Tyler Weaver's Blog, page 45
May 26, 2019
Your Sunday Dog Picture for 26 May 2019
Sundays are now a day off from posting here as I’ve leapt off the deep end and taken my newsletter weekly, releasing every Sunday at +/- 0700; you can sign up here. In the meantime, and to keep the posting chain unbroken, enjoy this dog picture; regular ramblings return tomorrow. – TW
May 25, 2019
Black Leopard, Red Wolf (248/620)
An ingenious hybrid of Dashiell Hammett, J.R.R. Tolkien, and African folklore and myth propelled forward by James’s uncanny gift of narrative (poly)rhythm, BLACK LEOPARD is a compulsive and compelling read.
But the same hybrid which makes BLACK LEOPARD so unique also makes it far more demanding than I had expected – especially the Tolkien influence: I’ve never had an easy go of losing myself in the innumerable characters and locations of his fantasy (or its modern heir, George R.R. Martin’s GAME OF THRONES, which I find similarly impenetrable) worlds –, a difficulty manifest here: I’m having a far more difficult time falling in love or in rapture with BLACK LEOPARD than I had hoped, especially given the lasting and undying love with which I met and hold dear his previous work, A BRIEF HISTORY OF SEVEN KILLINGS.
But the challenge that so confounds me – and the brilliance of James’s writing, both here and in previous work – is what keeps me going: the treasures contained in the vision of BLACK LEOPARD are, when unearthed, more than worth the head-scratching and character-guide-revisiting it requires of my fantasy-illiterate brain.
May 24, 2019
Open World Unpredictable
Most of the way through my first FAR CRY experience, FAR CRY 5, and though not in the same league as a Rockstar open world game and suffering from a dearth of character and humanity beyond cookie-cutter arche/stereotypes – I’m still enjoying it: Hope County is beautiful to behold and a joy to explore – it’s a place you want to save; the missions are challenging – an area in which FAR CRY 5 actually exceeds Rockstar: no matter how rich and well-drawn the missions in RED DEAD REDEMPTION 2, they were never particularly challenging; and any game with a compatriot cougar named Peaches or a bear named Cheeseburger deserves our plaudits.
But as beautiful as Hope County is it’s nearly doomed by the predictable: the “resistance” meter and rote kidnapping / escape missions at defined progress points kill the game’s momentum – despite being designed to move the story forward – and ruin the essential component of any open world game: in order for a game to be truly open world, it must be, like life, an approximation of the unpredictable.
While it’s fine – and, indeed, essential – that all games, regardless of milieux, have defined points of progress, FAR CRY 5’s ultimate sin is that its points of progress are the same mission only with escalating zealotry and cruelty in the cutscenes – and that mission is, each time it comes on screen, a bore. Rote, predictable, and coming at predetermined points in the game, their existence almost defeats entire purpose of my character: if attempting to wrest Hope County back from the Peggi menace means that I have to endure one more fucking kidnapping mission, then, sorry, Hope County, you’re on your own; I’ll just go back to roaming the woods with Peaches the Cougar and punching and reviving Hurk the state senator each time he spews some right-wing malarkey (which is every time he opens his mouth).
The kidnap missions would have been almost bearable should they come at random, unexpected – unpredictable – points in the game, but, by making those missions inextricable from your progress, FAR CRY 5 manages to render what should have been a joyfully insane experience into one that’s still enjoyable (and insane), but skirting the line of forgettable.
May 23, 2019
O+17
“And so it is…,” surprising still and always: that pluck/strum/aching beauty of strings and brushed snares and Lisa Hannigan intersecting with Rice’s melodic tenor growl of pain and anguish, his songwriting never settling for the easy way, the obvious way, each song pushing the limits of form in a melding of personal vision and personal heritage to create a work at once universal and intimate, immediate and enduring, the mark of an artist’s artist now gone silent again leaving one wondering, waiting, for the smallest whisper of what’s next.
May 22, 2019
So Now I Know What It Feels Like to Be Punched Inside the Mouth
Golf course, acrylic on canvas, across from me. Chair in descent, the whir of motors, the gleam of blinding light. The face looking over me, transformed into a masked, hook-and-mirror-bearing assailant, Open wide.
The scraping and the swallowing of concrete chunks, the occasional intermezzo to let the blood in my head return to normal dispersal throughout, a sip of water, press the silver button for more. Spitting blood, per normal. Upside down, hook, mirror, light, the occasional pointer: To get the bit at the botton of your teeth and prevent buildup, hold your toothbrush vertically. Good tip, almost as good as floss-rinse-brush / Moving on, to the flossing, the vigor, the head lift, the snap and the new sensation of her knuckles making contact with the left side of the inside of my teeth and then the right, full-flossing-force, ohmygodimsorry, ping-pong-punch-mouth. Try again. The vigor, the head lift… snap. The inside-mouth ping-pong-punch, again.
But this time, a bit of floss stuck. She tried with floss, then I had my turn. Overheard, from another of the open rooms, after a drill, while she was filling out a form and I was fiddling inside my mouth (needle-nose pliers optional): You have to wait to eat until your tongue starts to tingle: don’t eat before that, otherwise you might bite down on your tongue.
Finally, extrication, more apologies, obvious mortification. The 12-year-old dentist emerged, probably the same one who just educated the previous patient in methods for the avoidance of biting off one’s tongue, told me everything looked fine but came up with new problems that weren’t bothering me until he told me about them but didn’t bring up anything stuck in my back 19 so I assume the punch-remnant is out of there though even now, writing this, my jaw still fucking hurts.
Second round in the ring scheduled for November.
May 21, 2019
Notes from a Fountain Pen Honeymoon
After a few hours of back and forth between a shiny new Pilot Metropolitan and my beloved Pentel Kerry 0.7mm mechanical pencil on the first day, I’m now – thanks to its incredible fluidity and balance, though only when the cap is posted to it – both fully in the fountain pen corner and (fairly) certain that this isn’t merely the first stages of new doe-eyed love but the flowering of a fully committed relationship.
I’d like to say that I’ve no idea why I’ve never tried one before but I know exactly why: as an inveterate southpaw, I live(d) in mortal fear – thanks to more than one bad experience in K-12 art classes and the dictatorship of enforced caligraphy – of the toll taken on paper by the coupling of slow-drying ink and the side of my hand. Fortunately, the pairing of a Metropolitan with Namiki ink cartridges (haven’t tried the converter / bottled ink yet as I’m – for now at least, though the green conscience in me winces a bit at discarded plastic tubes – sold on the cartridge) is a quick-drying one and thus far, I’ve had no incidents involving wayward ink globules, leaking, or rorschaching ink butterflies across an unsuspecting ivory page.
As for my handwriting, well, it’s still shit, but at least I want to improve (SLOW DOWN) and the pen only magnifies that desire.
May 20, 2019
Going Home
Every so often, over the course of the last 20+/- years, I would catch myself saying, either out loud or under my breath, that “I’m ready to go home.” Even when I was at the “home” of the moment – be it the house I grew up in, the assortment of fleeting apartments I called “home” during my time in Boston, or the house in which I currently make my home with my wife and our dog-children, every so often, “I’m ready to go home.” I never knew where that was – until yesterday.
We were on our way to one of those exercises in estival transition and pulled pork discomfort known as the graduation party (I made it a point to not show up at mine), a graduation party at the lake and, as I continued on – instead of making that right turn, as I have for the last 20 years – memories flooded back with each winding turn, with each house that was there when I was a kid, with each patch of grass that once was a rest area now vanquished for a golf course, with each of the copious storage facilities along the twists and the turns: it was the road back to where my grandparents used to live, back to the house at the lake where the majority of my good memories of childhood took place; it was the road back to the home I haven’t seen in more than two decades and the home that I’ll never see again.
Once the party was over, we returned to the car and unwound the road home in reverse, back to life or the semblance thereof, the memories, the good memories themselves unwinding yet replaying, over and again, leaving a seared trace of themselves and the sensation that – though I’m content in my current life and possessed of the full recognition and acceptance of the old adage that you can never go home again – those good memories now serve only to taunt and mock.
(I’m ready to go home.)
May 19, 2019
Of Flutophones and Broken Records
A dog snores on the couch and, in a few hours, the off-key piercings from the neighborhood flutophone will sound from somewhere in the ‘burg and the AC will come to order but until then, here I am, typing into the ether because it’s what the discipline requires.
Another discipline: my meditation practice. Been doing it for almost 20 years, morning and evening, but found, for the first time last week, that moving to less time – from 30 minutes twice a day to 15 twice a day – was more beneficial: I feel less hurried, less harried throughout the day; I look forward to each session, something that hasn’t been the case for longer than I care to recall; and the broken records that have been thorn in the side of my brain for far too long seem to have stopped playing – though perhaps that’s a clearing of the deck for new records to sound. Maybe a flutophone cover band.
I’m not advocating that everyone should meditate less, rather that one should – must – find the optimal amount for themselves within the confines of the present; in my case, the tool of two 30 minute sessions was no longer effective – and possibly becoming detrimental, emphasis on mental – whereas 15 appears, for now, to be the right tool for the job at hand.*
*Note: as ever, subject to change.
May 18, 2019
The Report (44/448): Notes on Surreality
Yes, I’m reading it. The whole thing. Carving out a bit of time every evening to make my way through it, to understand it.
44 pages in, so far mostly dealing with summaries and the details of both the Internet Research Agency’s (IRA) and Russian government’s “active measures” to interfere with the election, I can report my understanding thusly: though, in hewing strictly and specfically to their formational mandate, “the investigation did not establish that members of the Trump Campaign conspired or coordinated with the Russian government in its election interference activities,” nor did they find any signs of “collusion” since there is no such thing – “collusion is not a specific offense or theory of liability found in the United States Code, nor is it a term of art in federal criminal law” – there was, nevertheless, some weird, shady shit going down (also not a “term of art in federal criminal law”), shady shit that the Campaign clearly felt would benefit them politically and electorally, two instances of which – surely, just the tip of the malignant iceberg awaiting me in the 404 pages that lie ahead – cross the rubicon into the land of the terrifying, the absurd, and the surreal.
Page 19:
“In May 2016, IRA employees, claiming to be U.S. social activists and administrators of Facebook groups, recruited U.S. persons to hold signs (including one in front of The White House) that read “Happy 55th Birthday Dear Boss,” as an homage to [“wealthy Russian businessman”] Prigozhin (whose 55th birthday was on June 1, 2016).”
And, page 32:
“The IRA also recruited moderators of conservative social media groups to promote IRA-generated content, as well as recruited individuals to perform politcal acts (such as walking around New York City dressed up as Santa Claus with a Trump mask.)”
That these “active measures” succeeded beyond their instigators’ wildest dreams in sowing discord and upending the U.S. political system owes much – if not all – of that success to the unique blend of American media illiteracy running ripshod across the country and manifesting itself in a culture of celebrity, resentment, and commoditized vitriol – the main lesson, then, 44 pages in: Media literacy is a national security imperative and MUST be treated as such. Period.
Recommended further reading: LIKEWAR, by P.W. Singer and Emerson T. Brooking.
404 pages to go…
P.S.: I found this passage, from page 13, to be a particularly remarkable statement of the investigative rigor of the Special Counsel’s office:
“During its investigation, the Office issued more than 2,800 subpoenas under the auspices of a grand jury sitting in the District of Columbia; executed nearly 500 search-and-seizure warrants; obtained more than 230 orders for communications records…; obtained almost 50 orders authorizing use of pen registers; made 13 requests to foreign governments pursuant to Mutual Legal Assistance Treaties; and interviewed approximately 500 witnesses, including almost 80 before a grand jury.”
May 17, 2019
currently / 17May2019
