Tyler Weaver's Blog, page 57

PHANTOM THREAD

An unsettling portrait of the lengths to which one must sometimes go to make the whole of life — not just the creative portion — worth living… a certain empathy with the travails of both Woodcocks, of the relentless pursuit of a goal without end by the creative, totalitarian id of Reynolds (an unsurprisingly brilliant – and possibly final – performance by Daniel Day-Lewis*) and the similarly relentless pursuit of another goal without end by Alma (Vicky Krieps is the true star of THREAD; her performance – and her stare – is a revelation), two passionate voices waging war across the minefield of the creative life and mind, a mind uniquely capable of self-deception: the only time I felt a realization of myself as a human being open to the tenderness of others in “real/adult life” was when I was recovering in my hospital bed, the sanctity and the curse of routine forcibly removed as my body learned to stop eating itself and I learned how to function amidst the rise of my new normal, of my new routine (no mushrooms required nor do I foresee the necessity of a return to illness as release, as fulcrum, unlike the impression of the Woodcocks’ inevitable loop with which the film’s final moments left me).

* Perhaps the war demonstrated in THREAD between a dedicated creative life and a dedicated human life spurred Day-Lewis’s decision to retire? Perhaps it hit too close to home for him? But that’s all just mindless speculation and I’m probably mistaken; though my theory makes a modicum of sense I’m certain it’s something far more mundane and far more human

Havel / Et Cetera

Another day begins in the AC to the soundtrack of the same sounds and the same routine, day in, day out. In my better, more lucid moments, this is a sanctuary and I am in sync with a sacrament of routine that facilitates a flow towards those small, concrete steps that comprise the accomplishment of The Work, the day’s work, the day’s purpose; in those other moments, that same sanctuary is a cage of my own creation where I hear only the things that need fixed and the voice of lament and castigation at my inability to do so: my stupid pancreas, the dead dryer, my stalled career (if it ever had gas to begin with), my stupid brain.

This passage from Václav Havel’s OPEN LETTERS jumped out amid this morning’s reading time (that it is excerpted from one of his letters to his wife, Olga, from prison is purely coincidental and I harbor no illusions that this self-inflicted prison of my mind erected over a moat of Multi-Grain Cheerios and almond milk in heartlandic idyll is in any way comparable to the brutal, corporeal prison in which Havel suffered four and a half years of countless indignities and injustices; indeed, even writing this caveat makes my mental travails seem that much more trivial and banal, but, alas):

“Genuine constancy is displayed only by someone who depends on himself and not on others, who has the strength to maintain a sober spirit, his own reason, and a healthy self-control, and an original, that is, unmediated, view of the world.”

Towards the clarity of constancy, then, amidst a battleground in which the two parts of myself are at war, the part that wants that constancy and sobriety of spirit and the part that distrusts itself and its capacity to ever form that constancy, reveling instead in the choppy waters of a flux of extremes (I do realize that in many ways, my self-control is far too controlling – it was this way even before my pancreas broke almost two years ago). So then, towards balance, always towards balance – and that “unmediated view of the world.”

Black Hole Rot

If John McCain failed, during the 15 months of his battle against a glioblastoma (the same relentless cancer with a five percent survival rate that killed my uncle earlier this year, five months following his own diagnosis), to inspire the tablescraps of the Republican Party to save themselves and break – in any meaningful way – with the gilded repugnancy of their hallowed standardbearer, he will not succeed in death, no matter how poignant and true his final message.

But it isn’t for lack of trying: to change what must be changed lies not in the inspirational reach of an iconic bulwark – who cannot, for all of his awakenings both recent and past, be absolved of his complicity in pouring gasoline on this particular dumpster fire – but deep within the noxious, mold-ridden foundations of a party where everything, from the ground up, must be bleached, gutted, and rebuilt… but we all know that that won’t happen: the politics of now are not built for honest assessments of terminal failings and the execution of necessary long-term solutions to ameliorate the effects of their devastation. The Republican Party, much like its literary precursor, Victor Frankenstein, is reaping what it has sowed on its path to power – a path unearthed thanks to the Democrats’ lack of spine, boldness, and purpose throughout President Obama’s second term and exploited by the Republicans in their shameless pandering to insane billionaires, short-term dark money gains, and the cultish adulation of nativist resentment; the party (in name only) of Lincoln is a party now not just beyond saving but not deserving of being saved at all.

I recognize that these words, such as they are, coming from some liberal snowflake like me fail to hold the same sway as if I were a Republican decrying the loss of my ideological home; I am, however, a firm believer in balance and in progress through a process of informed and civil competition between a mulitude of coherent ideas – party be damned – that can withstand reasoned scrutiny to make oftentimes difficult decisions in the name of a practical, tangible benefit not just to those who donate the most money to an endless campaign but to everyone.

This belief, however, is predicated upon the quaint notion that that opposing voice be possessed of a certain modicum of humanity and the capacity to compromise in the name of public service. The “Grand Old Party” of now, the party that is forcing us to watch its writhing gesticulations as it kowtows to its majority stake in the black hole rot, is anything but: rather, it is a three-ring circus run by incompetent, feces-hurling carnival hucksters clinging with cold, dead hands to any semblance of “the good old days,” a fiction extant only in the consumerist sloganeerings delivered between segments of the serialized narrative exploits of J.R. Ewing.

As the festering wound of his party and of the reality show politics they have mined from the desperate vein of the resentful and paranoid suppurates with each passing day, McCain’s final words seem, in the scant few weeks since his passing, to have already been forgotten, an inconvenient smudge in the rearview mirror of a party desirious not of rebuilding and renewing in a spirit of common civility but desirous, in the absence of its last bulwark, only of running itself off a cliff – and determined to take us with it.

Listening

How to best communicate the silence necessary for effective two-way communication in a medium where silence is all too often mistaken for non-existence? How do you express “just listening” in a medium where the face in the face to face can’t be seen, where an empathetic hand cannot be rested on a shoulder, and where every indication is, as Uma Thurman said in PULP FICTION, that we are all just waiting to talk – or is it that are we all just waiting to be heard?

Listen / Hum

How to best communicate the silence necessary for effective two-way communication in a medium where silence is all too often mistaken for non-existence? How do you express “just listening” in a medium where the face in the face to face can’t be seen, where a hand cannot be rested on a shoulder, and where every indication is, as Uma Thurman said in PULP FICTION, that we are all just waiting to talk – or is it that are we all just waiting to be heard?

For a medium that can open up the world, the internet is remarkably unable to incubate the silence necessary to hear and to absorb what is going on in that world – be it in the life of one person, one friend, or in, as Don Delillo called it (in ZERO K, I believe?), the hum of the world.

Yes, but will Barry wear Christmas lights?

News of an impending television adaptation of ALAN WAKE, Remedy’s episodic supernatural noir 2010 release (a precursor to the seasonal / episodic game releases of Telltale’s BATMAN and WALKING DEAD series, as well as the latest iteration of HITMAN), has brought with it fond memories of the game, of the world, of terrified characters wrapped in Christmas lights.

A few thoughts:

First, as Contradiction Films’ Tomas Harlan says at the end of Variety’s piece, adapting games to television is a smart move: Netflix’s CASTLEVANIA animated series (the second season drops next month) and its impending adaptation of THE WITCHER (starring Henry Cavill; please cast Eva Green as Yenn – though that may be too obvious of a choice), as well as Showtime’s in-the-pipeline HALO series all point to a growing acceptance that a multi-hour game experience is more faithfully translated not within the narrative confines of a two-hour film but rather within a serialized, long-form medium that allows for tangents and threads and deeper exploration.

Harlan, further: 

“‘Alan Wake’ was basically a TV series that was put into a game,” Harlan told Variety. “That was Sam’s vision. It was influenced by ‘The Twilight Zone,’ ‘Secret Window,’ Hitchcock, ‘Northern Exposure,’ a lot of U.S. television,” he said. “We plan to work closely with Sam on our this show. Sam is a huge part of this. This is his baby.”

Why Harlan would mention NORTHERN EXPOSURE (maybe it’s the preponderance of hiking boots and fleece vests; I do miss that show) but not TWIN PEAKS is beyond me – perhaps he didn’t want to state the obvious, that WAKE is essentially TWIN PEAKS if Stephen King had written it, jamming any number of his endless barrage of writers-as-protagonists into the lead – though please don’t mistake this for disparagement: after all, I have to thank ALAN WAKE for sating the TWIN PEAKS-sized hole in my heart in the years before the cathartic mindfuck that was the third season; it was an imitation, yes, but it was still there – it was still something.

ALAN WAKE creator Sam Lake: 

“Definitely what we have mapped out is a longer thing than the first game and a sequel; there is more to it,” Lake said. “In many ways, we see the universe as a bigger thing. Alan Wake is a very central character, but we have other characters around him like [friend and agent Barry Wheeler] and his wife Alice and Sheriff Sarah Breaker and other characters there. We feel this is a big universe to develop and explore in many ways… Not only that, but through the years, we’ve worked on multiple game concepts and stories for Alan Wake’s world that have never seen the light of day.”

While I had hoped to play a sequel (never played AMERICAN NIGHTMARE), I suppose seeing one (or what amounts to the salvaging of one) will have to do, though the article does make it sound as though, should the show be successful, a proper game sequel might see the light of day. As for exploring the ancillary characters, I do hope that they make an effort to grow them into more than the plot-point / archetypes / stereotypes / imitations – none without their charms, though – that they were in the game.

A parting request: please use the demonic xylophone of Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds’s “Up Jumped the Devil” as the main title theme. It was perfect in the game – and there’s precedent for Nick Cave’s music being used as television main titles: “Red Right Hand” and PEAKY BLINDERS, anyone?

Oh, one more: they’d better have Barry wrapped in Christmas lights at some point. I suppose that’s all I really ask.  Count me in regardless.

Ode on a Mechanical Pencil

Writing is a process of processing and the / a key to processing that process is, for me, to work with a mechanical pencil, to embrace its graphite smear across journal pages and the marginalia of the previous day’s markdown print-out and the side of my haggard southpaw; it slows me down to an essential slowness that creates the illusion or the reality that the day, as Leonard Cohen said, hasn’t gone down in debt.

Being Social (Redux / Reflux)

While Twitter has brought me some amazing opportunities and a number of lifelong friends,  the feeling that I have, as Bob Dylan once said, “stayed in Mississippi a day too long,” is omnipresent; now, whenever I ascribe to Twitter any purpose beyond a method by which to broadcast these meandering status updates into the ambient, it’s usually indicative of a fear of the laborious pace of the WIP and of being forgotten, itself one of the many masks worn by the fear of moving forward.

And so – as is the pattern – I come up with a plan (so many plans) to feed this snarling fear beast of my own creation: I share links and useless parentheticals and dog pictures (though those still live on my private Instagram; one must, after all, share dog pictures) in an attempt to, as Stephen Colbert once said of Cookie Monster, binge and purge at the same time – usually under the pretense that I should come up with a way to effectively share links for newsletter readers because clearly this is a problem that must be solved instead of the innumerable ones plaguing the WIP – and I fall back into a decade-long (jesusfuckingchrist), self-perpertuated pattern of both a perceived obligation to deliver inaccurate reflections of myself and the stifling swirl of relative mind before resolving anew to commit fully to my heartlandic hermitage, writing and broadcasting these Informalities (the point of which was recently explored and reaffirmed here) whenever they emerge from the mind-muck; it is usually at this point that I can feel the flatulent elephant abandon its perch upon my shoulders and fly off to parts unknown. And I can breathe.

In those moments when my psychological vigilance wanes and self-doubt invades and takes root, I allow it, social media —and Twitter, especially — to create a fiction that I am more than an ambient mosquito (to my fraction of a fraction of a fraction of the 24% of the population who actually use Twitter and the 46% of that 24% that use it daily) and, when those (extremely) rare moments of reaching further than the ambient come, I crave more; whoever called it a slot machine was dead-on: time vanishes and all that matters is the pull of the lever and the ding of the bell, an addictive opiate to palliate the fear of being forgotten.

Tom Petty once said, “I just don’t want to do anything that I can’t feel like I’m doing honestly”: pulling that lever simply isn’t an honest expression of where I want to be or what I want to write outside the bounds of the primary work; it’s a step backwards into learned addiction and the invasive tendrils of self-doubt and fear of the unknown. I’m far happier tending to my little garden here, writing what I want to write on a platform of my own – these Informalities,  the newsletter, and, most importantly, the WIP – and throwing the results into the world without expectation, moving forward into whatever lies ahead – though I will always have dog pictures to share.

The Unsettling

In which an exorcism by writing is attempted:

Facing down yet another seemingly uncrackable piece (on politics because I do love torturing myself), The Unsettling festers anew: the notion that, by spending time writing these pieces, I am neglecting my other work, The Work, that mythic third book, and wasting my time in the delivery of useless content into the ether of indifference, an Unsettling that cohabitates with a shitflinging, cokehead roomate called perceived obligation (Percy) who says I must produce new content for this little unweeded garden of thought and that if I don’t deliver said content into the ether, I will, since I’ve all but abandoned the anxious picayune of social media (excepting requisite dog pictures at Instagram and brief exasperations with a social rebirth at Mastodon and a return to Twitter) for the self-owned and long-winded status updates contained herein, slide into obsolesence and be forgotten (which begs the question of whether I am actually “known” at all – or if it matters one bit; on my good days, I want to believe that it doesn’t).

However, from the swampdepths of this Unsettling, a glimmer of light as I recall Montaigne’s words on practice – words first discovered via one of the inspirations for this iteration of my digital self, Warren Ellis’s MORNING, COMPUTER, and words that have since brought me the joy of reading, bit by bit, all of Montaigne’s work – immortalized at the top of this category page…

“What I write here is not my teaching, but my study; it is not a lesson for others, but for me. And yet it should not be held against me if I publish what I write. What is useful to me may also by accident be useful to another. Moreover, I am not spoiling anything, I am only using what is mine. And if I play the fool, it is at my expense and without harm to anyone. For it is a folly that will die with me, and will have no consequences.”

… – and recognize anew that the value of these maunderings is not in being of use to you but in being of use to me; they are my practice, my study, and my exorcism – of myself and of the world – and that’s it. Nothing more.

The Unsettling has ebbed; back to The Work.

Reading: THE MARS ROOM, by Rachel Kushner.

Listening: THE PARIS CONCERT, EDITION 2, by Bill Evans; DJARIMIRRI, by Gurrumul.

Fumbling About With Mastodon

Consider me intrigued.

What Mastodon offers, as of this nascent – and potentially naive – moment in its existence and in my usage is all that pre-algorithmic-OrangeMalignancy–and-his-sycophants-IPO Twitter offered, Fail Whales and all, an opportunity for a social media reboot reliant not upon rebooting within the Frankenstein monster of self-branded broadcast, perceived obligation, and ubiquitous anxiety that devolved from a tool originally for connection and becoming throughout my mid-twenties, but on the explorative potential of an uncharted wild unearthed in my late thirties, a new middle ground for an approximation of the digital genuine lodged between this space for talking to myself in public and the newsletter (itself a social liferaft from Twitter and Facebook); a means of exploring the question of if I were to just start using social media today, how would I make use of it?

But, as with anything in any stage of existence, Mastodon is not without its downsides and the inevitable growing pains: that same uncharted status means that I have no clue what I’m doing (though maybe that’s a good thing); the lingo and foundational principles of Instances, etc. are, much like the blockchain, headscratching; I don’t know anyone (also maybe a good thing) nor do I have a grasp of the inchoate societal canon; the timelines, (Federated and Local or whatever parlance they use, see above) intended as a tool for finding new people, are an overwhelming hodgepodge-flurry of rapids and eddies in lightning succession; and I can’t discount the omnipresent question of whether I want to devote mental energy to starting over yet again on yet another platform that is not my own.

For now, though, intrigue and fascination overshadow any uncertainty and compel me to navigate its pervasive idiosyncracies and unknowns; the existence of this site and the newsletter for (more or less) complete thoughts negate the question of content ownership – all content exorcism requiring more than 500 characters will live here or in the dispatches.

Should you decide to give Mastodon a go, you can join me and my three whole followers (more freeing than it sounds) there at @tylerweaver. I’m on the main mastodon.social Instance for now (I have no idea if that particular Instance is open for new sign-ups; the WIRED article that spurred me into the forest said it wasn’t, but I was able to sign-up there after reading the article), though I may start my own Instance if it allows greater integration with this site and the newsletter and I learn more about what, precisely, an Instance entails (for instance, can I transfer my handle over or do I have to get a new one? is Instance capitalized? (for instance)). While I’m not sure that I’m ready to go down that particular path, I won’t state anything with any certainty: I didn’t think I’d find myself intrigued by another social network nor can I deny the possibility that the initial exuberant verbosity on display here might fizzle out tomorrow, rendering this rambling little more than an encapsulation of a faded moment of naiveté in my ongoing connective becoming… or vanishing.

(TW)