If you've been following these blogs, you know that I am a fan of mixed martial arts. I have trained in Tae Kwon Do, Kung Fu, American Boxing and Judo, but modern mixed martial arts is more beautiful and practical than anything I had seen before I watched my first match.
A fighter who caught my eye early on was Miquel Angel Torres. For months now he has been my favorite fighter and after seeing the way he tore apart Manny Tapia, I now feel he is in contention for best-pound-for-pound fighter along with Anderson Silva.
Uriah Faber breathing down their collective neck.
Here is the word on Torres' recent defeat of Manny Tapia:
As the second round started Tapia landed a big right hand that Super Torres apparently didn’t feel. Unfazed by the “Mangler’s” power shot, Torres connected with a beautiful spinning back fist just before a clean right hand drops Tapia to the canvas.
The Hard Rock erupted into chants of, “Torres, Torres.”
Tapia leaped quickly to his feet but the challenger was hurt and a methodical Miguel Torres capitalized with combo that again sent Tapia crashing to the floor, where Miguel assaulted Tapia with a flurry of strong right hands and elbows. At 3:04 into the second round Josh Rosenthal stepped in to reveal a beaten and bloodied Manny Tapia.
“I wanted to fight a little bit calm this time,” Torres said in the post fight interview. “Last time I fought, I got kind of emotional and got kind of crazy. If I calm myself down, I fight like this pretty much all the time. I knew Manny was gonna come with big punches. I wanted to keep my range, use my jab to measure him up and then throw a couple of feints and a big right hand.”
Miguel Torres is in a class of his own. The worst thing about that is he knows it.
That’s not a bad thing for the sport, it’s not a bad thing for writers or fans and it damn sure isn’t a bad thing for the WEC. It’s a bad thing for Brian Bowels, it’s bad for Will Ribeiro and Joey Benavidez, hell it’s bad for any mixed martial artist that weighs 135 pounds.
If the catchweight bout between Miguel Torres and Urijah Faber ever happens I think it’ll be bad for him too. The performance Miguel put on Wednesday night was special. Special because his BJJ is special, it’s like his pistol and he can pull the trigger whenever he wants to.
The special thing is, Miguel never pulled the trigger.
Watch the first and second round here. Notice Torres' incredible left jab as well as his use of unorthodox strikes like a Tae Kwon Do style rolling ax kick and a spinning back fist that spells the beginning of the end for Tapia.
Now crank up the sound and check out these new tunes!
Explore this Santa's Workshop and listen to - and purchase - my new CD at your favorite online outlet. Also click the VIDEO button to watch the short film REvolution featuring yours truly on the soundtrack.
Enjoy!
Be gentle in your sleepy hands on this world.
Be a killer in Heaven.
I hope all of you are making plans to see friends and loved ones in the coming weeks, and I also hope - despite dire forecasts - that 2009 can bring the world peace and goodwill.
The same wish I have wished every year since I was a kid.
Maybe this time...
I am happy that so many new subscribers have been checking out this blog - and this site - and I am looking forward to being in touch over the coming year.
In addition to all the visitors who've been sharing their insomnia with us, we have also added a new blogroll in the right-hand sidebar. Right now there are only two entries, but keep your eyes peeled for more in the coming weeks.
Perambulating the Bounds is the visual art blog of Nashville Illuminatus, David Maddox. Taste Buds is the food/recipe blog of my pal/neighbor/fellow wino Barbara. She is a gardener and a neuroscientist. But more importantly for our purposes, she is a gourmand and experimental home chef, specializing in dishes from her home in Germany. Her pretzels are a knockout!
If you've been enjoying this blog this year, please consider supporting our efforts by purchasing the new CD, Blue Turns Black. The collection has been generating great comments and word of mouth. Download the CD at your favorite digital store and make copies for your friends. It's a great stocking stuffer and it will help us stay well fed enough to not sleep for another year...
Explore this Santa's Workshop and listen to - and purchase - my new CD at your favorite online outlet. Also click the VIDEO button to watch the short film REvolution featuring yours truly on the soundtrack.
Enjoy!
Be gentle in your sleepy hands on this world.
Be a killer in Heaven.
For those of you in the State of Tennessee, I'd like to encourage you to check out the latest issue of Number: An Independent Journal of the Arts. In my ongoing role as cultural polymath and provocateur, I contribute my writing to a number of different print and online publications. Number is a Southeastern art journal, published quarterly by the University of Memphis.
I have been writing art reviews/interviews with Number for years. For this latest issue, I was asked to serve as guest editor. Having put together a team including some of Nashville's most well-known and respected cultural commentators, we assembled a version of the journal that was bold, brash and beautiful, while remaining warmly familiar.
IMHO :)
Plese pick it up and check it out a gallery, museum, school or cafe near you. Just off the top of my head, Nashvillians can get it at Frist Center, Zeitgeist Gallery, Cheekwood, Watkins and the Vanderbilt Fine Art Gallery.
I will post a link to a .pdf file soon for the rest of ya.
In the meantime, here is the editorial I wrote for this issue.
Enjoy!
9 for #62
Small is the number of them that see with their own eyes, and feel with their own hearts.
- Albert Einstein
Like many good things, this all started with a party...
In Nashville - about a year and a half ago - I was at a celebration for a friend coming home for a visit. Down the street from my apartment on Belmont Boulevard, another acquaintance hosted a generous gathering in her honor: a lovely night, a short walk, comrades, drinks, and an interesting proposition.
One such comrade - Gadsby Creson - had made the trip from Memphis. Her new husband - Memphis' own Dwayne Butcher - had come along as well. Dwayne and I had met before, but not often and never for long. We had been in contact mostly through our mutual association with Number.
Having a chance to get (re)acquainted, the subject of the Journal came up. It turned out that Dwayne had recently joined the board of directors at Number, and he and our fearless leader – Leslie Leubbers – had been conjuring a sea change.
The simple ideas we spoke of that night transformed, multiplied and grew over time. Magical beanstalks can lead to humiliation as surely as The Goose That Lays The Golden Egg, and one is wise to watch such verdant progress with ax in hand.
In this case, the gamble has paid off.
This is the first of four upcoming issues of Number:An Independent Journal of the Arts that will challenge familiar assumptions about this publication's range, depth, variety, and voice, while also serving as an undeniable reminder of Number's place in Tennessee as its most important regional, visual arts publication.
Each issue of the upcoming run will be curated by a guest editor: myself in Nashville, xxx in Knoxville, xxx in Chattanooga, xxx back in Memphis. By that time – a year from now – Dwayne Butcher will take the wheel as the new full-time editor of Number, replacing the unforgettable Leslie Leubbers.
I have been lucky to work with Leslie longer than I have worked with any other editor. Her encouragement of my writing has been invaluable, and she has given me many opportunities to contribute to this Journal and become invested in its ongoing legacy.
Thank you, Leslie.
Since that night at the party – when Dwayne first tested my interest in guest editing an issue of this Journal – I have been asking myself two questions: “What is Number?” and “What can it be?”. Heretofore, Number has been the only publication that has consistently brought an intelligent, insightful voice to the visual arts throughout the state. It is literally one-of-a-kind. Given the opportunity to re-imagine the Journal, I began to focus on the second question.
This issue of Number - primarily - covers the Nashville art scene in a way that has never been possible in the Journal. Traditionally, Number favors the goings-on in its own backyard of Memphis. This is due to logistics more than a lack of desire to fully-cover the rest of the state. It is likely that these next issues will favor – if not spotlight – the localities of each of the guest editors. This is the first time that Number will be able to deeply involve itself in these particular frontiers, and – one hopes – that the treasures uncovered will be revelatory. In addition, each editor will be in the enviable position of transforming the Journal to align it with their particular (peculiar?) understanding of the poetry, pathos, politics, and people that make up their own little corner of the visual arts scene in The Volunteer State.
The Journal you are holding in your hand is equally familiar and foreign, explicit and exotic. Here we have the expected critiques of contemporary art exhibitions, but from fresh voices, speaking strange ecstasies with rough tongues. In addition, the horizon recedes in this new landscape to include reportage, memoir, travelogue and essay, twisted into a tapestry of sensations that evokes morning prayers, feral bunnies, 7” records, and midnight movies watched with wanting eyes. Huge abstractions eat one commentator alive, while another is hard pressed to find the gallery he is parked directly in front of.
Both John Ford and John Wayne swagger through this newsprint prairie. In Ford's movie, The Quiet Man, Sean Thornton (Wayne) moves to Ireland, searching for himself in the land of his fathers after killing an opponent in the boxing ring. Number is facing a similar transformation: rediscovering itself among the people and places that have always defined it.
In the pages you are about to turn, birds take wing over the Giza Plateau as paint pours across a canvas to form a syn-aesthetic geography. And yet, we are at home, in our beds at night, the wind through the windows, the solemn footsteps in the other room, a head-full of dreams half-realized, but beckoning. A clean, well-lighted place full of images and inspiration may be subsumed by the dim revelations of The Spectacle, but the faithful still make their joyful noise in the night.
Seeing this city's art community through the eyes of the writers, artists, educators, photographers, grifters and stow-aways that have made this document possible, I'm reminded of something a young friend of mine recently wrote:
“...you get what you believe in.” *
Amen, little brother.
Don't forget the graffiti on the wall, around the way, down Belmont Boulevard - The Street of Dreams - where our holy quest first began:
“Be brave.” **
Joe Nolan is a poet, musician and freelance writer living in Nashville, TN. Find out more about his projects at www.joenolan.com
While the world as you know it explodes into pure cosmic possibility, you may be thinking, "Hey? I wish I had some great jams to kick it to."
Never fear! Explore this treasure chest and listen to - and purchase - my new CD at your favorite online outlet. Also click the VIDEO button to watch the short film REvolution featuring yours truly on the soundtrack.
Enjoy!
Be gentle in your sleepy hands on this world.
Be a killer in Heaven.
Here we go again - up the down ramp, in the out door, showing our faces without an invite. Might as well pour a drink and hit the buffet, we're here now...
So I woke up from disturbing dreams last night. I had been wandering through the catacombs of Morpheus, tangled in a deep-green reverie that found me and my friend LS in an old, dark, stanky factory building that I was - evidently - using as some kind of art space/studio.
I know this because in my dreamwanderings, the helpful narrator who accompanied our journey as a disembodied voice - and a reassuring presence - equated this place with the old Fugitive Art Collective building off Chestnut, in Nashville. Believe it or not Fugitives, this place was far worse - and much more mysterious.
My little piece of Alighierian real estate was littered with fallen beams and twisted girders, snow storms of dust erupting from doorways filled with blue New-Moonlight. Ornate, leaded mirrors evoked restless ghosts in this corner, asthmatic drafts wheezed threatening poetry in that. Tres spooky mes freres. Tres spooky.
And then we woke up.
Or I did.
I left LS behind to take more notes for this report. Good job, darling. Thanks for being nice to me.
Finding myself semi-conscious - on the Street of Dreams - at 4 a.m. I took a second to find a strange narrative to go back to sleepy to on the Internet. However - immediately following three cautious steps across my floor - I slipped...all the way down the rabbit hole...
This Friday, December 12, will be marked in the expanse of Heaven by a full moon. This full moon is quite special, as our lunar lamp will be closer to the Earth than it has been in the last 15 years.
The last time the moon was passing by in this manner was in 2005. Its passing coincided with an event we have all come to refer to as The Tsunami.
There is reason to believe we may be in for another natural disaster with the appearance of this full moon. The Internet is abuzz with doomsday predictions, and overflowing with reports of bizarre animal behavior and strange geothermal phenomena...
My cats, they are CRAZY! They act like they are starving, they are fat and have always been well cared for. They run in a pack ahead of me to the kitchen and jump up on their food area, they jump into the trashcan where we keep the pet food to eat out of the bag, but if I take the bag and place it on the feeding shelf, they wont eat it there and run and jump in the trashcan when I open it to feed the dogs...My dogs wont eat out of their own bowls, they want ANYONES but their own. The chickens are attacking when we step into the coop, they have always been like pets, so yes Id say my pets are acting strange. And the coyotes are howling alot, I almost cried when I heard them the other night, they seem so intense about something...
Today as we were driving up a small road in one of the villages there were three vultures on the ground very near the road. It would have been easy for a motorist to run over them. They seemed to be confused Then way out in the countryside in the middle of nowhere an enormous flock of pigeons flying very elaborate patterns in the sky. I have never seen pigeons in the countryside like this.
A goose tried to land on the expressway today. I was on the interstate and saw this large goose by itself coming closer toward the road. I watched and assumed it was going to swoop back up but it did not! It was extremely close to shaving its own head off across my windshield. I felt really sorry for it. It barely made it to the side of the interstate and was obviously sick and disoriented. It was odd though.
I called up a local well drilling company today, the one that is nearest by and services most of the wells in this area of Arkansas. I asked about the stories about wells drying up all over. I was told, "my father has been doing this for 45 years and he's never seen anything like it before. Water levels are dropping 300 feet in some areas, we don't have any idea what is happening.
All of these reports come from areas in the Central United States, and the locations all fall along the New Madrid fault line. This is particularly worrisome for Tennesseans like myself. Tennessee did a study this year that predicts devastating aftermath for the State of Tennessee in the event of an earthquake along the New Madrid fault line.
If you are the suspicious type - like all of us here at Insomnia - it may seem interesting that the results of such a study would be released weeks before a novel lunar event that may be affecting animals, atomosphere and earth in a way that seems to allude to a possible ground-shaker in the near-future.
Certainly the powers that be are fully aware of the cycles of the Mirror of the Sun...
Could this report be a "warning" that won't raise too much alarm?
The most dramatic example of nature-gone-mad in this impending wave of seismic weirdness comes to the attention of Insomnia via our agents in the Hoosier State:
MARKLE, Ind. -- Five deer that wandered onto a highway overpass jumped to their deaths onto Interstate 69, one of them crashing through a tractor-trailer's windshield, police said.
After the animals' fatal plunge, their mangled carcasses littered the expressway to the horror of motorists who approached Friday's scene in the northbound lanes of I-69.
Wells County EMS paramedic Andy Stimpson said he wasn't prepared for what he saw when he arrived at the crash scene at the U.S. 224 overpass about 20 miles southwest of Fort Wayne.
"It's the weirdest run I've ever had in 28 years," he said.
John Salb, a spokesman for the state Department of Natural Resources, said the deer may have been spooked by cars as they were crossing the overpass and jumped from the overpass, not knowing that a busy highway was far below them.
The 20- to 30-foot fall killed all five deer about 12:30 p.m. Friday, said Brian Jenks, a dispatcher with the Huntington County Sheriff's Department.
The last of the five deer went through the windshield of a tractor-trailer rig, but the driver was not injured, police said.
DNR spokesman Phil Bloom said that many factors -- including breeding season, farmers removing crops and the presence of hunters in fields -- may have contributed.
Farmers are also removing the last of their crops from the fields, reducing the animals' food supply even as deer breeding season is in full swing.
Any of these factors could have pushed the deer onto the highway overpass, Bloom said.
The I-69/U.S. 224 interchange is a likely spot for wildlife and humans to collide. The west side of the interchange is bordered by privately owned fields and the Markle State Recreation area, which is popular with hunters, Jenks said.
The east side of the interchange, an area that's heavy with traffic, marks the edge of the town of Markle.
In addtition, the Web Bot has been picking up on a distrubance in The Force. The 'Bot was originally designed to make predictions in financial markets, but many claim it predicted 9-11 and other events. Here's what the 'Bot has to say about this weekend:
The Web Bot foresees a West Coast/Vancouver area large-scale earthquake around December 12, 2008. Many have seen signs of this coming for quite some time. This may not be the “Big One”, but it will prove to be significant and very devastating to the area.
Although the area of the New Madrid fault seems to be stable for the time being, a quick Google News search reveals a lot of seismic activity in the last few days in areas as diverse as California, Iran, Pakistan and China.
Of interest to you 2012'ers out there, our fair planet just entered into the 6th Day of the Mayan 7 Day Creation Cycle. This could be a period of tumultuous change according to our brown brothers, but it should also bode well. In the past, 6th Day periods have coincided with The Renaissance and the 50's Beat scene that gave rise to the American Counter Culture.
Mayan 6th Day periods also have a numerical resonance with the Number 13. A fact that has left a growing ache in our pants - and a tiny flame in our hearts - here at Insomnia.
Clearly, there are many changes coming our way in the next five years. Regardless of the circumstances we are surrounded by, it is our decisions that make all difference regardless of the wonders we face.
In the words of my old pal, Jim Morrison:
"I tell you what, I'm gonna get my kicks before the whole shithouse goes up in flames. Alright. AWWWWWWWWWRRRRRRIIIIGHHHHHHT!"
Keep on rockin' in the Free World.
While the world as you know it explodes into pure cosmic possibility, you may be thinking, "Hey? I wish I had some great jams to kick it to."
Never fear! Explore this treasure chest and listen to - and purchase - my new CD at your favorite online outlet. Also click the VIDEO button to watch the short film REvolution featuring yours truly on the soundtrack.
Enjoy!
Be gentle in your sleepy hands on this world.
Be a killer in Heaven.
I trust that we are all enjoying the beginnings of a lovely holiday season. After stuffing foodstuffs from no less than 3 Thanksgiving dinners, I am feeling quite properly fueled up for the race to Christmas.
With that in mind, I am pleased to offer you all this early gift: a free download from my new CD!
Last month, joenolan.com enjoyed nearly 10,000 visits from all over the world. As a thank you - and a Holiday Treat - for everyone who has followed this blog, listened to my tunes, and checked out my new CD, here is a free song:
"The First to Know" is the third song on my new CD Blue Turns Black. "First'" was originally scrawled in a notebook at a patio table at Nashville's Cafe Coco one fall evening. If I remember correctly, Cafe Americano was the drug of choice in those days. The music was added later. When I discovered the move from Cm to G that introduces the song, it seemed like I was on to something.
I am pleased to give this song to you with my wishes for Happy Holidays! Right clck the link and save it to your computer!
Support this site! Download the full CD and burn Blue Turns Black
for a sonic stocking stuffer!
Use this slick jewel box to listen to - and purchase - my new CD at your favorite online outlet. Also click the VIDEO button to watch the short film REvolution featuring yours truly on the soundtrack.
Enjoy!
Be gentle in your sleepy hands on this world.
Be a killer in Heaven.
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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