Bless you my brothers and sisters, and bless the spirits that have taken me to a new mind with which I seem to be able to correspond more regularly from this digital plateau, here in this too-bright place.
Wanted to share this brand new song I just wrote yesterday. I am currently involved with Tony Doling and Todd Greene - from the band Bulb - on a new project. We have formed a band called Drone, and we are recording a project currently known as Honeycom(b)a. I have been collaborating with Todd, sending him odd bits of lyrics every morning - nearly. Resuming this discipline has really focused the songwriting and yesterday this cool new one arrived. This piece is much more straight Joe Nolan, and will surely make the cut on my next collection (we'll see).
All The Things I'll Give To You
When the stars in the sky Fold their arms and die And the moon begins to cry Its milky dew I'll catch every tear And I'll gather them right here With all the things that I will give to you
When the bird finds its song No longer belongs Amidst the clatter-smashing noisy blue I'll add every note That melancholy martlet wrote To all the things that I will give to you
All the things I'm leaving in the morning All the things I'm giving you tonight After all the times I left you without warning I'll give you all these things and still not make it right
When the mountains lose the sun On their failing falling run To the bottom of the ocean's jealous hue I'll praise every peak In every word I speak About all the things that I will give to you
When the breeze finds it bears More than its fair share Of the strain on every sail that's sailing through I'll place every wind From every shipwreck they've done in In a tin, with all the things I'll give to you
All the things I'm leaving in the morning All the things I'm giving you tonight After all the times I left you without warning I'll give you all these things and still not make it right
(Fin)
Also be sure to open this browser-based player and preview my entire new - 12 song - CD "Blue Turns Black"
These songs will soon be available for downloading, so stay tuned.
I just finished Jean Luc Godard's film Masculin Feminin. This may be my new favorite Godard film. It is right up there with Pierrot le Fou. It actually comes later, but the setting and the black and white film make it feel more like early works like Breathless and Band of Outsiders.
Here are a number of quotes from the man himself. These were compiled by IMDB:
"I make film to make time pass."
"I don't think you should FEEL about a movie. You should feel about a woman. You can't kiss a movie."
"Tracking shots are a question of morality."
[on Los Angeles] "It's a big garage."
"There is no point in having sharp images when you've fuzzy ideas."
"Every edit is a lie."
"Up to now -- since shortly after the Bolshevik Revolution -- most movie makers have been assuming that they know how to make movies. Just like a bad writer doesn't ask himself if he's really capable of writing a novel -- he thinks he knows. If movie makers were building airplanes, there would be an accident every time one took off. But in the movies, these accidents are called Oscars."
"What I want above all is to destroy the idea of culture. Culture is an alibi of imperialism. There is a Ministry of War. There is a Ministry of Culture. Therefore, culture is war."
"I write essays in the form of novels, or novels in the form of essays. I'm still as much of a critic as I ever was during the time of 'Cahiers du Cinema.' The only difference is that instead of writing criticism, I now film it."
"In a house there is the top floor and there is the cellar. The underground filmmakers live in the same house as Hollywood, but they work in the cellar. It's up to them if they like to live in the dark. The Hollywood filmmakers are more intelligent, because they have that sunny top floor."
"A story should have a beginning, a middle and an end, but not necessarily in that order."
"All you need to make a movie is a girl and a gun."
Speaking at the 2004 Cannes Film Festival about filmmaker Michael Moore: "Post-war filmmakers gave us the documentary, Rob Reiner gave us the mockumentary and Moore initiated a third genre, the crockumentary."
"It's over. There was a time maybe when cinema could have improved society, but that time was missed."
"In the beginning I believed in Cannes, but now it's just for publicity. People come to Cannes just to advertise their films, not with a particular message. But the advantage is that if you go to the festival, you get so much press coverage in three days that it advertises the film for the rest of the year."
"People in life quote as they please, so we have the right to quote as we please. Therefore I show people quoting, merely making sure that they quote what pleases me."
[on cinema] "Truth twenty-four times a second."
"You don't make a movie, the movie makes you."
"My aesthetic is that of the sniper on the roof."
"Cinema is the most beautiful fraud in the world."
As promised, here are the next three installments of the soul music series I am writing for Culture Grits. The latest installment will be there sometime this coming weekend (?) and will tell the beginnings of the Otis Redding story.
Joe Nolan was born under a bad sign on June 13th in Detroit, Michigan in the last Metal Year of the Dog. Polymath, provocateur, inter-media artist, his tell-tale signs have turned up in music, visual art, journalism, poetry, fiction, video and film. A double Gemini, his interests range from the pharmacology of phenomenology to fly fishing; from mysticism to mixed martial arts; from Chaos to counting angels on the heads of pins. He has finished recording his third CD,
"Blue Turns Black"in Nashville, Tennessee. Click on
here, to visit his homepage and explore the rest of this site.
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Love and happiness to us all, every one.
