Tyler Weaver's Blog, page 56

Waiting: Endocrinology

(Me, Myself, and I) A two-hour drive in the November howl with NPR, a four-unit breakfast insulin intake and lunch in a rest area parking lot (also four units) so that I might sit in another pleather seat in a another small, comfy, yet sterile room, waiting, awaiting, a-waiting, my regular six-month checkup, Popular Science / Sports Illustrated on the walls, no TV. A few adverts for CGMS (someday I will let myself become part cyborg, sooner rather than later, it seems); a brochure or a dozen. Able to read here (new issue of The Economist), so long as I can ignore the mental chitter-chatter of certain personal, self-inflicted judgement of self based on an uncertain number (I AM NOT A NUMBER (6.5!) I AM A MAN!) and midterm election results (a tempered victory, a blue trickle that can and must grow on this, our long slog back to sanity, but a victory nonetheless (go Sherrod!)) on a day that I wasn’t able to run (breakfast normally one unit + six-mile run) thanks to my lack of scheduling prowess, but at least I could drink, unlike in 2016… Arrows and lines on the floor for easy reference and promotion of orderly order; bathrooms at end of a seemingly unsolvable labyrinth; thankful that everything that matters seems to be done on paper here as it instills a certain tactile confidence in the improvisational capacity of care given for a self-managed chronic disease, “See you in six months / get your eyes checked / let’s talk again next time about you becoming part cyborg…”

Waiting: Oncology

(Accompanying) Small, comfortable, the world outside forgotten; the best of a shit situation. Off-white walls. Pleather interspersed with floral fabric seating; a few benches / love seats / whatever; seating next to an end table readily available. A small television with big sound, HGTV, some beachfront prospective home (a steal at $1.5 million, personal beach of rocks and dirty water but the patio furniture is nice) not conducive to focused, close reading; magazine choices limited, Good Housekeeping, Men’s Journal (Matthew McConaughey turning over a new leaf or something) though signage was intriguing (TURN OFF ALL PHONES, et cetera et cetera). Art on walls, probably of Venice or a cabin in the woods or a balloon or a balloon outside a cabin in the woods in Venice; can’t recall. Yet to try the coffee, though it was, for first ‘go round (five years ago), my favorite coffee spot in town (along with the gas station about halfway between W and M); whoever made that coffee had the water/coffee ratio honed to an art.

LIVE BY NIGHT

Though beautiful to behold and punctuated by glimmers of excellence, Ben Affleck’s LIVE BY NIGHT left me recalling Michael Mann’s similarly anticipated and ultimately disappointing 2009 period crime epic, PUBLIC ENEMIES.

In contrast, however, to Mann’s exercise in squandered opportunity, I have a certain sympathy for Affleck: the final film was clearly not the film he set out to make, a victim (possibly) of his own post-Oscar hubris and (a potential cause of) recurrent personal demons and (certainly) of a risk-averse culture that will never again birth a cinematic crime epic a la THE GODFATHER or ONCE UPON A TIME IN AMERICA or Mann’s own HEAT but will go to great lengths to ensure the longevity of a cinematic comic book universe long after its novelty has worn off.

Though my speculations into the personal toll of the creative process are just that, I could feel Affleck’s passion fading as the film wound towards the 10th of its 13 interminable conclusions, the weariness in Affleck’s Joe Coughlin’s eyes and gritted teeth as his empire and life fell apart seeming to mirror that of Affleck the filmmaker as he watched a labor of love became nothing but a labor, an exercise in futility between descents into a self-inflicted, deal-with-the-devil imprisonment in a cape and cowl.

LIVE BY NIGHT was a disappointment, yes, but that doesn’t mean I’m not rooting for Affleck the filmmaker to return to form; whatever his next project may be, I hope that it brings with it the creative groove that so eluded him here.

Reading: HUMAN ACTS, by Han Kang

Listening: J.S. BACH: SIX SUITES FOR VIOLA SOLO, by Kim Kashkashian.

Music / Silence

On some days I can work only to music (lately, St Vincent, The National, Sibelius, Brad Mehldau, and Ambrose Akinmusire), a rhythmic accompaniment from without, and on other days, days like today, silence is the only song I want to hear – silence and the voice within (for better or for worse) accompanied by, as Don DeLillo called it, the hum of the world (or a snoring dog (not DeLillo)), and the rhythmic clack of fingers against a keyboard as they sacrifice nonsense such as this to the insatiable appetite of the blinking turquoise cursor. Whether this is emblematic of a period of deepening focus or of a preemptive strike against a systemic lack of it, is unclear; it is what it is and that’s all that it is… and tomorrow may bring with it a different story altogether.

I Read The News Today Oh Boy

A continuous effort to optimize my news consumption habits and answer the question of to what end does The News serve me and to what lengths do I go to to serve The News?

What would I miss out on if I accepted that most of my consumption habits are born out of boredom, anxiety, perceived obligation, and the habitual need, forged over a decade-plus, to accumulate a certain shared social currency so that I might gamble again and again and again at the blinking attention casino in my pocket? What if my “optimization” consisted instead of a daily (as it currently is) and disciplined (as I am working towards it being) prioritization not only of those sources for which I gladly pay – The Washington Post, The Economist, The Paris Review, Vanity Fair, and WIRED – but of the centuries of knowledge and thought awaiting in the books stacked perilously, one on top of the other, tsundoku-style, on the far shelf?

Perhaps I’d have more to write about than a purpose squandered daily to the whims of FOMO and a resultant systemic overload which not only perpetuates itself but exists solely at the expense of a single-minded focus on The Work at hand.

Reading: Thomas Hardy, THE RETURN OF THE NATIVE

Listening: Berlin Philharmonic, Herbert von Karajan & Okko Kamu, SIBELIUS: THE COMPLETE SYMPHONIES

Office / “Sacred Place”

His home office was markedly different from the only home offices that single / low-double-digit me had known – my grandfathers’, a banker and a biology professor: whereas theirs had ducks and spiders and horses and microscopes and gold pens and graph paper, his, a co-worker of my father’s, had a shelf of Warren Beatty DICK TRACY action figures and Republic’s THE ADVENTURES OF CAPTAIN MARVEL in slate-grey clamshell VHS (I still have the VHS copy he made for me, blue Sharpie ink in slow fade); so different, but the same: encapsulations three of the minds and purposes of their primary occupant, a “sacred place,” a home for becoming, for realizing… or perhaps just a home.

Quoth Joseph Campbell in THE POWER OF MYTH:

“You must have a room, or a certain hour or so a day, where you don’t know what was in the newspapers that morning, you don’t know who your friends are, you don’t know what you owe anybody, you don’t know what anybody owes to you. This is a place where you can simply experience and bring forth what you are and what you might be. This is the place of creative incubation. At first you may find that nothing happens there. But if you have a sacred place and use it, something eventually will happen.”

And so my offices, across various homes and houses and rooms, upstairs, downstairs, et cetera et cetera, have all been iterative steps towards the realization not only of that first inspirational office but of my grandfathers’, a work in progress directed towards the most current portrait of myself and of my mind (for better or for worse), a Lego Ship-in-a-bottle, a complete Funko POP TWIN PEAKS collection alongside a POP Bob Ross (wrong BOB), a snoring Morkie, Jorkie, or Marley, a “sacred place” where I am, on a good day, most capable of losing myself to the work and of forming “what (I am) and what (I) might be”; and, as I write this, +/- thirty years on, that he of that first non-familial inspirational office was a writer makes even more sense.

MassEducation

Never underestimate the emotional wallop of audible breaths between unpredictable phrases and metamorphoses over Philip Glass-infused piano lines that, like Annie Clark’s voice, leap between whispered etherealities and post-punk explosions swirling in and out of the honesty of her words: whereas most “raw” reissues are little more than cash-ins appealing only to the most devout, “MassEducation” is a remarkable transformation of an already brilliant album into something new, a bold exhalation from an artist in full possession of her singular talent and unafraid to reveal the most intimate depths of her relentless creativity.

Highlights: Slow Disco, Smoking Section, New York, Happy Birthday Johnny, Pills Pills Pills… oh fuck it, just listen to the whole album.

See also: St Vincent on ‘Masseduction’ vs. ‘MassEducation’,” via Vulture.

“Second Wind”

Wrote about this apposite bit of brilliance from Václav Havel in newsletter 0035, but it’s still on my mind, on repeat – day in, day out – so I’ll share it here, if only for me.

“Sooner or later, however, a writer (or at least a writer of my type) finds himself at a crossroads: he has exhausted his initial experience of the world and the ways of expressing it and he must decide how to proceed from there. He can, of couse, seek ever more brilliant ways of saying the things he has already said; that is, he can essentially repeat himself. Or he can rest in the position he achieved in his first burst of creativity, subordinate everything he learned to the interests of consolidating that position, and thus assure himself a place on Parnassus.

“But he has a third option: he can abandon everything proven, step beyond his initial experience of the world, with which he is already by now all too familiar, liberate himself from what binds him to his own tradition, to public expectation and to his own established position, and try for a new and more mature self-definition, one that corresponds to his present and authentic experience of the world. In short, he can find his “second wind.” Anyone who chooses this route – the only one (if one wishes to go on writing) that genuinely makes sense – will not, as a rule, have an easy time of it. At this stage in his life, a writer is no longer a blank sheet of paper, and some things are hard to part with. His original élan, self-confidence, and spontaneous openness have gone, but genuine maturity is not yet in sight; he must, in fact, start over again, but in essentially more difficult conditions.

“I found myself at this crossroads in the late 1960s and I’m afraid I’m still looking for my second wind…”

– Václav Havel, “Second Wind” (1976)

QUANTUM BREAK

While almost every frame of QUANTUM BREAK could be considered a work of art, the game itself is — to be charitable — inconsistent: at its best, it’s an engaging diversion that made me say “whoa” more than once; at its worst, it’s a repetitive slog through a forgettable plot burdened with complex controls, hit-skip pacing, muddied clarity, and a pervasive air of missed opportunity.

For example: BREAK’s most glaring deficiency – and chief contributor to its slog-ness – lies in its reliance on that old standby, firearms of various size and utility, to dispatch the endless hordes of faceless, private mercenary / Blackwater antagonism. It would have been far more exciting – and more in keeping with the apparent overall goal to push the envelope – to have supercharged the functionality of Jack’s time distortion powers and used guns only as a last resort – if at all. As it stands, the combat system is a hodgepodge of typical third-person actioners and a glimmer of something new and exciting that never managed to coalesce into a meaningful experience, as though the gamemakers at Remedy couldn’t quite make the time powers work the way they wanted to and fell back on their considerable tried-and-true pedigree in third-person shoot-em-ups and flying lead to get the job done.

And then there’s the TV show.

Pushing ALAN WAKE’s successful execution of an episodic structure to its next level, BREAK’s live-action interstitials, despite featuring THE WIRE alums Aiden Gillan and Lance Reddick (though I was unable to suspend disbelief long enough to buy Shawn Ashmore as a convincing gun-slinging protagonist/avatar of enemy clearing / time-continuum-saving mayhem) never rose above the standard laid out by (most) Netflix straight-to-streaming sci-fi flicks similarly populated with half-realized characters and caricatures: for a game / experience that held time as its main plot point and the fracturing of it as the problem to be solved, the show threw the game’s pacing into tumult and served little purpose other than to deepen a world that could have been deepened more effectively by paying more attention to the game itself; in other words, by trying to be two things at once – a gamechanger and a game, a game and a show, a show and a game, whatever – and placing “cool” above the fundamentals of story, pacing, and character, BREAK missed the mark on both.

Despite the preponderance of bitching above, I’m glad I played it – when QUANTUM BREAK works, it WORKS… which makes the moments when it doesn’t all the more painful – and would recommend it to anyone solely on the basis that it represents a noble – if deeply flawed – effort at something new that, though it missed the mark by virtue of aiming so high, points towards an intriguing future beyond the endless parade of indistinguishable multiplayer killfests.

On Hypoglycemic Moments

Theirs is an arrival heralded by the sensation of floating on water while an anchor is tied to your waist from below as thoughts swirl (more than normal), unstoppable, manic, and reason vacates the premises to unleash the shit-flinging monkeymind, screeching and pulling you deeper and deeper and deeper into the water and into the disbelief of yourself and of the moment and you lose yourself more with each interminable second as the water enveloping you solidifies into glass and you claw at the edges and the sides of yourself to escape but there is nothing to grab onto except for, at last – seconds, minutes, maybe, have passed – the salvation of the juice box (though if you’re alone and all you’ve got is year-old Capri Sun you still have to somehow manage to jab that straw into that fucking bag while your blood sugar is a… challenging … 46) and its sweet, delicious sustenance as time regains its equilibrium and slowly, slowly, the cold sweat abates and you tick back towards humanity, back towards the surface, life-giving fruit punch or Ecto-Cooler in your bloodstream.