We'll Always Have Paris.

A quarterly collaborative DIY Art Zine out of KCMO

Who Am I?

A Gen-X Midlife Stoner, burning a heavy debt to ART. I remember my first introduction to homemade zines. It's 1995, junior year of high school, a random weeknight in Denver, and you and your people sneak out into the city to find the speak-easy coffee shop/book-shop tucked into the dirty industrial part of town. Paris on The Platte. Open every night until 4AM. Always buzzing with musicians and lovers, insomniacs, poets and the downtrodden, all crammed in together under low, warm light. Every Wednesday, the house guitarist would play acoustic Bob Marley, but with a morose twist. You're drinking steamed almond milk, smoking clove cigarettes, hanging out with your best friend's cool older sister and her friends. If you were lucky enough to be there on a rainy evening, surely you've never forgotten the way it made you feel. You grab something to read from one of the many walls of floor-to-ceiling books; musty, yellowed paperbacks, accompanied by the heavy, earthy smell of a rare humid summer rain.

The coffee shop was separated by a narrow opening in a brick wall. You had to sneak through to get to the actual book-shop. Immediately to the left, there were bulletin boards full of sticky notes that people left, with random thoughts, jokes and musings. Directly underneath the bulletin board, there was a counter full of handmade 'zines and flyers, fanned out like little gifts from the underground. Mini poetry 'zines, Political fire, Comics, Drawings, and the random, hand-written love letters. Oohhh the love letters... to nobody and everybody. I took every single one home that night, and ever since. They hit me somewhere deep; the intimacy of holding someone's handmade product made you feel like you were indulging in a stranger's melancholy; secluded thoughts they can only share under the convenient anonymity of a 'zine. There were no limitations. You share your secrets, and they share theirs. They made ME want to write, to paint, to pour my heart out. Most of those 'zines are still with me; one of my most sacred core memories of the 1990's.

That's what this is. That's why I do it. To build a community-assembled work of art! To hand something real to the next generation and urge them: keep print alive. The cold, dispassionate scroll of the online world can't touch it. You can't hold an algorithm. But you can keep print in your hands. You can keep it safe.