Tyler Weaver's Blog, page 47

Sifting

Struggling to come up with something to write about this morning but I suppose that’s the point, to write about – and to publish – something even when I’ve got nothing to write about, when my stores are barren and my shelves are stripped even of the clearance tags and the remnants of my Flatiron Building Lego, after plummeting to the concrete floor in its best impression of Humpty Dumpty, line the inside of my filing cabinet because I don’t have the brainpower to decipher the language of rubble and reassemble or, clearly, to say anything interesting this morning. To work, if not to reassembly.

Red Dead Revamp

This grand experiment started out of a desire to write about RED DEAD REDEMPTION 2 and avoid the banality of survey course reviews by offering depth and small pieces about individual aspects of that flawed masterpiece… but since I’ve already beaten the game, those banality-avoidance-hopefully pieces will have to wait until I begin a replay for slowness and for the aforementioned depth.

In the meantime:

RED DEAD 2 is the first game I’ve played that my wife preferred to watch instead of our usual routine of catching up on any number of bingeable Amazon / Netflix / HBO offerings we’re way behind on (RDR2 is, perhaps, one of the main reasons we’re now so woefully behind and ARROW Season Six really does suck but my god THE AMERICANS is brilliant); once we reached the end of the game, she asked me when I was going to play the first game again so that she could see what happened to John.

Since I avoid online play like the plague, the New Austin portion of the post-narrative RDR2 map remains woefully barren, but is, nevertheless demanding of exploration if for no other reason than to satisfy my nostalgia for the glory of gaming days past, a gunslinging trip down memory lane back into that first experience of RDR1. Two birds, one stone, then: Rockstar could / should / must remaster and re-release RDR not as an individual game but as an update to RDR2, using the RDR2 map and all the glories – and callbacks, perhaps to forgotten characters? – that come with it. (Wouldn’t it be nice?)

I harbor no illusions that a remaster would fix the script issues that plagued the first game – especially in Marston’s passive, fence-jumping, ham-fisted RED HARVEST / YOJIMBO / FISTFUL OF DOLLARS homage-adventure south of the border – but it would still make for a remarkable experience, transforming two modern Western epics into one gargantuan feast.

On Pieces Missing

Yesterday’s discussion with myself in public regarding the rhythm of the word, combined with 36 wonderful minutes of SPRINGSTEEN ON BROADWAY (must make time to watch the rest) has inculcated a notion that, without playing music, a piece of me is missing – and has been for a very, very long time.

Not to say that I have any interest in returning to performing or composing (though I do miss the camaraderie of being a drumstick-wielding cog in a musical organism), but just to keep it as part of myself, to return to a regular piano or guitar or drumset practice with dog-chewed drumsticks and/or a quarter for a pick.

I know – as much as one can know anything in a creative field – that my place, that my voice, is with the written word, but perhaps it’s time to dedicate a small corner of the living room of myself – an end table, perhaps – back to the universal language?

Rhythm, Rhythm, Rhythm

As a long-lapsed percussionist and classically-trained composer, rhythm – and its symbolic, written, representation – is everything to me: I hear it in my footsteps, in the tires of traffic passing over uneven roads, the clicking of the dog-childrens’ toenails against linoleum — and, in this iteration of my life, I hear it and see it in the way that words flow or fragment across the page, the screen.

The rhythm currently dominant in The Work at hand is that of my head hitting the wooden sheen of KaijuDesk as I search for the right punctuation to symbolize the rhythmic content of The Passage at hand; I am Goldilocks, and punctuation my (poisoned) porridge.

I’ve been turning over and again to this passage in Ursula K. Le Guin’s STEERING THE CRAFT (an essential in any writer’s library):

“… punctuation tells the reader how to hear your writing. That’s what it’s for. Commas and periods bring out the grammatical structure of a sentence; they make it clear to the understanding, and the emotions, by showing what it sounds like – where the breaks come, where to pause.

If you read music, you know that rests are signs for silence. Punctuation marks serve very much the same purpose.”

– Ursula K. Le Guin, STEERING THE CRAFT, pp.11-12

And so it is – though now that I’ve typed out Le Guin’s wisdom, something is starting to, might be, click(ing). Excuse me.

An Incomplete Listing of Useless Thought Loops

These tend to emerge when The Work isn’t going well and my compromised brain decides to initiate shutdown protocols by focusing on unsolvable, unending loops of utter futility, most likely because I let myself believe them to be solvable and transformative; the reality is that they are anything but. Block the following upon sighting of their invasive rumblings:

Which social network to use… (It doesn’t matter; use whichever you happen to enjoy, for some reason or another – if you enjoy any of them. The right tool for the right job – just don’t be the tool.)



Which RSS feeds to cut and how to optimize online reading time… (There’s no such thing as optimal online reading time.)



What to post and when (It doesn’t matter; whatever and whenever the hell you feel like.)



Which writing implement to use (Whatever feels right at the time – though know that you will invariably return to mechanical pencil, smearing be damned.)



Whether to read the news while eating breakfast / lunch / etc… (No. One thing at a time: when you eat, eat; when you write, write…)

Worth closing with the concluding lines of Alain de Botton’s THE NEWS: A USER’S MANUAL…

“A flourishing life requires a capacity to recognize the times when the news no longer has anything original or important to teach us; periods when we should refuse imaginative connection with strangers, when we must leave the business of governing, triumphing, failing, creating or killing to others, in the knowledge that we have our own objectives to honour in the brief time still allotted to us.”

Alain de Botton, THE NEWS: A USER’S MANUAL, p.255.

Notes on Forcing Myself to Fall Asleep

Five nigh-illegible sticky notes hang from the monitor but the one to which I keep returning tells me to stop forcing myself to fall asleep.

When I first went to a therapist, our conversation inevitably turned towards matters creative, and, when I described the frustration of it all, of the words that just weren’t coming and the shit quality of the words that did, he looked up and said, “That sounds like you’re forcing yourself to fall asleep.”

Deny your mind its clenched eyes and shoulds and musts and pressures, its tossings and turnings, its cursings hurled at the ceiling of yourself– just stop. Show up, do your thing, let it come. It will, eventually – if you get out of your own way.

(A second sticky tells me to trust the process – whatever it is today. I think this is an adaptation of a line of Josh Lyman’s in THE WEST WING, “This is how it works today.”)

Temporal Distortion, Continued…

…the first block of the day, this block, feeling as though it’s the last block of the day and the second block of the day as though it’s the first… everything in between, the pieces assembled from the life in the daylight hours, finally processed in that first bit, when it’s still dark, before breakfast – though now daylight’s coming much sooner – to clear space for the head-on confrontation between myself and the blank page in the second. And so it goes.

Notes on the Broccolification of Bonnie the Bonsai

Though it is Wednesday I will not be convinced that it is not Thursday; some form of temporal distortion going on here. Or: exhaustion.

(Related):

While I’m anything but a gardener, I discovered an unexpected affinity for the practice of bonsai caretaking when a family friend, a gardener in twilight, gave me his bonsai. Thus, Bonnie the Bonsai, baby’s first bonsai, became part of my life.

But.

After my return to life from human-caretaking duties: the discovery of browning leaves upon Bonnie the Bonsai owing to my dereliction of routine and constancy during the caretaking time (though I did come home daily, she couldn’t come with me to the house of the caretake-ee as the cat of the caretake-ee would have eaten her… in retrospect, she probably would’ve been better off taking her chances with the cat) and the back and forth weather that is Spring/Winter in Ohio; clearly, Bonnie and I are both susceptible to the ravages wrought by the disruption of routine.

And so:

A recapturing of Bonnie’s caretaking routine, watering, etc, etc, but still the browning metastasis spread to the point that only a quarter of her leaves remained green – and those were new growths. So whatever I was doing was encouraging new life, but the old and dessicated was denying the new and green its chance for growth.

This week, in my best impression of a surgeon circa 1890: hack, slash, boom, the result the broccolification of a tree… so that maybe the green might flourish, so that maybe the broccoli might rise, maybe.

Maybe.

And so here we are; there might be an ending to this but I can’t come up with one because I’m still convinced that it’s Thursday. Need sleep.

Waiting: Physical Therapy

(Accompanying): A brief sojurn to box store hell to locate a replacement wiper blade before returning, again and again and again, to the shovel on the wall, shiny chrome on tan on tan on tan on tan on tan, to the susurrus of walkers across tan carpet, whispered and shouted sharings of injuries and replaced joints, HGTV on the big screen across the way, wheelchairs parked at the ready to make a quick escape from these goddamned uncomfortable seats but at least I’ve got LOVE IN THE TIME OF CHOLERA and am as in love with García Márquez’s words as Florentino Ariza is with Fermina Daza, the waiting, the waiting…

Revisited: THE DEPARTED

While I still believe that Scorsese’s long-deserved Oscar should have been for any other of the gifts he’s bestowed upon us for the last 50 years and that the original, INFERNAL AFFAIRS, is better, I can say that, having revisited THE DEPARTED this weekend for the first time in almost a decade, it nonetheless remains an enjoyable pulp crime / dark (darkdarkdarkdark) comedy / fever dream love letter to the great crime films (including his own) – in a way, Scorsese channeling Tarantino – with the ending in particular being the closest we’ll get to a Scorsese slapstick comedy, his version of the Keystone Kops (capped off with a THIRD MAN homage following the funeral).

The first in a modern homage trilogy for Scorsese (though everything he does wears his love of each genre he tackles on its sleeve)? THE DEPARTED as fever-dream-delirium-homage to pulp crime fiction / crime films; SHUTTER ISLAND a hallucinatory love letter to Hitchcock and B-thrillers (much in the vein of 1991’s CAPE FEAR and not as well-executed, though I do want to revisit both films); and HUGO a joyous song sung to cinematic history and the magic of early moviemaking?

It’s quite possible that I liked it, THE DEPARTED, far more this time around than the first time I saw it. Maybe I just missed Boston. Or needed the delirium.