about New Orleans, from the phenomenon of being chased by wild dogs while riding your bike ("Wild Dogs"), to sneaking into a public monument ("Up Lee's Ass"), to DJing a party on the roof of an abandoned industrial site ("The High Life"). The core of the book is the 40+ page "Scenes From a Shattered Memory," which is where Clark really digs into living in New Orleans and what it meant to him. To be sure, some readers may be put off by Clark's occasional railing against capitalist society, but for the most part, I wouldn't expect such readers to pick this kind of book in the first place. Like a lot of such criticism, however much I might agree with the principle, it often comes off a little too shrill. Fortunately, Clark is not much of a whiner, and throughout his stories, he recognizes when he is at fault in situations and calls himself on it. He's also good at cutting through the BS that often floats around the scenes he's in, recognizing the silliness of arguments over what's punk behavior and what isn't. Unlike so many in these subcultures, he doesn't come across as self-righteous or holier-than-thou, just as a thoughtful person with some interesting experiences to share. Most of these are not ones I'd particularly care to have partaken in, but I'

One of the reasons we read is for escape, to blanket ourselves in a fantasy world, removing ourselves from our own. Leaning With Intent to Fall is all of this but in the case of Ethan Clark, his real life is the fantastical. He can't escape it, doesn't want to escape it. Not only does he go out of his way to find adventure but it finds him. He's the man you spontaneously run into drunk at 5am and share a Krispy Kreme with and the next day he's curating an amazing underground art show at an illegal warehouse while you're still nursing a hangover. Ethan even seeks out adventure in something as mundane as chasing a mysterious, rabid dog on a bike and captures a whole new perspective of the event with his low brow philosophical aesthetic. Kerouac can be too cliche, a bit too heady. Bukowski not as energetic of a drunk. Sid Vicious too little focus. And Ian Mackaye too fragile. Ethan is like the literary soul baby of Obama, David Choe, and the graffiti writer Saber. Leaning With Intent to Fall is a collection of stories I wish I had the wit to pen and the balls to live. Cheers.