Author Archives: Joe Nolan
Warhol ’65
1965, 50 years ago, was a big year for Andy Warhol, the filmmaker: He met Edie Sedgwick who starred in one of his best films, that year’s Poor Little Rich Girl. He also began collaborating with Paul Morrissey who helped Warhol take his cinematic ambitions to another level. Things were going so well behind the [...]
Science + Art = Symmetry
We often think of science and art as opposites that might never meet. In truth, the two have always had much in common and this new meeting of opera and particle physics demonstrates that we humans are at our best when our intellects and our imaginations combine and cooperate. The site for the new Symmetry [...]
Kerouac’s Crash
Dennis McNally is the author of my favorite Jack Kerouac biography, Desolation Angel. I love the book because it places Kerouac’s story in the context of a creative movement that saw artists of every stripe striving for their authentic, original, individual voices. McNally invokes Monk, Cassavetes, Dean, Pollock and Brando into his universe, demonstrating that [...]
Going, Going, Gonzo!
Fear and Loathing On the Road to Hollywood is a documentary featuring writer Hunter S. Thompson and artist Ralph Steadman on a road trip to Tinsel Town. Also known as Fear and Loathing in Gonzovision, the Documentary Heaven site has the skinny… A fascinating, 30 year old BBC documentary on the Good Doctor and Ralph [...]
John & Yoko TV Movie
Five years after his assassination, this made-for-television drama tells the story of John Lennon and Yoko Ono. I wasn’t aware of John and Yoko a Love Story before my girlfriend discovered it online, but it’s definitely worth watching. The 1985 flick picks up at the height of the fallout of John’s comments about The Beatles [...]
Dylan, Electrified
50 years ago, Bob Dylan released Bringing It All Back Home. Side two of the album featured the acoustic sound that most of the singer/songwriter’s fans may have expected — Dylan’s previous release, Another Side of Bob Dylan, found the artist abandoning the topical subjects that marked his earlier releases in favor of increasingly hypnotic [...]
Everyday Acid
While the news is full of the novel progress being made on the marijuana liberation front, L.S.D. is also making inroads into the mainstream via the same scientific settings where the acid was born — hell, the psychedelic substance even has its own Kickstarter campaign. Here’s the words from the Irish Examiner… A crowd funding [...]
The Predictions of Philip K. Dick
Here’s another post that deals in the dubious doings of failed prophecy… In 1981, Philip K. Dick seemed to cast himself as one of the Precogs from Minority Report when he offered a list of his own prognostications to be published in the collection Book of Predictions. Here’s what PKD saw when he stared into [...]
