Author Archives: Joe Nolan
Inevitable Velvets
Back on track with my site live again, and keeping good to my word about celebrating the 50th anniversary of The Velvet Underground and Nico, here’s a short documentary film that brings viewers as close as they can come to getting their hands on a ticket to Andy Warhol’s Exploding Plastic Inevitable. It’s important to [...]
VU 50
Driving home from a carnival today I caught the first bit of a public radio show shouting out the 50th anniversary of The Velvet Underground’s debut album. These cats were arguing that the record is the most influential album in the history of rock. For me that’s a stretch, but there’s no doubt that the [...]
Mountain Song
I don’t post a lot about sports on this blog — Insomnia is a counterculture blog and sports are mostly intrinsically mainstream culture in America. That said, certain extreme outliers are so crazy that they create subcultures that are ever bit as weird as any artists’ enclave, musicians’ scene or drug tribe. The men and [...]
Alien Report
So I wanted to reflect on a paranormal anniversary for this post before I realized there was a current story that dovetailed perfectly with it: 2017 marks the 70th anniversary of Kenneth Arnold’s UFO sighting which marks the beginning of the modern UFO era. Right on time, pranksters are calling up Donald Trump’s new “alien” [...]
May Day
Happy May Day! Here’s an unforgettable scene from one of my favorite movies… Please subscribe to my YouTube channel where I archive all of the videos I curate at Insomnia. Click here to check out more Cinema posts.
Nashville Film Festival #4
Wednesday afternoon I headed to the fest to check out the Animating Reality short cartoon docs block. During the introduction before the program it was explained that so many documentary entries came in as animated films that the fest decided they deserved their very own section. Lately documentaries use animation a lot. It’s a trend, [...]
Nashville Film Festival #3
Last night I hit the Nashville Film Festival for their 8 P.M. screening of the Frayed Shorts program. Every year the Frayed Shorts selections celebrate abbreviated gross-outs, small scares, small sized celebrations of sex, and tiny terrors. After a go for broke introduction by Jason Shawhan — is anyone better? — we were off and [...]
Nashville Film Festival 2
I stuck to shorts again on Monday, checking out the Grow Up Already program of narrative films in the afternoon. Overall these coming-of-age movies were super impressive — Damià Serra’s “On The Roof” features a cast of great young actors dealing with sexuality, bullying and the personal dynamics that can become complicated and even violent [...]
Nashville Film Festival 1
I’ll be posting about the Nashville Film Festival this week — the event got underway this past Thursday afternoon. I saw a number of films before the fest for my annual preview I write for The Contributor. On Thursday I went to pick up my credentials, and was able to score a ticket for the [...]
I, Not I
Following up on yesterday’s post about the relationship between consciousness and reality — yeah, yeah, I’ll get back to the Satanic, Loch Ness, avant garde, performance artists next week — here’s a piece from Curiosity about modern day philosopher Daniel Dennett’s idea that consciousness — Descartes’ “I” — is just an illusion… There’s a quote [...]
