Author Archives: Joe Nolan
Serious Clown
What happens when you add up every man who’s ever walked on the moon? You count more men than have ever been knighted to officially don the red wig and play the part of the clown, Ronald McDonald. In this surreal documentary, one former Ronald shows us just how hard it can be to escape [...]
Bukowski: On Writing
I try to do all of my writing during the week. Songs I’ll write anytime. Poems anytime. But everything else gets pushed away at least once a week. It seems I’m always editing something or getting a blog post together by Sunday evening, but mostly, during the weekends, words are for reading. Nowadays that means [...]
Discovered: Rosetta Stone
Some discoveries are so profound, their influence can impact culture on more levels than one. The discovery of the Rosetta Stone on July 19, 1799 decoded the Egyptian hieroglyphics — a written language that had been dead for 20 centuries. “Rosetta stone” also became a universal phrase used to describe the final, indispensable clue that [...]
Gonzo Wonderland
This year we celebrate the sesquicentennial of Alice in Wonderland — a landmark of kid lit and a cornerstone of psychedelic fiction. This probably won’t be my last post about Alice. As a fantasy for the wee, Alice inspires illustrations, and it’s assumed that Walt Disney owns that territory. Little did I know that Ralph [...]
Captain America’s Grunge Days
Can you believe it’s been 25 years since the Captain America film premiered? No, I’m not talking about the latest pair of franchise-within-a-franchise films in Marvel’s contemporary cinematic empire. I’m talking about a direct-to-video version of the Steve Rogers story that took liberties with the shield-slinger’s legend to deliver an environmental message back in the [...]
City Lights at 60
When Gutenberg created the printing press humanity took a massive leap in literacy, social equality and political democracy. It’s hard to imagine in this day of tablet phones and digital literature, but after World War II the American paperback created a revolution of its own: it made books available for cheap and made publishing possible [...]
Prison. Drugs. Terror.
Getting started on the blog this week I was inspired by that Snowden trailer I just posted as well as an article I found while adding pages to my Flipboard magazine. Before Oliver Stone became one of the most important directors of his generation he was one of the most important screenwriters of his generation [...]
Stone On Snowden
I’m a huge Oliver Stone fan, and I’m anxious to see what he might do with his new biopic, Snowden, which tells the tale of the heroic whistleblower and is due out this coming Christmas. Knowing Stone I’m sure he’ll attempt to put the entire NSA surveillance program up on the screen just like he [...]
Writing on Walls on Film
I just turned in my column for next week’s Contributor, reviewing the new DVD release of the Jean Michel Basquiat film Downtown ’81. While Style Wars is often mentioned as the first hip-hop documentary, Downtown ’81 was shot a few years earlier even though it wasn’t released until 2000. The film is actually fictional, but [...]
Vintage John Lennon Cartoon
Recently, I was browsing through stories via Flipboard and I came across this delightful piece about a vintage animated short film based on John Lennon’s instantly recognizable cartoon doodles. Here’s a bit from the Brain Pickings site… …six years after the beloved Beatle’s assassination, Ono commissioned independent animator John Canemaker to create a short animated [...]
