Tyler Weaver's Blog, page 55
November 25, 2018
Status 25Nov2018
November 23, 2018
Why yes, I do love Bob Dylan’s Christmas album (thankyouforasking)
Whereas most Christmas albums are little more than jingle-jangle background music cash-ins for anxiety-laden shopping excursions and the consumption of under-salted casserolic traditions amid the expectation of cheer and goodwill that tend to fall on the sword of clique-y familial bonds and resentment, Dylan’s CHRISTMAS IN THE HEART is something more: it is the Christmas album as a middle finger to expectation from a creative force who’s spent a lifetime not only flipping birds to expectation and fearlessly exploring his own creative whims, but a creative force who became a creative force by being an erstwhile and passionate student of the history of song; indeed, CHRISTMAS IN THE HEART should be viewed not as a surreal oddity but as the first of what would become an interpretive trilogy of albums (along with the sublime SHADOWS IN THE NIGHT and FALLEN ANGELS), a performance brimming with earnestness and musical mastery that brought to mind a gathering in a small-town assembly hall on a snowless Christmas Eve night listening to music that could make one believe that there would be three inches of snow on the ground when the doors opened after the last amen.
November 21, 2018
The Essentials: 99 WAYS TO TELL A STORY
With Raymond Quineau’s EXERCISES IN STYLE as a starting point, Matt Madden takes a single, simple tale of a late-night refrigerator trek and transmutes it across 99 variations in comics form. Applicable not just to comics but to all forms of storytelling, 99 WAYS TO TELL A STORY has at its heart the lesson that through curiosity, attention to detail, and the imaginative utilization of the storycraft toolbox, anything is possible. Always indispensible, always inspirational.
*Note: this was first published as part of a complete list in installment 0010 of my bi-weekly newsletter; I’m planning to republish and expand that list here over the coming months.
November 20, 2018
Status 20Nov2018
November 19, 2018
Waiting: Gastroenterology
(Accompanying): Comfortable pleather love seat, a sign on the glass partition behind me proclaiming that all furniture must be kept at least 30 inches from the railing: a three-floor drop to the lobby, otherwise (resist urge to measure, resist). Omnipresent Sports Illustrated and WebMD magazines on the table adjacent, the tapping of impatient fingers on a laptop, the rustling of newsprint (I do love that sound), along with a few cell phone conversations, messages and status updates left by those who have braved the waiting room for hours (but at least the seats are comfortable); nary a television in sight, thankfully. A blurry painting of blurry mountain range (I think) on a column in the middle of the room; print probably available in the gift shop. Didn’t think to look but did write down that I hoped I would be able to read my notes. (I wasn’t.)
November 17, 2018
Status 17Nov2018
November 15, 2018
Toward Utility
To continue with the assorted ramblings of working within self-created systems: I’m experimenting with working only on The Book in the morning and relegating these pieces, the newsletter, and assorted web tinkering (I’ve already instituted a strict no-connection, no news (read: no Orange Malignancy) policy, save for family and music, in the morning – Self-Control is an essential app) to the less stringent, awake, and focus-demanding afternoons so they become not a distraction from the main work of the morning but a supplemental exorcism of accrued thought amidst the afternoon wasteland.
A plus: this shift / delineation away from reflexive distraction helps to minimize the pervasive lack of purpose that can, especially in various modes of exhaustion, haunt my afternoons, the overflowing of a self-perpetuated cocktail of guilt and bullshit that tells me I didn’t do all I could and that I must therefore pay the penance of wallowing in my own artistic insignficance for the duration of the afternoon, much to the dismay of all who are unfortunate enough to encounter me.
A challenge as well: learning to work on the iPad – this piece itself is an experiment with composing and publishing on it alone – and shift my little MacBook Air 2011 to essentially a snappy little typewriter (iA Writer on both)… partly, I’m sure, to prepare myself for said Air’s inevitable demise and the movement of all work, Book or ramblings, to the iPad.
The rain, the ice: still, it falls.
November 14, 2018
Status 14Nov18
November 11, 2018
System / Steering
Another system among the systems seeking balance with one other over the improvisations of a day, the day – spinning plates et cetera et cetera; the more one becomes aware of these systems – systems which also, like water – be it in a stream or in a basement –, seek their own level, regardless of our efforts – the more one becomes capable of the tiny, incremental adjustments necessary/possible to steer said self-leveling systems back towards a semblance of balance when they run astray of themselves.
Danger lurks, however, in this pool of heightening systemic awareness: the danger that one (speaking from a decade-plus of experience here) will attempt to exert too much control, lashing sweaty, clammy hands to the ship’s wheel, and transform a balanced and imperfect self-discipline that serves the day and The Work into a perfectionistic self-totalitarianism that serves only itself, feeds on guilt and perceived obligation, and seeks to plug the cracks by which, as Leonard Cohen said, the light gets in.
In just enough control and in the recognition of each system’s own, unconscious movements towards balance, the light; in too much control, the dark. A system, a routine, then, must never serve to perpetuate its own existence for the sake of personal atonement but rather must serve – as much as it can be made to do anything – that to which it seeks to bring balance.
November 9, 2018
FarinaBot
Prediction: The greatest and most influential writer of this epoch will be not the most gifted or eloquent but a Dennis Farina / GET SHORTY bot that quotes everything the Orange Malignancy tweets and adds “Fuck you, fuckball,” and eventually, on one glorious morning, causes the Malignancy to argue with it, thus gifting us the joy of witnessing a self-perpetuated tweetstorm that might, might, if all the stars align, shatter the space-time contiuum and reset time, Crisis on Infinite Farinas.*
* this Informality may be a side effect of an ongoing, post-midterm hangover.
