Poetry. WATER & POWER was the original title of the film Chinatown, referring to the utility department that caused so much devastation to the Owens River: a fitting title for Standard Schaefer's second book and its many thematic overlaps with the film. Schaefer draws on documentary materials, journals, biographies, Hollywood myth and the literature of the American West to describe the landscape and characters of that terrain as quite distinct from the legacy of Walden Pond and its corresponding notions of individualism so prevalent in American culture. Drawing from the music of Charles Mingus, Igor Stravinsky, Frank Zappa, and Willie Nelson, he tries to capture the music on which the landscapes depend. WATER & POWER is a portrait of the American West as seen through CIA satellite photographs accompanied by the music of West Coast Jazz and the European avant-garde composers who took refuge there.

Reviews:
Allyssa Wolf in Octopus