Author Archives: Joe Nolan
Addressing the Academy…
OK, so back in the day I did some live blogging during the Oscars. Tonight I’m going to watch the broadcast while listening to the commentary from On Cinema at the Cinema. I’m at my girlfriend’s house helping her get some dinner together and editing some photos and notes I took tonight at a community [...]
Black Moon Risin’
On Wednesday afternoon my Facebook wall began to light-up with the frantic news that outsider musician and Nashvillian par-excellence, Dave Cloud, was in an intensive care unit as a result of his battle with cancer. The news came out of nowhere for most of the rocker’s friends and admirers and yesterday’s announcement of his death [...]
Lost Lion
Philip Levine, poet and son of Detroit, died on Valentine’s Day. He was an accomplished man who’d lived a long life, but anytime we lose a voice like his the silence it leaves behind is a roaring one. Levine’s poetry reached back to William Carlos Williams’ confrontations with the blunt facts of reality, and the [...]
Who is Tom Wilson?
I’m fascinated by the career of lesser-known music producer Tom Wilson. One reason Wilson is so fascinating is the fact that he played a central role in the development of crucial musical movements of the 1960′s, but even today’s most informed music maniacs offer only blank stares at the mention of his name. That’s why [...]
Jodorowsky’s Poetic Money
Alejandro Jodorowsky is one of my favorite filmmakers, but that won’t come as a surprise to anyone who follows my posts. I’ve seen all of the master’s films and was particularly excited by last year’s release of both The Dance of Reality and the documentary Jodorowsky’s Dune. The former was Jodo’s most recent feature film [...]
Tahiti’s Third Sex
This weekend I watched a documentary about a group of pioneering Germans who tried to create a Utopian society on an island in the Gallapagos chain. Like many Utopian experiments this one devolved into tragedy. The film lead my girlfriend and I down a rabbit hole about the impact that other settlers and British imperialism [...]
Henry Ford’s Hempmobile
Henry Ford filed a patent for a plastic car on January 13, 1942. At first glance, this fact struck me a curiosity — an interesting development that could’ve been. In truth, Ford had been working with the his plastic prototypes for at least a year before filing and the “plastic” aspect of the car was [...]
Gene Vincent Lives
Today we celebrate the birthday of one of rock ‘n’roll’s original madmen: Gene Vincent embodied sex, drugs and rock ‘n’ roll about a decade before the emergence of an American generation that would take hold of those values and recreate world culture in a new era of freedom and expression. By 1969 Vincent was a [...]
This American Burroughs
Hey, Insomniacs! I’m getting a slow start on the week after spending Monday driving back from Asheville, North Carolina. I played a solo singer/songwriter gig there over the weekend and had a real blast bumming around that great little mountain town with my girlfriend. Check out my YouTube channel to see videos from the show. On [...]
Losing the Bomb
On February 5, 1958, the United States military lost an armed hydrogen bomb off the coast of Savannah, Georgia. Why don’t you take a second to read that again — somewhere off the coast of Georgia, there is a massive bomb that’s 500 times more powerful than the one dropped on Hiroshima. Perhaps the most [...]
