Author Archives: Joe Nolan
Striking Slaves, Stinging Bees
You might not know it, but here in America we’re nearly one full month into a prison workers’ strike that began on September 9 on the anniversary of the Attica Uprising. I say you may not know it because the mainstream media doesn’t recognize detainees as human beings, and doesn’t think to illuminate the fact [...]
Nazis! Drugs! Madness!
Yesterday morning I came across this The Guardian author interview with Norman Ohler whose new book, Blitzed, is an exhaustive excavation of the drug culture at the center of the Third Reich. Here are a few words… …“Yes, it is strange,” he says, smiling at my giddiness. But then he has long believed in a [...]
Midnight Visitor Waits
If you follow me on Facebook you might have seen my ornery post last week wherein I linked to an announcement about Leonard Cohen’s new album, and complained about my Nashville music peers constantly celebrating “great” songwriters who shouldn’t even be allowed to mutter Cohen’s name in their prayers. GREAT is a big word, and [...]
Banned in Russia
Growing up during the second half of the Cold War, when I was a child the Soviet Union was notable for two reasons: nuclear weapons and censorship. That’s about all I really knew: the Russians and citizens of their satellites can’t read or watch or print what they want. Also they have enough warheads to [...]
Alan’s Angel Angle
Reading some stories on Flipboard the other morning, I came across this piece about Alan Parker’s Mickey Rourke, Robert DeNiro and Lisa Bonet film, Angel Heart. Check out this headline: ALAN PARKER’S ANGEL HEART IS ASTONISHING AS HELL Obviously I had to flip this to find later and post here for y’all. Here’s a bit [...]
Jimi Jams
Over the weekend Open Culture pointed back to one of its own posts to remember Jimi Hendrix’ death in London on September 17, 1970. Here are a couple of great acoustic performances with some words from Open Culture… Solo acoustic recordings of Hendrix—film and audio—are incredibly rare. In fact, the only other footage may be [...]
Horror Europa
It’s only the middle of September, and in the South it still mostly feels like summer outside. By the time I’m driving to the gym in the morning it’s probably going to still feel muggy and hot. There’s talk of a cold front, but the last cold front barely broke before we were back in [...]
Boss Bruce
Yesterday’s post celebrated the David Lynch film Blue Velvet‘s 30th anniversary, but today I wanted to take a second to note that 2016 also marks the 45th anniversary of Fists of Fury — the Bruce Lee action film originally titled The Big Boss when it was released overseas in 1971. The movie was the first [...]
Smith & Lynch
I’ve been seeing a lot of old David Lynch posts popping up as Facebook “Memories” lately, and I was reminded that we’re still celebrating the 30th anniversary of that strange, sad, scary and sensational film, Blue Velvet. It looks like we’ll be getting a new doc about Lynch and his visual art practice soon, but [...]
A Is For Attica
45 years after the prison riot at Attica, we’re still learning new information about the protesters, their grievances, and the murderous suppression their revolt garnered. Attica and the events that took place there all those decades ago were purposely obscured by official lies, brutal beatings and even executions. It’s not necessarily a mainstream news story, [...]
