Today we celebrate the birthday of novelist and poet, Jack Kerouac. Kerouac didn’t give the Beat Generation its name, but his image and influence on mid-20th century literature are immeasurable, and his On the Road novel continue to inspire the imaginations of young freedom-seekers all over the world. Kerouac followed in the footsteps of heroes like Thomas Wolfe and Walt Whitman to pioneer a musical, expressive prose style that reflected the inventive spontaneity of jazz and heralded the cultural revolution of the 1960s.

Kerouac struggled through his young adult life, completing most of his major writing before the publication of On the Road brought him into the spotlight of literary celebrity. The often hermetic Kerouac had an ideal character for writing, but was uneasy and anxious with the expectations and notoriety that fame brought. He retreated into alcoholism and conservative politics and religion before he drank himself to death at the age of 47.

My favorite Kerouac book is The Subterraneans. The novella has all of the energy of On the Road, but the single setting in San Francisco focuses the narrative and heightens Kerouac’s prose. Check out this deep-dive documentary, What Happened to Kerouac from 1986…

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My new single, “Savage Nomads” will be released on Tuesday. There are lots of ways to put music out there these days — I’ve used SoundCloud, BandCamp and Tunecore separately and simultaneously for years. Lately I’ve been releasing a new single every few months on Bandcamp, but I decided to to something different this time. It seemed like the blockchain was the only place to put my music at this moment because of all the creative insights I’ve had since becoming a part of the Steemit community.

Here’s a video that I posted after my first month on Steemit. I’m sharing this again because it demonstrates how being on the site has clarified my creativity and shown me a way forward after a frustrating period of having to come to grips with the fact that I wasn’t getting my music across because I wasn’t getting it to the audience that could hear it. If you’re a creative artist with talent and drive, but you’re also hungry for a breakthrough, I hope these thoughts can help!

Please follow the goings on at my DSound page — the song will drop in the next 24 hours. Take this opportunity to join the Steemit community and start being compensated for your curation and content. Steemit is the anti-Facebook and there are very active music and photography communities on the site.

In anticipation I have some good mentions I’m rolling out and I’m doing some radio and podcasts here in Nashville to help promote the song. I’m most excited about the capsule review the song got from legendary music critic Anthony DeCurtis…

“Savage Nomads” evokes its smart sources, but isn’t overwhelmed by them. It feels loose, free and contemporary — full of pleasure and ideas.”

– Anthony DeCurtis, Author, “Lou Reed: A Life”

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Do you remember your dreams? Do you remember yesterday night?

Here’s a song from our East Side Story Telling set. Have a good week. Tell someone a story…

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Following up on yesterday’s post about the relationship between consciousness and reality — yeah, yeah, I’ll get back to the Satanic, Loch Ness, avant garde, performance artists next week — here’s a piece from Curiosity about modern day philosopher Daniel Dennett’s idea that consciousness — Descartes’ “I” — is just an illusion…

There’s a quote by religion professor Lee Siegel that Dennett use to illustrate his point: “Real magic is the magic that’s not real. While the magic that is real, that can actually be done, is not real magic.” There’s nobody out there sawing people in half and putting them back together again, only illusionists using various tricks to make it appear that that’s the case. According to Dennett, the same is true of consciousness. The only difference is that our brains are triple-billed as the saw-wielding magician, the lovely assistant trapped in the box, and the mystified audience. What we think of as our consciousness is actually our brains pulling a number of tricks to conjure up the world as we experience it. But in reality, it’s all smoke, mirrors, and rapidly firing neurons.

If that’s a bit heady, then get ready for Dennett’s next metaphor: If our brain is a smartphone, then consciousness is the screen. In other words, consciousness is not how our brain works, it’s only how we interface with it. A screen doesn’t really have much to do with how the phone works, and in fact, the phone could do nearly everything it does without it. It just wouldn’t be useable by humans. According to Dennett, our brains are like smartphones in another way as well: they are basically robots, or thinking machines, and like any robot, they need a medium through which to communicate with their users. But it goes even further than that: if our brains are robots, then our neurons are smaller robots, which are in turn made up of even smaller robots. So even if we lose the concept of consciousness along the way, we’re still pretty incredible “machines.”

Here’s another cool video about philosophy and consciousness, this time dealing with the Problem of Other Minds and Philosophical Zombies. Oh my…

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This year we celebrate the 25th anniversary of Spike Lee’s masterpiece, Malcolm X. Here’s Roger Ebert reviewing the film when it debuted in 1992…

…Walking into “Malcolm X,” I expected an angrier film than Spike Lee has made. This film is not an assault but an explanation, and it is not exclusionary; it deliberately addresses all races in its audience. White people, going into the film, may expect to meet a Malcolm X who will attack them, but they will find a Malcolm X whose experiences and motives make him understandable and finally heroic.

Reasonable viewers are likely to conclude that, having gone through similar experiences, they might also have arrived at the same place.

Black viewers will not be surprised by Malcolm’s experiences and the racism he lived through, but they may be surprised to find that he was less one-dimensional than his image, that he was capable of self-criticism and was developing his ideas right up until the day he died.

Spike Lee is not only one of the best filmmakers in America, but one of the most crucially important, because his films address the central subject of race. He doesn’t use sentimentality or political cliches, but shows how his characters live, and why.

Here’s Spike Lee talking about Denzel Washington’s devastating turn in the title role…

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The British horror film The Wicker Man (1973) is one of my favorite movies in any genre. The flick is spooky throughout, but this story of a police officer investigating a missing child case on a remote island is also funny, artful, campy and sexy, and it features a ubiquitous soundtrack that makes this macabre masterpiece play almost like a musical. It’s a truly unique movie, and it joins Witchfinder General (1968) and The Blood on Satan’s Claw (1971) on a shortlist of classics in the short-lived folk horror genre.

The Wicker Man‘s director, Robin Hardy died on July 1 at the age of 86. Here are two documentaries about his classic film: Burnt Offering: The Cult of The Wicker Man and The Wicker Man Enigma…

Stay Awake!

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It mostly doesn’t work out when novelists become film directors. At best, authors seem to make bizarre cult classics: Tom McGuane’s 92 In The Shade comes to mind, and Stephen King’s Maximum Overdrive has its memorable moments of coke-fueled camp. But both pale to the high weirdness and real-life violence in Norman Mailer’s Maidstone:

From the Criterion site…

Over a booze-fueled, increasingly hectic five-day shoot in East Hampton, Norman Mailer and his cast and crew spontaneously unloaded onto film the lurid and loony chronicle of U.S. presidential candidate and filmmaker Norman T. Kingsley debating and attacking his hangers-on and enemies. This gonzo narrative, “an inkblot test of Mailer’s own subconscious” (Time), becomes something like a documentary on its own making when costar Rip Torn breaks the fourth wall in one of cinema’s most alarming on-screen outbursts.

This week we celebrate the birthday of Rip Torn who turned 85 on February 6. Here’s Maidstone…

Stay Awake!

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Thanksgiving is an important day: It marks the beginning of the traditional holiday season for most white, Christian Americans and it reminds all citizens of when we first began to call this land our home.

These events have importance in and of themselves and should not be dismissed. However, the world is a more complicated place than the stories we tell ourselves often allow for and the implications of the coming of the white man to the shores of New England, seen from another angle, are chilling, terrible and murderous.

To keep things in perspective, why not listen to this wonderful poem by one of our favorites here at the Insomnia blog? Here is William S. Burroughs’ “A Thanksgiving Prayer.” Happy Holidays!

Stay Awake!

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John Carpenter’s They Live (1988) doesn’t sound like a classic movie: A drifter wanders into Nowheresville USA — a Los Angeles neighborhood devastated by an economic recession. After witnessing some suspicious activity surrounding a strange church, the man discovers a box of special sunglasses which reveal that the reality he’s come to take for granted is anything but what is seems. Add a starring role for professional wrestler “Rowdy” Roddy Piper and one would assume They Live was potboiler sci-fi with a clever gimmick and a B-list “star.”

The problem with this assessment is that it forgets that this is a movie made by a man who practically created slasher films with Halloween and whose ability to infuse cliche-filled genres with deep, emotional and subversive content made him a legend.

They Live is a conspiracy-laden masterpiece of popcorn paranoia that manages to be as entertaining as it is startling. A class war battering ram of a movie, the flick makes the moneyed into monsters while elevating its blue collar lead to the status of a revolutionary hero.

No spoilers here. If you haven’t seen the flick, do! Whether you have or not, enjoy this take by Carpenter himself, talking about his inspirations for They Live in celebration of the film’s 25th birthday. The LA Times has the skinny:

Carpenter discussed his motivation in making “They Live,” a campy but subversive sci-fi flick that starred professional wrestler “Rowdy” Roddy Piper as the film’s blue-collar hero Nada, who discovers an alien conspiracy to mind-control the people of Earth using invisible messages. Carpenter called “They Live” his most political film and said it was his response to consumerism and class disparity in the 1980s.

“By the end of the ’70s there was a backlash against everything in the ’60s, and that’s what the ’80s were, and Ronald Reagan became president, and Reagonomics came in,” Carpenter told the sold-out theater at the Chinese 6 Theatres in Hollywood. “So a lot of the ideals that I grew up with were under assault, and something called a yuppie came into existence, and they just wanted money. And so by the late ’80s, I’d had enough, and I decided I had to make a statement, as stupid and banal as it is, but I made one, and that’s ‘They Live.’ … I just love that it was giving the finger to Reagan when nobody else would.”

Here’s the trailer:

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Stay Awake!

I’ve sang the praises of Withnail and I on the blog before, but I was recently reminded of another, great, bizarre British comedy that also debuted in 1987. I’m not sure what was in the water that year, but it was something compellingly strange and relentlessly absurd.

Looking at DVD’s online, I came across a two-disc deluxe edition of Straight to Hell that I wasn’t aware of. I love this movie, but hadn’t seen or thought about it in years. By the time I had read this outrageous Amazon description of the flick, I’d fallen into strange love all over again:

Four hapless bank robbers bury their loot and attempt to hide out in a deserted desert town. But the town is not deserted. Feasting, song, sexual tension, and inevitable deaths ensue. Featuring digitally improved violence and cruelty, six missing scenes, A new 5.1 stereo soundtrack by Academy Awardr Winner Richard Beggs, and a new color design by cinematographer Tom Richmond. Norwood (Sy Richardson), Sims (Joe Strummer) and Willy (Dick Rude) are three black-suited killers-for-hire. Paid to murder one Mr Greenburg, they oversleep and miss their target. To escape the wrath of their employer, Mr Dade (Jim Jarmusch), they head for the desert, robbing a bank en route. When their car dies in a ravine, the robbers bury their money and head for a lonely town to hide out “till the heat blows down”. A dead man in an overturned car greets them. Next morning, a horde of bandits, the McMahon clan (The Pogues), descends upon the town. A showdown between the hitmen and the outlaw gang is averted by the arrival of Rusty Zimmerman (Ed Tudor-Pole), who attempts to arrest Bruno McMahon (Shane MacGowan) and his brother Angel Eyes (Spider Stacey). The killers dispatch Rusty and his fellow bail-bondsmen, and are befriended by Frank (Biff Yeager), the leader of the McMahons. An uneasy truce lasts for a couple of nights. Sims and Willy fall in love with two of the local beauties, Fabienne (Jennifer Balgobin) and Louise (Michele Winstanley). But when Sabrina McMahon (Kathy Burke) murders the family patriarch (Jem Finer), a series of deadly events is set in train. Mr Farben (Dennis Hopper) and his lovely wife Sonia (Grace Jones) provide the killers with a suitcase full of high-tech weaponry. George, the hardware store owner (Miguel Sandoval) kills Angel Eyes. And Mr Dade arrives, offering a bounty for the heads of Norwood, Willy and Sims. Willy and Sims flee the ensuing gun battle, abandoning Norwood and Fabienne to certain death. Velma, teaming up with Frank, outsmarts all three and makes off with the money. But Frank, an amateur mechanic, has failed to properly maintain his clutch and brakes, and he and Velma meet a fiery demise. Norwood and Fabienne miraculously survive the destruction of the hardware store, and kill Mr Dade and his henchmen. Norwood leaves town with the women, bound for an uncertain but interesting future. Meanwhile, a skeletal hand emerges from the smoking ruins of the store…

Sounds like a winner, no?

Watch this great behind the scene’s featurette to find out more. If you’ve never seen Hell, this will serve as a great primer. If you are a long-time fan, this will wind you up all over again.