Tag Archives: A Million Miles Away

A Million Miles Away: Valerian

by

0

This book was supposed to be about rock singles, but today I went to see Valerian for the second time and it was so deep and so beautiful that I wanted to capture the sense of immersion in a world of feeling.  Suddenly as I write I feel very heavy, some center of attention in my mind crosses over into a supernatural frequency.  This happens all the time but tonight because I am attempting this I have a deeper frame of reference, I can say “I am here” or “I am there”.  I know so much of what I wanted to create artistically wasn’t art at all but rather the communication of this other frequency, the reality of this other world.

I don’t know if this piece will make it into my book – I still like the formal idea of making it all about pop singles, but because I’m turning my attention in this direction I felt like making the attempt to articulate my feelings about this movie, good and bad.

The first time I saw it I thought it was very slow and also sentimental.  But I found it eerily fascinating and over the weekend it grew on me so I just went to see it again and I love it.  I know it’s going to stick with me forever.

Part of this has to do with the original graphic novel.  Over the weekend I went to my comic store and picked up a promotional booklet that had a story and a lot of quotes from Luc Besson about how much he loved it, and how it was part of the inspiration for The Fifth Element.  I also found the Fifth Element a little cheesy the first time I saw it, but came to love it later.  I’m sure this has to do with Besson’s sense of timing.  Ultimately it winds up being a much deeper emotional experience, quite against the grain of Hollywood at this time.

I have to think about how the link to a long-running graphic novel series affects me.  I’m a sucker for the sense of “establishment” and roots in time.

I’m also rooting for Besson, making an independent film that goes agains the grain.

And I think Cara Delevingne is hot.  Dane Dehaan is also very charismatic.  I think he sounds exactly like Keanu Reeves, which was jarring at first but ultimately Keanu sounds great and so does Dane.  I love Dehaan’s style.  I really bought into the love story and I want to see more of them. 

The first time I saw it I was a little uncomfortable with Laureline’s climactic speech.  I didn’t want to make the emotional adaptation to her.  But the second time I accepted it fully.  In other words, she convinced me.  I had a very similar reaction to The Fifth Element, feeling a little put off the first time but ulitmately being won over.

The depth of the world created in this story is luxurious.  I’m so glad I saw it and I might even convince myself to see it again.  I intend to read the graphic novels. 

I was very disappointed at the horse-race figures for the first weekend.   I hope it does better in Europe than it has here.

I’m not sure this piece will make it into the final version of “A Million Miles Away” but I am finding my own voice and emotional space on the web, getting used to writing freely about entertainment and not giving a damn what anyone thinks. 

A Million Miles Away: In the End

by

0

A Milliion Miles Away:  In the End

9:24 PM 7/23/2017  I’m writing two texts simultaneously tonight, because I’ve had one of the most intense, confusing, and successful weekends I can remember and there is a lot to sort out.  And not only am I sorting it out, but it’s coming down to specifics after years of vagueness.  For years I’ve wanted to write a book called “A Million Miles Away” based on rock singles that have influenced my life.  Baudelaire wrote a book called “Paris Spleen” which is my model – a series of prose poems depicting with “single-effect” precision various qualities of consciousness evoked by each song. 

I have felt prompted to begin this by the death of Chester Bennington.  As I’ve been recording in elsewhere, Bennington’s death was synchronous for me, in that it came two days after I had a vision of suicide by hanging right before I watched an episode of Buffy the Vampire Slayer in which a character commits suicide by hanging.  Bennington’s death by suicide was enough of a synchronicity, but then to find that he died by hanging, and that did so on the 53rd birthday of his friend Chris Cornell, who also died by hanging. 

There was a lot about his death that is going to take time for me to unravel.  It’s going to be a magical process.  The first step was that I was talking to his ghost, and the ghost of Chris Cornell, and I felt prompted to actually begin “A Million Miles Away” on my blog.  I already have a Pinterest board with that title, but I’ve begun to post lines from my story “The Darkening” on my blog and I’m finding they have a magical effect.  So now here’s a second book that I’m working on by means of this same technique, which I call “fractal zoom”.

9:40 PM 7/23/2017  I think Chester is going to help me heal damaged parts of my “mind”, or the fields of energy I perceive when I’m daydreaming about popular music.  Synchronistically, this process began a couple of days before I saw the Rolling Stones exhibit, “Exhibitionism” at Navy Pier, and then that night went to Ravinia to see Exene and John from X, Garbage, and Blondie.  It was a magical experience that clarified a lot of interior states for me and gave me even more to write about. 

There were other things that happened this weekend that also have to be tied together, like the sun entering Leo, Brian’s astrology salon on Thursday night, the release of a new Nine Inch Nails ep, and the opening of Luc Besson’s film Valerian and the struggle I had to get tickets for that.  There’s also some relatedness to upcoming events like the movies Atomic Blonde and Dunkirk, Flashback Weekend, and Wizard World.

I’m not sure what it all means but the synchronous death of Chester Bennington was the tipping point that brought me to begin writing about it, to take the process I began with The Darkening and apply it to “A Million Miles Away”.

So these entries will just be tentative lines and then later I’ll go back and pull them together for a finished manuscript, an effort to emulate Baudelaire’s Paris Spleen.