From Punk Planet to punk advocate

Anne Elizabeth Moore brings her DIY brand of advocacy to Cambodia and beyond

By Ryne Ziemba
Published: February 20th, 2009 | 11:30am

In 2004, Anne Elizabeth Moore moved back to Chicago (where she had lived previously while attending the School of the Art Institute from 1994-1998) to begin working as a co-editor for Punk Planet magazine with her friend, and the magazine's founder, Dan Sinker. Even though the magazine went under just a few years later, an article that she began on the corporate invasion of DIY (Do-It-Yourself)/punk culture turned into a very talked about book titled, Unmarketable: brandalism, copyfighting, mocketing, and the erosion of integrity. "If that [Punk Planet] had been the only project in my life, I would be pretty bitter now," she said, about the demise of the 13-year magazine. "Then, that situation sort of became the reason for writing Unmarketable. And the story line unfolded as I was writing it, but it was also sort of about the demise of the self-publishing culture."

Moore's special brand of media analysis art took the recent form of the fake New York Times Special Edition project she edited and contributed to with hundreds of volunteers, distributed on November 12, 2008 in Manhattan. It aimed to propose a new agenda for and reinvigorate hope in the political left, although Moore left the project shortly before distribution over disputes with her co-creators.

Moore has also taken an interest in Cambodia. This began with viewing the movie The Killing Fields as a young girl; right at the time she was beginning to become interested in social issues. "I became totally enchanted with this beautiful land that was deeply and permanently changed by a small group of people who really only wanted to increase rice production in the country. The Khmer Rouge, a communist group, ended up killing around 1.7 million people, nearly a quarter of the population, to fulfill this agenda that looked a lot like capitalism."

It was an obsession that blossomed last winter, into a project she worked on with 32 young girls in a dormitory on the south side of Phnom Penh. After she had decided not to co-edit the Best American Comics series anymore and wasn't able to work on Punk Planet since it's demise, she began thinking a lot about the role of small media in culture. "When Punk Planet folded, it appeared to be this issue of accidental censorship," Moore said. "The government didn't necessarily try to push free-market capitalism to this extreme that would push small press publications out of existence, but it happened anyway." It was around this time that, while researching other examples of accidental censorship, she got the idea to do some workshops for women in Cambodia about zines and the importance of DIY publications.

The project, which she documented in a blog titled "Camb(l)o(g)dia", included teaching the young women she lived with about zines and zine culture, helping them make their own zines about Khmer culture, and working on a collaborative book called New Girl Law. The book is a rewrite of a Khmer book from the 19th century describing etiquette for women called Chbap Sirei (Girl Law).

The blog about her experience in Cambodia contains a few hilarious stories of Anne describing punk culture to some of the women she lived in a dormitory with and contextualizing punk within the framework of mainstream culture.

However, there were somber moments during her stay in Cambodia. On Christmas Day, Moore decided to go visit Cheung Ek, the site where some of the genocide by the Khmer Rouge took place. There were clothes scattered throughout the grounds and mashed into the dirt that had belonged to victims of the genocide.

One woman that Moore worked with in Cambodia, Samouy, hadn't heard of Cheung Ek and hardly knew anything about Pol Pot and the Khmer Rouge. This is not necessarily surprising in a country where teachers are strongly discouraged from talking about the legacy of genocide in their country. But it is perhaps a little bizarre, considering that the Khmer Rouge killed the woman’s uncle. Moore writes in her blog about a conversation with the young woman that parallels this erasing of history in the United States. "I explained," the blog states, "we do not discuss the American Indians, that the government killed in very great numbers because they wanted their land, because it makes the government look bad."

This particular entry on the blog - which Moore is currently turning into a book- really underscores the importance of Anne Elizabeth Moore's work. By trying to work with young women in Cambodia and translating something like zines into another culture, she has shown the strong social significance of having unmediated records, especially in an age where our media and therefore our culture become more and more mediated. Without them, even great atrocities can be forgotten.

Having returned to Chicago, Anne Elizabeth Moore has currently begun focusing some of her creative energy towards raising awareness about the dark side of the Olympic games through a project called "the Unlympics." She hopes to bring attention to the potential havoc that a 2016 Olympic bid could wreak on the poor of Chicago's south side through gentrification, displacement, and criminalization of poverty.