Tyler Weaver's Blog, page 58

UNFLATTENING

At once a profound work of philosophy and of comics mastery, Nick Sousanis’s UNFLATTENING is an illumination of the seen and the unseen world rooted in the limitless potential of the comics medium, an exciting remix of centuries worth of thought that breaks free of the boundaries of the panel and the page and guides us through the flatlands of our prepackaged assumptions and hardwired, habitual beliefs into new, combinatorial realms of possibility.

Great works invite – no, demand – revisitation so that their innumerable secrets and layers might be fully explored and discovered. UNFLATTENING is no exception: in this love letter to both a medium and to our capacity for expansive thought, Sousanis has created something truly special: a journey into the furthest reaches of our awareness and understanding that asks us only for the best of ourselves, a journey that begs to be revisted time and again.

A must-read.

(TW)

P.S. Also of note is the invaluable backmatter and bibliography Sousanis provides; your reading list just got a lot longer.

The Stream After the Flood

Amid the great uncertainty of now there is a modicum of comfort to be mined in the cyclical nature of history and in the impermanence of everything, in the truth that the only constant is change. But also inherent in that cyclical nature is the stark truth that we live in a present more like the ignoble past than we would care to admit, a present in which eight years of oftentimes agonizingly slow and flawed progress towards a better tomorrow, inches rather than miles, has fallen to the revanchist whims of a racist coot with a mastery of thumb-propaganda and a remarkable capacity (amplified by illict foreign assistance) for exploiting that particularly American brand of paranoid resentment and delivering it like a gilded, flaming bag of dog shit on humanity’s crumbling doorstep; we live now in a present which lays bare and raw the truth that the stream of history flows above a riverbed rife with the irradiated skeletons of lessons unheeded, ignored, and forgotten.

But, as with a stream after a flood, water always seeks to find its level; so too will balance and sanity find their way back to us – though it will take time and requires our help, not only at the flood-point but also downstream and for future generations. It is incumbent upon us to guide the stream through this dark, deforested wilderness of populist blood-and-soil charlatanism and confront, with honesty and realism, the decades of systemic rot that made it all too inevitable, a rot including but by no means limited to: special interests, two-party dominance, prejudice, gerrymandering, inequality, apathy, media illiteracy, table-scrap economics, dark money networks, Citizen’s United, and the toxic iteration of shareholder-driven connectivity that ferments a clime of retributive, corruptible outrage politics and tribal fandoms that seek not to understand but to pwn, facts and truth be damned; it is incumbent upon us, now more than ever, to save ourselves from ourselves.

Though the road ahead remains long, there are pockets of hope that have been glowing ever brighter since that terrible night in November: the deft pursuit of gun regulation by the students of Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School and the growing movement they have inspired, turning unfathomable tragedy into bold, decisive action, a potent coupling of the long-term organizational thinking of the civil rights movement and the digital immediacy of Occupy (for a look at how today’s protest movements compare with their antecedents, both foreign and domestic, I recommend Zeynep Tufecki’s TWITTER AND TEAR GAS); the work of a revitalized fourth estate, a dogged middle finger of truth-seeking to the treacherous minefield wrought by the rally-bile of the Orange Malignancy’s demagogical fear and loathing; and the resistance of both everyday citizens and institutional bodies (excepting Congress – retirement, Senators and Congressmen, is not resistance; it is resignation) to the cruel and inhumane policy pathogens of a regime intent on wearing us into submission with a shock-and-awe barrage of horrors, outrages, and alternative realities.

Even now – especially now –, wading knee-deep through the muck of this malignant blight, I am hopeful that the path to rebirth is becoming clearer; that we will, like water, find our level. There is little doubt that it will be a perilous journey – and that things will get far worse before they get better – but it is nevertheless a journey down a path that must be found and walked before history, poisoned by the irradiated skeletons of lessons unlearned that line its riverbed, inevitably repeats itself and the window to sanity and a better tomorrow closes for good.

(TW)

Being Social

Whenever I ascribe to Twitter any utility beyond its present optimal purpose as a method to broadcast these meandering status updates into the ambient, it’s usually indicative of an impatient fear of the laborious pace of the WIP and a fear 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 to feed this snarling fear beast of my own creation: I share links and dog pictures (though those still live on my private Instagram; one must, after all, share dog pictures) and other miscellaneous shit – 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, self-perpertuated pattern of perceived obligation and expectation before saying a hearty fuck it and resolving anew to stay true to my heartlandic hermitage, writing and broadcasting these Informalities whenever I feel like it; 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, Twitter, to create a fiction that I am more than an ambient mosquito and, when those rare moments of breaching the ambient materialize, when they become a book or a gig or an acknowledgement from someone whose work I admire, I crave more in that aforementioned self-perpetuating cycle of deleterious expectation and perceived obligation. 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; 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 – these Informalities, the newsletter, and, most importantly, the WIP – and throwing the results into the world without expectation, moving forward into the unknown, the unplanned.

If I’m forgotten by the ambient, so be it; it’s far better than forgetting who I am – and who I am working to be… though I will always be someone who shares dog pictures.

(TW)

On Forcing Myself to Fall Asleep

A bad writing day, week, month, year is the daylight version of forcing myself to fall asleep (credit where credit’s due: my therapist threw that pearl out there in our first session and I knew I was in the right office), a day, a week, a month, a year, in which I push myself to close my eyes and dream the dreams of my dreaming only to stare at a screen rife with forced words, the wrong words, that lead nowhere and signify nothing but a failure to get out of my own way.

In Zen Mind, Beginner’s Mind, Shunryu Suzuki says:

“You become discouraged with your practice when your practice has been idealistic. You have some gaining idea in your practice, and it is not pure enough. It is when your practice is rather greedy that you become discouraged with it. So you should be grateful that you have a sign or warning signal to show you the weak point in your practice. At that time, forgetting all about your mistake and renewing your way, you can resume your original practice… Even in wrong practice, when you realize it and continue, there is right practice.”

Best to look at it as a warning sign, the opening of a path back to right practice – to realize, to recognize, and to continue: just to write, just to sleep; abandon the gaining ideas – the I musts, the I shouldbeabletos – and continue. To always continue.

(TW)

Words and the Lack Thereof

Today, as with the 500+ yesterdays and as with the unknown number of tomorrows, I stare aghast yet unsurprised at the radioactive slime trail left in the wake of the Orange Malignancy’s latest shitshow; today, as with those yesterdays and those tomorrows, I find myself without the words to immediately and viscerally express my frustration and  horror at the monstrosities endemic to this red-hat surreality show of the unhinged.

Words, for me, – and specifically, the hunt for the right words – constitute the exploration and revelation of depth; when the truth is so simple – that the Orange Malignancy is a blight on the world and on history and proves it with greater frequency and in more visceral forms each day that this show stays on the air – it feels all but impossible to provide anything but word-vehicles of anxious jaw-drops, usually a variation on “what the fuck?!” or “jesusfuckingchrist.”

There is, at least, some comfort to be mined in the words of Emerson:

“Stay at home in your mind. Don’t recite other people’s opinions. See how it lies in you; and if there is no counsel, offer none. What we want is not your activity or interference with your mind, but your content to be a vehicle of the simple truth.”

This insignificant meandering through my little unweeded garden of thought, then, is simply the expression of being unable to express myself; a word-representation of the frustration at my having “no counsel,” though part of me wonders what Emerson would consider a/the “simple truth” of today.

(TW)

(h/t to Carol Tilley for unearthing the above gem.)

HALO 5, or how I stopped trying to find the point

Perhaps there was a time when I could tell you what was going on in the HALO universe. Perhaps I could, in those halcyon days, differentiate between the good guys and the bad guys and the badder guys and the baddest good guys and the goodest bad guys and could tell you when and where the games took place. Perhaps I could have even included a section on it in my first book. Perhaps – perhaps – I could have once told you the point.

Perhaps.

While undeniably an action-packed and – in spite of its best efforts – fun game that provided some of the best gaming moments (that vertical descent level is INSANE) since the first outing a decade and a half ago, HALO 5 is nonetheless a disappointment, a convoluted mess of promises strung together with a haphazard script that, for some reason, failed to learn the lesson of its spiritual successor, HALO 2, and implemented an ill-conceived multi-protagonist narrative that – for four-fifths of the game – relegated Master Chief to an existence as a passive, grieving plot point going through the motions of processing loss, hunted by his confederates, and haunted by the catastrophic creative choices of those entrusted with keeping the franchise vibrant and innovative. Neither vibrant nor innovative, HALO 5 is yet another piece of collateral damage wrought by the shifting of priorities to multiplayer run-n-gun-fun at the expense of engaging solo campaign storytelling.

While I appreciate the “shades of grey” that have been added to the HALO-verse since the success of its first outing and the development of varying alliances between factions of alien races to make the franchise more than an endless series of a FPS military strikes on alien lifeforms on some floating space ring indistinguishable from the one you destroyed in the last game, there’s simply no heart, nothing to make it worth remembering. If there is heart, it’s lost somewhere amidst an impregnable armor of convolution and the worst practices of fan-service.

Perhaps I’ve been spoiled by Bethesda’s WOLFENSTEIN series, which, while filled with stereotypical archetypes and more than its fair share of groan-inducing braggadocio, is still an evolutionary exercise in video game character: the writers have taken great pains to make those stereotpyical archetypes into human beings facing the seemingly insurmountable odds of pure evil; they have become more than avatars for our own wish-fulfillment: they are worth remembering.

In its present form, HALO leaves me clueless as to its point beyond nifty maps for multiplayer chaos, a once-revolutionary franchise flailing about on the cusp of irrelevance. Then again, maybe I’m the irrelevant one and I’m just not seeing the appeal of multiplayer online co-op til you drop gaming. Maybe this is how my parents felt when they tried to transform my Transformers.

If so, my apologies.

(TW)

 

A Tradition of Reality Distortion

Peel away the snakeskin of normalcy and comfort paid tribute by welcome sign declarations of “Keeping Tradition a Part of Our Future” and the truth of that tradition stands revealed: as sections of this town and this countryside fall to addiction, suicide, and poverty, the only tradition being kept a part of anything is one of a deep-rooted obliviousness to the devastation of reality, a tradition designed to preserve, at any cost, the semi-translucent  Band-Aid of brochure-ready, warm-hearted, they-tried, synecdochic mediocrity that masks the infection eating this town and countless others like it alive. 

This rot is not simply an opioid crisis or a drug crisis or an iequality crisis but a multi-generational crisis of secular excommunication, willful obliviousness, and the inability to listen on the part of those addicted to disbelief and the distortion of reality in the name of a nostalgia for a time that never existed; “Back in my day” is a persistent temptress, a potent excuse. 

None of this is written with the intention of transferring blame from one side to the other: each side shoulders its own burden of complicity and is responsible for the consequences of the individual and collective paths they choose to take; no one is blameless. This does not, however, dilute the fact that obliviousness, inaction, and the promulgation of patronizing bromides and can-kicking half-measures are just as addictive and deadly in the long-term as meth and fentanyl and heroin are in the short and will – should this tradition of hearing loss and reality distortion in the name of a false idyll continue to supplant the capacity even to admit that this cataclysm exists, here, now, in this bastion of wanton heartlandia – ensure that the next words on any future welcome sign are an epitaph.

(TW)

The Comfort Lies

Peel away the snakeskin of normalcy and comfort paid tribute by welcome sign declarations of “Keeping Tradition a Part of Our Future” and the truth of that tradition stands revealed: as sections of this town and this countryside fall to addiction, suicide, and poverty, the only tradition being kept a part of anything is one of a deep-rooted obliviousness to the devastation of reality, a tradition designed to preserve, at any cost, the semi-transculcent Band-Aid of brochure-ready, warm-hearted, they-tried, synecdochic mediocrity that masks the festering, infected wound eating this town and countless others like it alive.

This infection is not simply an opioid crisis or a drug crisis or an iequality crisis but a multi-generational crisis of secular excommunication, willful obliviousness, and the inability to listen. It is a crisis of addiction to disbelief, self-interest, regression, and the ignoble supersession of resolute empathy and empathetic resolution with patronizing, bootstrap-bullshit nostalgia for a time that never existed, a crisis born of the fear not that the treatment that has the best to chance to save your life may make you sick but that it may make you lose your hair.

None of this is written with the intent of transferring blame from one side to the other: each side shoulders its own burden of complicity and is responsible for the consequences of the individual and collective paths they choose to take; no one is blameless. This does not, however, dilute the fact that obliviousness, inaction, and the promulgation of patronizing bromides and can-kicking half-measures are just as addictive and deadly in the long-term as meth and fentanyl and heroin are in the short- and will – should this tradition of hearing loss and reality distortion in the name of a false idyll continue to supplant the capacity even to admit that this pervasive cataclysm exists, here, now, in this paragon of wanton heartlandia – ensure that the next words on any future welcome sign are an epitaph.

(TW)

THE LAST WALTZ

What more do you have to give when you’ve given all of your years of becoming to the muse and to the music and to the nameless audience beyond the stage lights? What more do you have to give when you’ve given all yourself to The Road? And what do you do, who are you, when it ends?

For Robbie Robertson, there was nothing left for him to give except for all of himself one more time, just one more time. As he and his bandmates performed for a mostly unseen audience, he made a final sacrifice to his passion, to The Road, exorcising its demons in the stream of sweat that flowed from him as he shredded his fingertips across the copper gleam of his Fender to make it sing the song that only he could make it sing.

Rick Danko, in an especially poignant interview that I had forgotten in the years since my last viewing, embodied someone lost without The Road, without that path of his becoming. While onstage, he gave as much of himself as Robertson but without the pangs of immolation, simply performing another show that, to him, must lead to another show… only to realize that when the stage lights went out in the wee hours of 26 November 1976 that there wouldn’t be another one.

What have you been doing with yourself since THE LAST WALTZ? Scorsese said.

Just making music, you know? Danko said, his eyes hidden in the shadow of a hat donned while pondering Scorsese’s question.

And then there is Levon Helm, a national treasure if there ever was one, an erstwhile Arkansas warrior with a rock-solid beat and a voice that could and can call the dead to arms, searing through “The Night They Drove Old Dixie Down” and “The Weight”; if Robertson is exorcising The Road, Helm is its evangelist. He IS The Road, existing and attaining himself in that sacrifice to its mysteries and serendipities, a life in sync with the heartbeat of the wandering minstrel shows of his youth and an immortality beyond death in the life of the midnight rambler.

These haphazard notes scrawled in the days following what was (at least) my 20th viewing of a film that has been part of my life since childhood leave out the remarkable feeling of celebration of music, of the incredible guest performances and the tiny moments of broken guitar straps and digitally-removed cocaine from Neil Young’s nose and the inestimable contributions of Richard Manuel and Garth Hudson, the madmen of the keys, but THE LAST WALTZ is, despite being more than 40 years old, a living, breathing document: at once a celebration, an exorcism, an evangelism, an ending, a beginning, a tent revival and a New Orleans funeral. With each viewing, it metamorphoses into something new, some new combination, some new question and with my next inevitable viewing of that mythical Thanksgiving night in 1976, it will become something new all over again.

(TW)

MINDHUNTER

MINDHUNTER is the best kind of surprise:  much more than an unofficial narrative non-fiction(ish) prequel to any number of (insert acronymic investigatory agency here) procedurals of varying quality from the last 20+ years,  it is an intense, relentlessly absorbing character study that subverts those cookie-cutter procedurals into a methodical drama anchored by the efforts of three human beings (not simply archetypes or vanilla wafer plot manifestations) to connect to someone beyond themselves and their work – partners domestic and professional; silent sons; mewling, unseen cats with predilections for tuna and anonymity in a basement laundry room – efforts that inevitably culminate in failure and the bitter realization that the only people to whom they can connect are the serial killers that they interview; as their subjects murder to possess souls, so too do the interrogators murder pieces of themselves to possess an understanding of true evil, an evil that, as MINDHUNTER’s 10 episodes unfold, transforms them from idealistic, driven do-gooders into obsessed, shattered-mirror reflections, abandoned cans of tuna fish in a basement laundry room.

(TW)