Paul Maziar
Fleeting Galleries Made Permanent
Apr 19, 2009
Words by Sean Moeller
Illustration by Johnnie Cluney
Sound engineering by Mike Gentry
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Welcome to Daytrotter
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Lost In Beginnings
original version appears on unreleased reading from What It Is: What It Is
After having spent a few months in Portland, Oregon to work on my second book and tour with the band Drew Grow and The Pastors' Wives (myspace.com/drewgrow ), I came back to New York to tour with Chase Pagan. He and I have done many shows together in New York, and this was our first tour together. We thought the music and the words, and the way the words came out, fit pretty well together. All of the readings I did there at Daytrotter are from my first book 'WHAT IT IS: WHAT IT IS', which I collaborated on with the very talented designer Matt Maust. Of all the things I read for the Daytrotter session, "Lost in Beginnings" is my favorite. It's about an eccentric new friend, and the night we met. This beautiful girl at a party he hosted looked exactly like Molly Ringwald. For various reasons, that night caused me to see every succeeding night as the best night of my life. I have a new book coming out this year, called 'The Exploding Pen'. It will be a collection of short prose, with the sketches of a fantastic painter/sketch artist named Mark Penxa (markpenxa.com ). I also have a full-length vinyl release coming out, of readings from 'WHAT IT IS: WHAT IT IS', on The Vinyl Summer Recordings.
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NYC Love You Long Time
original version appears on unreleased reading from What It Is: What It Is
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No Visions
original version appears on unreleased reading from What It Is: What It Is
The words that Paul Maziar writes are for real consumption, for people to eat like ripe strawberries and explosive oranges that shoot bullets of juice out like sniper fire, splattering onlookers or bystanders, depending on what the surrounding parties are up to. The words are the best burger that you've ever had and they're like a dessert that within the first half-bite a person just closes their eyes and rolls the mouthful around to get all of their taste buds a flavor as the vocal cord lets out a satisfied groan. The thing about even the best of food is that no matter how memorable it is, the taste fades rather quickly, only to be unleashed again when recounted or elicited, recounted again in another meal. They can hold their place as memory, but they cannot be what they were when they hit the tongue. This goes for all that hits the eyes and the ears as well, not just that which was encountered in a dirty diner or freshly off a tree or yanked off the vine. As magnificent as the senses are, they lose their shape in recollection only to be reenergized when they're perked again some time later and so begins the flood. The way that Maziar approaches his chronicling and the prose of it in his debut book What It Is: What It Is, a collaborative effort with the photography of Cold War Kids bassist Matt Maust - his former roommate in Long Beach, is with an astute take on the same principle, where he lets the moment consume him totally, smacking him down with the kind of memorable overload that you can only feel if you want to, if you're receptive to being smacked down. The words are his very impressive attempt at making his memories - those tastes and people, the sights and sounds - that couldn't have lasted for long, but they were important and parts of simplistic, everyday brilliance. It's not a passive expression that Maziar takes, but one that makes his nostalgia as life-like as it could ever be - hitting on the small details that will taste like the strawberry seeds rubbing onto the tip of the tongue, the rolling of the red juice into tiny streams on each side of the squirming muscle and the slight crunch of those seeds into the crevices of the slowly grinding teeth. It's in that rush of sensations and with that rush that he cooperates with, letting it blindly make his pen or hands talk, whichever he uses when he sits to do that. He gives you the impression that his prose doesn't start or end in its cycle, but it just keeps looping through his mind, imprinting as it all happens, giving it an unmistakable property of immediacy - the immediacy that lasts.
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