Tyler Weaver's Blog, page 43

(Catchup Week) And in the End…

The drizzle heralds the arrival of a stalled front forecast to drop +/- three inches of rain over the next few days but at least K returns this morning: Catchup Week is officially at its end, the hum of my world returning to its normal frequency – The Morkie, thrilled; The Jorkie, indifferent.

Never got around to Scorsese’s ROLLING THUNDER REVUE (will save it for the Fall), or anything, really, once I started spending my evenings exploring the post-apocalyptic baby-bogarting dystopic Boston of FALLOUT 4 (reviews were spot on: Bethesda certainly learned a thing or two about game combat from their FPS releases between NEW VEGAS and the fourth installment; it’s like night and day – thank you, WOLFENSTEIN and DOOM).

The complete Catchup Week list: GEORGE HARRISON: LIVING IN THE MATERIAL WORLD (Netflix); YOU WERE NEVER REALLY HERE (Amazon Prime); STEVE JOBS (HBO) – Kate Winslet, unsurprisingly, steals the show; and COLD WAR (Amazon Prime) – breathless, heartbreaking and beautiful.

(Rain, rain, go away…)

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(In addition to these daily ramblings, I also send out a weekly newsletter on Sunday mornings. You can sign up here, if so inclined.)

On Criticism

I’ve got an iA Writer document full of ideas for these pieces – in case of emergency, break open types – but, without fail, I always delete the shards of pieces yet to be that are little more than criticisms (used here solely to connote expressions of disapproval) – not because I don’t want to hurt anyone’s feelings but because I find it a greater challenge to write about things that I love.

That’s not to say I won’t / don’t / haven’t write / written pieces critical of other works (or the sideshow hucksterism of the world at large): I just prefer, when possible – and let’s be honest, sometimes we just need to say, Look at this fucking bullshit – to include solutions or to make elements of my own work a reaction against the perceived-by-me sins, conscious or otherwise, of the works in question; criticism, then, not as an end in and of itself but as a method by which to explore solutions and new perspectives.

Thus ends my criticism of (or, at least one form of) criticism (which, yes, was among those in-case-of-emergency-break-open type pieces).

(Catchup Week) YOU WERE NEVER REALLY HERE

In hands other than Lynne Ramsay’s, YOU WERE NEVER REALLY HERE would have been just another diversionary conspiracy thriller: instead, she takes the best of TAXI DRIVER and OLDBOY (down to the hammer) and filters it through her own uncompromising vision of its source material to give us a psychological menagerie of brutality and pain that speaks greater volumes in its sparse, relentless ninety minutes than most of our beloved streaming engorgements can say in 13 hours. A testament to the power of brevity.

Also, Johnny Greenwood’s score is superb: Alban Berg meets John Carpenter.

The Exile

I pulled the painting pictured above (apologies for the angle and intrusive heater in the right corner – tried everything to avoid the morning’s glare) from the dusty corner of a highway antique mall – where all true treasures wait – and brought it and its broken frame home.

Created by Rhode Island-based artist Leonard Shalansky (1941-2011), “The Exile” delivers me a centering empathy each time I look up from The Work, from the toil: perhaps it’s the solitary life of writing or the solitary life I feel out here, that feeling of perpetual distance from everything – I’m not sure. But thanks to Shalansky’s work, I’m reminded that I’m never truly alone.

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(In addition to these daily ramblings, I also send out a weekly newsletter every Sunday morning. You can sign up here, if so inclined.)

RubberBandThoughtStopping

After 11 failed attempts to quit smoking, it was a rubber band (along with an e-cig, baby carrots, and that wonderful gum – and the no-smoking policy of the woman who was to become my wife) that made the 11th attempt the one that took.

While the e-cig was packed away long ago (though it did help me get through the process of writing the first book; I should’ve thanked it in the acknowledgements – consider this a better late than never gesture), and I still chew gum though not THE gum and nosh on baby carrots as my manual transmission pancreas allows, the rubber band is still an essential tool – for thoughtstopping:

When my brain goes off on tangents and I start attaching to deleterious thoughts, much as the T-1000 clung to Arnold and Linda’s car, the rubber band acts as a foot smashed to fingers clinging to the precipice: but instead of dropping me into the canyon, awaiting my destiny with the anvil exclamation point, it brings me back to myself, to my breath, to the present, and lets me watch the invasive thought vanish before it takes root and shits all over the rest of my day.

Lesson: Never underestimate the replacement of mindless reflex with mindful choice – even if it takes a rewiring of the subconscious with an elastic snap to get there.

(Catchup Week) GEORGE HARRISON: LIVING IN THE MATERIAL WORLD

With K away on family vacation, my yearly cinematic catchup week has begun: Eight years on, finally watched Scorsese’s transcendent GEORGE HARRISON: LIVING IN THE MATERIAL WORLD and came away with a deeper, more profound impression of my favorite Beatle: the creative genius stifled and then unleashed; the spiritual seeker always seeking, always changing; the giving, quiet, kind, take-no-prisoners-fuckrightoff truthteller more at home in the garden than on the stage and possessed of a light that lingers still – nearly twenty years after he left us – on the faces of those fortunate enough to have been in the gravity of his orbit and those of us he reached by the luminosity of his gifts.

Weep-warning (among many): Tom Petty telling the story of the first thing George said to him after Roy Orbison died: Aren’t you glad it wasn’t you?

Planning to bookend this catchup week with Scorsese music docs: his second Bob Dylan documentary, ROLLING THUNDER REVIEW: A BOB DYLAN STORY, drops 12 June.

Your Sunday Dog Picture for 09 June 2019

This week’s newsletter is on its way; regular ramblings return tomorrow.

Me, Initialized

A relief to write with The Exorcist this morning, its glide and scratch across paper a welcome, calming return – Do your work, Emerson tells us, and you shall reinforce yourself – to being a Writer after a day spent in the cesspit of being an Author, a day of identity-reinforcement and clarification resulting in the purchase of three new domains and the addition of my middle initial to clarify – the W. does not stand for Writer, though that would be awesome and even more clarifying, as would be adding F.F.S. to the end of my name as a balm to my post-middle-initial-urge to add Esq. to said coda – that I am indeed the me, myself, and I that has been hurling words, both self- and traditionally-published, to the digital and print ether for the last decade and a half.

Thinking these Informalities might move to a new home, where I can add initials as needed, but I’m not sure yet. For now, I’ll just stay put, F.F.S.

Sunrise Patrol Jorkie

Noise emanating from this sunrise bucolia brings to mind, for some reason or another, the mystery of the “sound sickness” that struck American diplomats in Cuba a couple of years back… not sure if I’m hearing cats roaming the periphery of the house or geese flying overhead: if cats, the sing-song nature makes a Disney song-and-dance number all but inevitable; if geese, carry on. Either way, the dogs’ ears are perked and the Jorkie is engaged, having found an outlet for her totalitarian ethos – as did Cartman during his stint as hall monitor –  in her morning neighborhood watch routine. Woof.

The Sorta-Vanishing: How I Use Twitter Now

While Twitter has brought me career opportunity and lifelong friendship, it – and my attachments to it – has become – in spite of my best efforts otherwise – a spoon used by the worst excesses of my chronic anxiety and depression to break free of the mental prison I’ve constructed to contain them; I’ve worked too long and too hard to let that containment falter.

But I’m not vanishing completely: though I may (at present) lack the capacity or interest to create content for the bird-platform beyond its current iteration as a stream of these Informalities, that doesn’t mean I won’t interact (eventually) should someone have something to say – nice or otherwise – about one of these pieces: I’m just keeping all of my thought-sharing here, at this little unweeded garden of thought – where I’m most comfortable expressing myself and/or talking to myself.

And so I retreat into this space and its newsletter embassy in the hopes that somehow, someway, it brings me closer to an approximation of peace and artistic satisfaction. See you tomorrow.