By snoadmin
There are plenty of authors who attempt revealing, personal narratives. The most interesting narratives always seem to come from writers, especially if they’re not pretending to be someone else and hold a true, authentic voice behind the gloss and ink.
“What It Is: What It Is,” is the latest book to emerge from this special genre.
This book should be particularly interesting to locals considering that the author is no foreigner to Long Beach. Demonstrating his fondness for the area, Paul G. Maziar even writes from a local coffee house.
The book itself was edited by bibliophile extraordinaire Shea M. Gauer, the co-owner of Long Beach’s {Open} Bookstore.
Adding to the excitement, Maziar collaborated with a long-time friend and graphic artist Matt Maust, who also happens to be the diminutive bassist of the Cold War Kids band. In this narrative, Maust extends his tireless art to complement Maziar’s writing.
The bruised up, black and white photos, drawings, and graphics by Maust help define the experimental dimension that exudes from all aspects of this book. If you’re absorbed in the book, studying the words and images, you’ll most likely find yourself obsessing over Maziar’s MySpace recordings, which are embellished with the cutesy background tunes by the electronica band, Goddamn Electric Bill.
In many ways, “What It Is: What It Is” has a huge pulse without even touching it. But at the heart of it, especially with Maziar’s writing, the feeling is like being taken to the edge of the world, to a place where you’re afraid to look over the wall because there may not be anything on the other side.
In a fevered, hopscotch-like fashion, Maziar cracks open the randomness of how life happens for him, as he tours the country, making jarring stops from Brooklyn (his current home base) to Hollywood, and places in between.
What seem like a thousand surveys and poetic infatuations of the things he encounters along the way, Maziar goes on with his incurably sweet prose expression.
It’s somewhat infectious, maybe an eye-opener or even scary. But one thing is certain: You won’t want to stop reading.
Maziar revels in a buzzing, heightened state of self-awareness, and it’s something that glides so seamless in his playful language. This kind of thing is something he can only define by a saying he borrows from a friend: “Discovery through experimentation, not premeditation.”
The writing is fluid, tense, free-floating, painful, vivid and obsessive, all while endlessly circling Maziar’s throbbing narrative structures.
Lately, with Maziar’s homecoming to Long Beach this past weekend (he celebrated the expansion of “What It Is: What It Is” distribution), he was able to articulate a special way of viewing the city, finally.
“My relationship with Long Beach has been on an elevator,” the 27-year-old writer says. “The place stirs my mind and all my senses, and so far has been the place where I’ve been the most productive as a writer.”
Maziar lived in Long Beach for three years, left for Hollywood and somehow ended up in New York. Coming back, he wonders why he ever left.
Of his Saturday weekend reading, Maziar calls it “veritable make-up sex.”
