Author Archives: Joe Nolan
Nashville Film Festival Part I
I’ve been spending the last few days checking out various selections at the Nashville film festival. My assistant, Antonia Oakes, came up with a preliminary itinerary of films to which I’ve added a few of my own choices. The flicks I’ve seen so far highlight various countercultures and outsider aesthetics in one way or another. [...]
Bicycle Day, 2015
Happy Bicycle Day! 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.
Beiles And The Beats
Continuing our celebration of National Poetry Month, here are some words about South African poet Sinclair Beiles: Beiles was associated at-a-distance with the Beat Generation, but you have to get a little deeper into their mythology before you find his mark. Beiles was primarily a surrealist poet who was also known for his collaborations with [...]
Yeats and the Faeries Yeats and the Faeries
Continuing our focus on National Poetry Month, here’s an interesting presentation about the great Irish poet W.B. Yeats and his preoccupations with the occult and the folk mythology of Ireland. R F Foster is a renowned Yeats expert. He’s the author of Words Alone: Yeats and his Inheritances. In this video Foster touches upon Yeats’s [...]
Hemperor
Five years ago, on April 15, we lost author and activist Jack Herer. If his name isn’t familiar, the fruits of his labor certainly are. The changing tides regarding marijuana and hemp legislation along with the fault lines that are currently cracking through the edifice of the War on Drugs all owe their contemporary roots [...]
Worst Party Ever
On this day in 1846, the Donner Party set off on their infamous journey from Illinois to California. By February the following year the party would be rescued from their frozen hell in the Sierra Nevada Mountains, embedding their story of ambition, madness and cannibalism in the American psyche forever… Stay Awake! Please subscribe to [...]
Basketball Diarist
April in America is National Poetry Month. Reminded of this today, I immediately thought of Jim Carroll – a prodigy of verse whose hybrid poetic memoirs are required reading for anyone interested in punk era New York city and the decades that followed before Carroll’s death in 2009. Carroll’s musical releases are well-worth a listen, [...]
Lost Beatle
It’s the time of the year when we remember the “Fifth Beatle,” Stuart Sutcliffe who started “The Beetles” with John Lennon before his untimely death at the age of only 21 on April 10, 1962. Stuart was the band’s original bass player as well as a dedicated painter who left the band to pursue a [...]
Grungespiracies
Over the weekend, while many of us were involved in some kind of springtime revelry whether motivated by Easter, the equinox, the lunar eclipse or just the general retreat of the winter weather, I enjoyed a fun Saturday night and a lazy Sunday: I played a set at the Melodia Studio open house on Saturday [...]
Nina Simone: The Legend
I first heard about Nina Simone while reading Sam Shepard biographies which always mention his working as a busboy at the Village Gate, refilling the diva’s ice water glass during her performances in New York in the 1960′s. It was only years later that I fell under her spell and I still think her take [...]
