"The Walk" + New Books

Hi Elizabeth,

Happy Late Night. Just checking in to say hi. I went up to Aliso Canyon twice today, once for an afternoon walk and then again at 7pm when Grimsley wanted to meet me up there for another walk. I hope things are going well for you. I don't know if you are still travelling or not, and I haven't seen any FB posts for a few days, except your concert pic that you posted today, so I am guessing you are busy.

I have just started a John Lennon biography by Philip Norman that I am enjoying very much. It's fun to read about what he was like as a kid, and the writing is so good and so descriptive that you feel you are right there in his neighborhood of Liverpool with him. I am also reading the latest Dr. Farrell book, having finished "Thrice Great Hermetica". The new one's about 9/11, a subject I am very much interested in. Maybe one day I can get a writer and researcher of his caliber to help me find out what happened in 1989.

That would be a book to blow the lid off of everything.

Last night I watched a movie called "The Walk", about a French guy who set up a high wire between the World Trade Center towers in 1974, and then walked across it. I can actually remember the headlines when that happened. That Summer, I was completely engulfed in rock n' roll (in it's greatest year), so even though the news about this French wire walker was major news for a little while, it wasn't something I thought about for long, being 14 years old. But, watching the movie, I certainly remembered hearing and reading the news that day, and feeling the shared astonishment with everyone else at what this guy had done.

If you see the movie, he didn't just walk across the wire from one building to another, which by itself would have been an almost unbelievable act of courage. What he did was to practically become "at home" on the wire, for a short time, like that space belonged to him. And that part I'd forgotten about, but I remembered it while I was watching the movie. What he did goes beyond having great balance and tremendous courage. In that one feat, as depicted in the movie, he more or less lived in mid-air, his mind and body completely attuned to that environment, and I am not sure too many people have ever achieved that kind of metaphysical coupling before, between the physical and spiritual worlds. I think it's so amazing what the guy did, that that's the very reason it wasn't well remembered once the initial publicity wore off. What he did was like a dream.

The movie itself is very good once it gets going. Overall, I'd give it about a 7 out of 10, or maybe a 6.5 because the first hour is somewhat Hollywoodized. But the second hour makes up for that, and the movie as a whole makes you really think about what the guy did, because it wasn't just an acrobatic feat.

And the movie is also about the Twin Towers, and how - no matter what was ultimately done to them - that this one French acrobat and his accomplices did something far more powerful and far more lasting, because he loved those buildings, before they were even completed. Long live Philipe Petit.

xoxoxoxoxoxoxoxoxooxoxoxoxoxo :):)