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What
It Is: What It Is,
a book of prose poems by Paul G. Maziar and photos by Cold
War Kids bassist Matt Maust, clearly owes a heavy debt to
zine culture of the 80s and 90s, where xeroxography and sloppy
typography conveyed a sense of urgency. Back then, lack of
design and bad printing seemed to say, "This is important
and I must get this out now."
In those
early days of home computers and cheap photocopying, kids
of every stripe—but especially punks and anarchists—learned
the rudiments of page layout at community centers and in schools,
surreptitiously printing out pages on the library printers,
pasting down cut-up snapshots and having their friends at
the copy shop run off pages on the tail ends of other jobs.
Zinesters held collating parties and, more often than not,
handed out their work for free. There was an excitement to
getting a new zine, seeing how someone handled art—enhancing
the photos with drawings, or just forgoing any hope of getting
good gradient tones and Xeroxing over and over again until
the image decayed into some abstract forms. The core of the
zine was always the words, and amateurish, dark, sincere poetry
often filled zine pages. What It Is: What It Is gets
the amateurishness right, with none of the excitement, and
with a price much heftier than any zine.
One would
hope that in the ten years since the high point of zines,
what with all the available inexpensive software and scanners,
that a publisher could put out a book that looked better that
What It Is. Sadly, the book, which relies on Maust's
photos as much as it does on Maziar's prose poems, should
have had a sharp-eyed production person taking care of the
art reproduction. The photos have almost no whites, the shadows
are too dark, and the overall quality is dull, flat, and dirty.
It's difficult to tell if the images are any good at all.
Also Maust, who designed the book, decided to put all the
text in a bold san serif face with very little leading, making
the pages look even more crowded and dirty. The cheap uncoated
paper has a great deal of show-through, which obviously doesn't
help matters.
Finding
a place to focus can be difficult, but if readers decide to
make the effort they will find typically cryptic youthful
musings on finding enlightenment in the mundane aspects of
life, like in "Untitled 4.0.": "And last night we stayed out
real real late and learned a lot with our eyes peeled—about
staying glued not to the TV—but unglued in certain senses
when it's almost criminal to keep it all together." There
is also a lot of train and plane traveling. A Freudian would
probably have something to say about that.
Maziar's
poems are deceptively deep, but upon parsing the words the
poems tend to appear very shallow. "How I Began to Tell The
Truth" features some brief Hanged Man from the Tarot imagery
but then quickly moves to stealing from virginal shrubbery
("Or was I a thief? Covered in mud with all those broken dead
branches in my hands./ Torn from innocent trees."). "For Mikey
B. Le'French Kanadian" features some word play worthy of eighth
grade: "A god of frustration is nothing more than a devil
waiting in front of a church to prey on us while we pray;
where there are heights there are definite depths." Perhaps
those who understand what exactly any of this means will enjoy
What It Is: What It Is. Better printing and better
design could have transformed this book from youthful follies
to something more captivating by giving readers something
to ground them, but as it stands, readers are left trying
to figure out exactly what It is.
(July
2008)
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