Author Archives: Joe Nolan
AKA Tania
On February 4, 1974, the Symbionese Liberation Army kidnapped Patty Hearst. What followed depends on your point of view: Was Hearst isolated, raped and brainwashed into becoming a soldier for the army’s revolutionary cause or was she a rich brat playing revolution who would never really suffer the consequences of her actions? Maybe Guerilla: The [...]
Satan Trek
What did William Shatner do between the end of the original Star Trek series and the first Star Trek feature film? Didn’t he make a movie about family curse connected to a Satanic grimoire that featured Anton LaVey as a technical advisor and featured John Travolta in his very first appearance on film? Beware The [...]
Eno Also
Anne and I were driving around in the Nashville sunshine but we couldn’t find her YOUNG AMERICANS disc so we listened to TAKING TIGER MOUNTAIN instead. Since Bowie’s death we’ve been listening to lots of Bowie and watched a cool documentary a few weeks ago. That same night we found a couple of documentaries about [...]
Howard and Bill
Burroughs: The Movie is a 1983 documentary by Howard Brookner about the author William S. Burroughs. Brookner shot the film for five years with Burroughs’ full cooperation. The two became good friends before Brookner died of AIDS in 1989. In 2012 Brookner’s archive was discovered in a variety of locations, and the filmmaker’s nephew, Aaron [...]
Private River
25 years ago in 1991, Gus Van Sant released his masterpiece, My Own Private Idaho. The film starred Keanu Reeves and River Phoenix as street hustlers in the Pacific Northwest in a loose re-telling of Shakespeare’s “Henry IV.” Idaho was one of the first flicks I saw at the first art house theater to become [...]
Remembering Richie Havens
Today we celebrate the birthday of Richie Havens who was born on January 21, 1941. Havens is one of my favorite singer/songwriter’s of all time: his growling vocals were immediately recognizable, his unique open-tuning guitar style emphasized the rhythmic expression of his right hand, and Havens is one of the only artists who consistently made [...]
You Belong to the Night
With the passing of Glenn Frey, the Eagles will never fly again. The band was beloved, but also hated for it. Whether you were an Eagles fan or not, their story is truly compelling and the documentary History of the Eagles: The Story of an American Band is required viewing for contemporary country music fans [...]
Bowie Cuts Up
The late great David Bowie made changing his artistic identity look easy by borrowing freely from every creative discipline within his reach — Bowie studied mime, played the saxophone and was well-versed in Beat Generation lit… Here Bowie demonstrates his own application of Burroughs’ and Brion Gysin’s “Cut-Up” technique… Stay Awake! Please subscribe to my YouTube [...]
Last Words
After being mortally shot in a restaurant urinal, German-Jewish American gangster Dutch Schultz slipped into fever and hallucination before dying. Schultz’s surrealistic screed of last words has since become a thing of literary legend. Here’s the Wiki… Schultz’s last words were a strange stream-of-consciousness babble, spoken in his hospital bed to police officers who attempted [...]
