Author Archives: Joe Nolan
Good Witch
If you live in Nashville and you’re planning to see a movie over the weekend pick up a copy of The Contributor and read my review of a fascinating new film called The Witch. Here are a few of my thoughts… Winter is a notoriously slow season for cinema — studios are busy promoting last [...]
Austin Osman Song
Chaos magic is the emergent discipline of the occult revival of the 21st century, and chaos magic pioneer Austin Osman Spare is its spotlighted personality. Spare died in mostly-anonymous squalor in 1956, but in this new era his cult of personality is second only to Crowley, and his magical concepts and haunted art continue to [...]
The Man in White
Today we celebrate the 1931 birthday of author Tom Wolfe who became a hero of the counterculture with the 1968 publication of The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test — an experimental report on the drug culture surrounding Ken Kesey and the Merry Pranksters. Wolfe is a New Journalism pioneer whose use of fictional devices in his [...]
Bye, Bye, Bobby
Today we remember the death of Bobby Sands following a hunger strike by Irish republican prisoners at the HM Prison Maze which began on this day in 1981. Sands and his fellow Provisional Irish Republican Army inmates were afforded what amounted to POW status (Special Category Status) determined by negotiations between the IRA and the [...]
Hattie’s Leap
On February 29, 1940, Hattie McDaniel became the first African American to win an Academy Award…. Stay Awake! Please subscribe to my YouTube channel where I archive all of the videos I curate at Insomnia. Click here to check out more Counter Culture posts.
Huey’s Day
On February 17 we celebrate the 1942 birthday of the founder of the Black Panther Party, Huey P. Newton. Anyone paying attention to Black Lives Matter can’t help but see parallels to the same challenges that faced the Black Panthers way back in the 1960′s. Here’s a 1968 documentary film made by the Panthers: Huey! [...]
Galileo: Science and Sorcery
Getting started on the blog a day late this week. Spent the day yesterday driving back to Nashville from a visit to Asheville, NC. We had a gloomy, but pretty-in-a-melancholy-way drive through the Smokies on Friday, but yesterday low temps and rain made it a pretty slow, tense drive, and didn’t leave a lot of [...]
Pink Fritz
I think of this blog primarily as a “countercultural” clearing house. It’s hard to define what “counterculture” even means in a world where sex, drugs and rock ‘n’ roll won the war a long time ago. My movie posts are always counter cultural in their way and today’s post is no different. Fritz Lang’s Metropolis [...]
TAXI DRIVER at 40
Three years ago I reviewed Steve Schapiro’s book of Taxi Driver photographs. Here are some of those words… Of all the brilliant gems of 1970′s America’s New Hollywood Cinema, Martin Scorsese’s Taxi Driver may be the grimiest and goriest. Beyond Paul Schrader’s loneliness-crazed script or Scorsese’s street-level shooting, it’s Robert DeNiro’s portrait of the mohawked, [...]
Maid Made Mad
It mostly doesn’t work out when novelists become film directors. At best, authors seem to make bizarre cult classics: Tom McGuane’s 92 In The Shade comes to mind, and Stephen King’s Maximum Overdrive has its memorable moments of coke-fueled camp. But both pale to the high weirdness and real-life violence in Norman Mailer’s Maidstone: From [...]
