Author Archives: Joe Nolan
Smack Talk
My man Ezra flipped a sweet Dazed article about music and heroin into our {R}emnants mag on Flipboard yesterday, and sitting down to post it caught my eye. Here’s a bit from Dazed… But heroin has consistently eluded this ebb and flow, from its prominence and influence in the jazz and blues era of the [...]
Lust 40
2017 marks 40 years since the release of Iggy Pop’s Lust for Life. Including the classic title song and the evergreen “Passenger,” the album also features the dark romance of “Tonight” and the jailbait jam, “Sixteen.” I’ve always loved this album as it’s probably the best example of the massive influence that Jim Morrison had [...]
Jarman’s Jubilee
This year we celebrate the 75th birthday of British filmmaker Derek Jarman. Jarman was born on January 31, 1942. I’m always discovering and then keeping tabs on these timely anniversaries of our countercultural forebears, and I’m happy to highlight this one even if I’m getting to it about 7 months too late. The good news [...]
Drumpf Prophecy
Back in the day, if you were a conspiracy theory believer or if you were fascinated by the various countercultures that believe in UFOs or Bigfoot or a vast global cabal of any kind, you were in a fringe community. I’m all ears any time the subject of the JFK assassination comes up, but nowadays [...]
Sun Songs
If you live in Nashville I know you’re excited about the total solar eclipse we’ll experience here on Monday afternoon. I’m watching the programs on a science channel and their countdown just dropped past 13 hours while I was editing the image I’m including with this post. The lion swallowing the sun seemed a good [...]
Defy Day
If you love experimental cinema and you live in Nashville then you’re in luck: the second annual Defy Film Fest starts on Friday night and the event includes screenings of 64 experimental films through Saturday. Here’s a bit from my Critics’ Pick in this week’s Nashville Scene… I was only able to screen a couple [...]
Year of the Blade
Today I came across an RT article where Slovenian philospher Slavov Zizek outlines his conviction that as humans and machines merge, people will lose their individual freedom. Here are some words… “The fact that is what possible to break into, to hack a computer through a DNA, means that our identity, determined by DNA is [...]
Best West
After recent posts about Sam Shepard and Philip Seymour Hoffman it occurred to me that the pair had “True West” in common — Shepard’s Pulitzer Prize nominated play was first produced in 1980, and in the year 2000 Hoffman and John C. Reilly starred as estranged brothers Lee and Austin in another celebrated production of [...]
PSH at 50
I recently got on a kick of remembering the late great Philip Seymour Hoffman before I realized that I’d missed the chance to observe what would have been the actor’s 50th birthday on July 23. Most of Hoffman’s fans didn’t know that he’d struggled with substances in his early 20s. And it came as a [...]
Merry Jerry
Jerry Garcia was born on August 1, 1942 and in 2017 we’re observing his 75th birthday. This anniversary calls to mind my BEST AMERICAN BANDS OF ALL TIME LIST. I won’t get into all of the details of that list here, but I will tell you that when I first made that countdown about 12 [...]
