Tyler Weaver's Blog, page 49

Unsolicited Predictions on The Report

At 0656 the morning of…

One, while we can already be certain of Barr’s bias towards preconceived notions of criminality based on executive station, there will be no doubt that he works in service not to a country but in subservience to a person (who appointed him) if he delivers his 0930 spin session while standing next to a table teeming with paper. (However, barring (pun slightly not intended) paragraphs upon paragraphs of “complete and total exoneration,” the Malignancy will find something about which to rage against his appointee.)

(Update 0955: he didn’t need the teeming stack of paper.)

Two, The Report – or what little isn’t redacted – will change little, if anything, about the current state of affairs; opinion and spin will rule the day over the rule of law and a bias towards sanity; the entrenched will remain entrenched, Mueller will be a hero, Mueller will be a villain, and the reality show clusterfuck narrative of cruelty and fear will snowball on.

Three, part of that spin will be the continued argument that the campaign was too green and filled with morons to coordinate with anyone. Stupidity will be the primary defense against any and all transgressions and, given the pedigree of the players, this is not an argument without merit. The question remains, however, of how provably willful and/or designed that particular case of ignorance and stupidity was and continues to be.

Four, the only way the Malignancy leaves office before he can transform the third decade of this century into the same oxygen-deprived cesspit that he has this one remains via electoral wipeout, a complete and total repudiation, and, no matter what The Report reveals (or is spun to reveal or not to reveal), it is incumbent upon us, just as it has been since that awful night in November, to save ourselves. And the first way to do that is by never assuming that we will win – because, like it or not, there’s a hefty chance that he will be reelected.

Of course, there’s an equally hefty chance that I’m wrong on every single one of these, in which case, I’ll happily ignore myself.

Speaking of Tom Petty…

I often think of a story told by Tom Petty during his VH1 Storytellers performance, a story of the writing of “Swingin’” — among the best songs from what I consider his best album, 1999’s vastly underrated ECHO — and how he told the Heartbreakers that he’d written a better song while they were recording that first song and that they could get rid of that first song and go with the new song, that better song, that he’d just written while they were recording that first song. 

Not sure why this came to mind, other than it happened through on the path towards figuring out what to write about this morning… and made me throw out what I’d written previously, something on how social media is boring me again, yadda yadda yadda, and how I’m thinking that I might stick with these pieces as my main social existence because, as Tom Petty once said, “I just don’t want to do anything that I can’t feel like I’m doing honestly…” 

(Oh. Maybe that’s why.) 

Damn, I miss him. 

Listening: Glen Hansard, THIS WILD WILLING – a seismic shift in style that WORKS (Hansard remains one of the best live acts I’ve seen).

Playing: FAR CRY 5 (random outbursts from my AI squad members always come at inopportune times. Hilarity ensues.) 

Welcome Home, Morning Brain

Second day returned to the whole of my sacred mornings, four hours (with a break only for diabetically-mandated breakfast, with this grotesque written in the first half of those hours) spent slipping back into the comforting discomfort of my headspace, learning again to (attempt to) ignore the flow of time and the news of the day and the obligations of life surrounding to enter the day’s iteration of the flow creative; back to understanding, fully, the essential truth of these complete mornings: without them I was barely running on fumes but with them I regain the capacity – not a guarantee of, but the capacity – to refill my self-respect tankard and endure the remainder of the day with an approximation of patience and sanity. As Leonard Cohen said of writing:

“[Writing] begins with an appetite to discover my self-respect. To redeem the day. So the day does not go down in debt…”

Listening: Sigur Rós, VARIATIONS ON DARKNESS. (Also grand to have my music back; twenty-dollar wi-fi extender for the win.)

Of These Fortuitous Grotesques

During an aimless peramublation through the new officespace to the tune of T Bone Burnett’s latest, THE INVISIBLE LIGHT: ACOUSTIC SPACE (love it), I grabbed THE COMPLETE ESSAYS of Michel de Montaigne and opened to a random page. This is what he had to say:  

“I was watching an artist on my staff working on a painting when I felt a desire to emulate him. The finest place in the middle of a wall he selects for a picture to be executed to the best of his ability; then he fills up the empty spaces all round it with grotesques, which are fantastical paintings whose attractiveness consists merely in variety and novelty. And in truth, what are these Essays if not monstrosities and *grotesques* botched together from a variety of limbs having no defined shape, with an order sequence and proportion which are purely fortuitous?” 

Michel de Montaigne, “On Affectionate Relationships

Without a doubt the finest description of these inconsequential daily exorcisms of thought, these shapeless and disordered monstrosities “botched together” by my own uncoordinated whim to fill up the empty space around The Work – executed to (whatever passes for) the best of my ability – at hand, an essential counterpoint to my indulgence of wanton perfectionism.

Reading: SING, UNBURIED, SING, by Jesmyn Ward.

Is Tom Cruise Still on the Subway?

Rewatched COLLATERAL (still a great film, 15 years on – and yes, I still love the oft-maligned third act: it’s the closest we’ll ever get to a Michael Mann-directed monster movie… speaking of which, we need a new Michael Mann crime film; I refuse to believe that the disappointing PUBLIC ENEMIES (the trailer, with Otis Taylor’s “Ten Million Slaves,” remains the best part) is his final statement on the genre) last night and I have two questions: does Jada Pinkett get Jamie Foxx out of the shitload of trouble he’s in after not only assaulting the cop post-taxi flip but also from Ramón’s trunk peek? Also: how long does Tom Cruise stay on the subway – and who finds him?

P.S. The sooner the Criterion Channel makes an Amazon channel or XBoxOne app, the sooner they can have my money; I long to have some intelligence and class in my streaming life.

P.P.S. Yes, that IS a LEGO Christmas train as the featured image. It’s early and I’m fucking hungry.

Breath / Work

In meditation, in running, I stay with the breath and I return to the breath when my mind wanders or my interest wanes or the asshole in my head, to borrow a phrase from a dear friend, runs rampant. The question this morning: if the breath is the shortest assigment in life, then what is it in The Work?

I wish I had an answer but I’m certain that the answer is different for each person and that there is no single cure; perhaps it changes daily.

What is the breath indeed.

On HANNA

A captivating genre blend, BOURNE meets Elena Ferrante, anchored by three great performances by leads Creed-Miles, Kinnaman, and Enos, but nearly felled by that chronic condition of the binge-able, the muddled middle, when the components – thriller, action, bildungsroman –  split into a series of segmented “and thens” which, while compelling in their own right (the Sophie story esp.), never found their component rhythm and ground the narrative to a nigh-lull.

Note: while I recognize that this disjointed rhythm was intentional and representative of Hanna and Eric’s state of mind, it could have been more fluid: ideally, the disjointing would have been only in the characters and in their reactions to events around them – not in the writing and pace itself.  

Fortunately, like Hanna and Eric, the blend found its way back to itself in time for a blistering conclusion that delivered more than enough tears and promise to make me crave the just-announced second season. Recommended.

On the Previous Lives of Desks

Still in love after nearly a full week of work behind KaijuDesk though I find my thoughts flicking to haphazard ruminations about KD’s previous life, about how many dreams took their first steps towards reality with a signature from across its wooden expanse and about how many more were destroyed… ironic yet fitting, perhaps, given my own experience both former and latter, that I’m using this one-time banker’s desk to give an approximation of life to this mad calling, this dream, of mine.

On Time

Thinking about something I’m telling myself that Fay Wray said of Erich von Stroheim (I cannot, for the life of me, remember the source of it nor am I now, thanks to that mental slippage, certain that she said it at all though I will continue to credit the corporeal her regardless and update this posting should the memory return): 

“Time was his, he owned it…He used it as it should be used by an artist: He ignored it.” 

Each day, my own efforts at owning and igoring time, at unraveling its tendrils and the self-perpetuated expectations (of others, of myself) I ascribe to it: be here, do this then, do this now; one eye always on the clock or a clock, have to be somewhere at such and such a time, have to do this… constantly trying to live not only Wray’s alleged words about Erich von Stroheim (my inability to remember where this comes from is of ceaseless annoyance to me) but Shunryu Suzuki’s in ZEN MIND, BEGINNER’S MIND: 

“We do things one after the other. That is all. There is no such time as “this afternoon” or “one o’clock” or “two o’clock.” At one o’clock you will eat your lunch. To eat lunch itself is one o’clock. You will be somewhere, but that place cannot be separated from one o’clock. For someone who actually appreciates our life, they are the same.” 

And so it goes. Tick tock, ignore the clock, ignore the clock.

Illusion of Control

Discussed on The Economist’s “The Intelligence” podcast: the plight of the modern casino, how millenials just don’t dig the slot machines like the previous generations (revenue from slot machines is, according to the reporter, 2/3 of any given casino’s income) and the casinos’ efforts to appeal to the latest generation by incorporating elements of video games – skill, etc – into slot machines and thus, in theory, stave off a financial apocalypse.

Among the problems to this approach to apocalypse-staving, they’re exacerbating the problem of the Illusion of Control (defined in the Oxford Dictionary of Psychology as “the belief that one has control over events that are actually determined by chance”) in the players  – and, I would add, in themselves.

Laterally: how do I allow my own Illusion of Control to pervade The Work? Is it in a mad faith that somewhere, somehow, if I just pull the lever one more time, that I’ll drudge up the ability, the skill – no matter how fleeting – to wrangle those words into something possessed of meaning and of creative satisfaction, a next paragraph, a mad faith that will pay off one day, just one day, just give it one more go?

Perhaps. But all I can do is the same thing I do every day: show up and give it, The Work, my time and what passes for my brainpower. Beyond that, perhaps an acceptance of my lack of control over everything else in this game of chance is in order.