Tyler Weaver's Blog, page 50

KaijuDesk, Day One

I am here and I am working, for the first time, at KaijuDesk.

The process of moving the office entirely to the former Paint Shop (more on the room’s history in subsequent ramblings) / mud room / extra living room / exercise room begins in earnest (as does the process of moving items from said Paint Shop into my former office) – fortunately now this process can be a “during work” thing to give me something to do other than hate myself for not getting further on The Work when The Work refuses to cooperate (location agnostic) or fiddle with a fidget spinner.

Minimalization / elimination in this process of moving: what’s essential and what isn’t. What needs to make the trek downstairs, what doesn’t… Not going all Marie Kondo but I do want to take this opportunity to make it an office I would make now, not a transition from one dumping ground to the other. 

Next to make the journey: the books and the bookshelves, to make room dividers and deepen the cavernous feel. Also, dog beds – The Morkie and The Jorkie will mutiny otherwise, though the former does seem to like the extra desktop roaming space afforded by KaijuDesk’s girth; perhaps a Morkie/Jorkie under-desk cubby is in order.

Consider: a wi-fi signal booster though no, I’d prefer to go without it out here. Once the dividers go up, I’m in a Faraday Cage of work, just as I was when I wrote my first book and found my place. 

Type-type-type.

P.S. LAYLET EL BOOREE, the new album from Ifriqiyya Electrique, is amazing. Must-listen.

P.P.S. THE INCREDIBLES 2 is delightful, but I’m not as in love with it as I am with the original. That said, all I really want from the Disney / Fox deal is a Cold War / Space Race, sixties-set FANTASTIC FOUR flick directed by Brad Bird.

Leonardo, Halfway

200+ pages into Isaacson’s LEONARDO DA VINCI and am riveted not only by Leonardo himself – particularly affecting are Isaacson’s tellings of Leonardo’s unfinished works and failures, either from his own perfectionism or from outside forces though mostly the former – but by how Isaacson tells Leonardo’s story through the evolution of his body of work, through his ever-shifting and evolving transformations and fascinations and curiosities, synthesizing them, much as Leonardo did, into something new and unique; a paean to untrammeled presence and creativity. Essential.

Joker

In our first fleeting moments with Phoenix’s KILLING-JOKE-meets-MEAN STREETS-and-THE-KING-OF-COMEDY (my favorite Scorsese films)-infused iteration let loose upon a TAXI DRIVER Gotham, a palpable combination of unpredictability, dread, and elasticity: the character at its core, no matter the answer posited within the final film to his multiple choice origins; that the film is called JOKER and not THE JOKER is significant, a tell, that this is just one of those endless multiple choice origins, the one that spoke most to director Phillips – and managed to convince the comic book-recalcitrant Phoenix to play the titular role.

If the DC movies continue on this “Black Label” path of apparent artistic independence advertised in JOKER’s teaser and shake loose the MCU-wannabe/neverwas strangulation of the Snyderverse DCEU (I never understood the “Extended” part of that name), we might be in for something truly special…. but October’s a long ways away – and we won’t know anyting until then.

Waiting: Orthopedist (C)

Accompanying: Finished a book (WABI-SABI), (11 holes of DESERT GOLFING), waiting, waiting,  now at two hours in a relatively comfortable pleather chair among a sea of relatively comfortable pleather and wood chairs atop blueish leaf carpets enclosed by walls filled with clearance rack Kohls paintings of bridges and maps, a scant magazine selection though one promises to “change my life and my butt” so I’ve got that going for me (22 holes of DESERT GOLFING), and at least the TV is on mute but oh fuck it’s DR OZ (send help): Could your home sweet home be a former meth house? Dr Oz says it’s more common than I might think, but first, Did an illness turn a perfect doctor into a sex fiend? (Maybe) How appropriate for a waiting room in which I’m now the only one left waiting (34 holes of DESERT GOLFING), Are you waiting to see a doctor? No I’m waiting on someone waiting to see a Doctor, where’s your bathroom? 

The Must-Read-Everything-Written-By List

(Ambitious, certainly – but I only have whatever remains of the rest of my life.) 

Edith Wharton

Thomas Pynchon (novels completed 2018; still need to get around to SLOW LEARNER collection.)

James Ellroy

Don DeLillo

George Eliot

László Krasznahorkai

Charles Johnson

Leo Tolstoy

John Williams

Paul Auster

Charlotte Brontë

Jennifer Egan

David Goodis

William Faulkner

José Saramago

Ursula K. Le Guin

Marlon James

Vladimir Sorokin

Louise Erdrich

Clarice Lispector

The Left Hand of Graphite

Back and forth, pen to pencil, pen to pencil: often an indication of creative frustration and an urge to change things up, but for now —should it continue to be as wonderful as it is at present – I’m back to working and journaling with a mechanical pencil, a Pentel Sharp Kerry, 0.7mm, my precious.

(It is) a pathway to slower thought and  deeper focus as I learn to embrace the imperfections left across the page in the wake of my graphite-smeared southpawness, granting the picayune maunderings contained within a lived-in look, a certain character of working that leaves me with a graphite badge of honor to carry the rest of the day through.

Super Mealtime Blood Sugar(Shock)

Thanks to an out-and-about dinnertime low blood sugar surprise, a scant quantity of testing strips (yes, yes, more evidence of the utility of a shift to CGM / part-cyborg, I get it, I get it), and an absence of glucose tablets (tropical fruit is my favorite), I, for the first time since my immune system decided to transform my pancreas from automatic to manual transmission – two and a half years, now –, chugged half a can of regular Sprite and, perhaps more unsurprisingly than I would care to admit, nearly wretched from the abundant sweetness (one can contains more than half the amount of carbs that I allow myself at breakfast / lunch and more than my entire dinner) contained therein; I think my eyes may have started watering but that was probably due to a cat lurking about.

Listening: Billie Eilish, WHEN WE ALL FALL ASLEEP WHERE DO WE GO (lives up to the hype and more… she’s amazing); Lucinda Chua, ANTIDOTES 1-EP.

KaijuDesk, In Progress

Amid a series of short assignments in room rearrangement (lift chaise, move chaise, curse chaise, etc etc), a growing unease of moving from my room office to a divided space, echoes of homes foreclosed and months in a corner between IKEA bookshelves… 

But I adore KaijuDesk and, not only am I excited about upgrading my working surface to a big boy desk (KaijuDesk won’t fit through the door into what is presently my office so I must build the new office around the only space that can house KaijuDesk, a space 10 feet from the only door that it fit through), I must remember that, in spite of the pain of back then, it was during that time of enclosure and cyclical change that many breakthroughs – and breakdowns, certainly – happened; perhaps this return to an office divided is how I confront at last those fractious remnants of the decade past and build something new.

(Seeking the) Batmobile Exit Ramp

The highway crumbles just as it has for the last thirty-plus years or decades or centuries to reveal another pothole amidst a perpetual patch job and a fleeting memory of those halcyon days of yore, same pothole, probably, a fear fucking about in my single-digit brain of whether or not I — when I would at last be able to drive myself down the crumbling highway in the Batmobile (because that would be my car) — would remember how to get to the places we were going, the necessary places, Kmart, I think, but Kmart’s long gone now and, though I did remember how to get there more than once, I never got to drive the Batmobile. Alas.

Earworm: Karen O, “Moon Song.” 

Reading: Walter Isaacson, LEONARDO DA VINCI (at last  – it’s only been on the to-read stack for at least a year.)

Empty Footfalls in a Square of Pallid Open Worlds

Currently on my Gamepass return, 2/3 Square Enix: SHADOW OF THE TOMB RAIDER, abandoned; VAMPYR, made it two mintues – such a cool concept, such a boring execution (though I might give it another chance); finally settled on JUST CAUSE 3: big, stupid fun – an enjoyable diversion, an open world EXPENDABLES with a grappling hook played out across the Square Enix brand of lifeless, repetitive, and pallid open worlds though nonetheless possessed of its own unique and bemusing personality.

Scatching my head as to why Square Enix would choose to focus their publishing / development efforts on such dull open worlds (a scratching based solely on playing the TOMB RAIDER and, in spite of my grumbling about the sandbox, enjoying JUST CAUSE 3) when they seem incapable of producing one of any merit and let their best IP, the DEUS EX series (not open world, and not third person), languish in disinterested obscurity following the best entry in the series since the original.