Blog Archives
Harry on Peyote
Yesterday I posted about my own new music and a Timothy Leary spoken word record that I found in a record store last week. My pal and Nashville music stalwart Steve Poulton messaged me to say he knew about the Leary record, and also to mention a Harry Smith LP of Kiowa peyote ritual music. [...]
Dr. Acid Folk
Last weekend I started recording my fourth album at Blue Bourbon Studio in Inglewood. We tracked half the album on Sunday and we’re off to a great start. Many of the songs I’ve been playing live recently will be included, but with 12 tracks there will also be surprises. Like all of my records this [...]
All Art is Martial Art
International Fight Week 2016 will culminate on Saturday night at UFC 200. The fight’s site has a poster-making app that I’ve been having some fun with. While I was finishing my latest installment of the Pikes Project for WPLN, I was also misusing It’s Time by writing in expected fighting captions and then attempting to [...]
Into The Veldt
Yesterday I was thinking about all the ideas and visions and ambitions that are reshaping Nashville and other cities all over the country as suburbanites push to urban cores and gentrification becomes the only game in town. So often what we want isn’t what we need or even what we thought we wanted once we [...]
Saint George’s Day
This week we remember losing George Carlin on June 22, 2008. I’m a student of stand-up comedy — it’s been an important influence in my own performances and I have an entire library of books about comedy, comedians and funny cinema. The only thing more terrifying than walking onto a stage with only a guitar [...]
Blooming Finnegan’s
Happy Bloomsday! On June 16 we commemorate the calendar date of James and Nora Joyce’s first romantic date. June 16 subsequently became the date on which the events in James Joyce’s novel Ulysses take place. Joyce was an early 20th century modernist, but his wildest visions have been celebrated as psychedelic masterpieces by underground countercultures [...]
Radical: Muhammad Ali
I’m a huge fan of combat sports. Back in the day I’d occasionally post about fights here at Insomnia, but since the blog has zeroed-in on counterculture content, only an exceptional fighter might make an appearance. Over the weekend, we lost the great Muhammad Ali. Exceptional is one of the first words one might use [...]
Hobo Visions
John T. Davis’s 1992 documentary, Hobo, finds the BBC filmmaker tagging along with a modern day train-hopper — a Vietnam vet who goes by the hobo handle of “Beargrease.” On their travels we learn about the century old symbol system that American itinerant workers still use to communicate important information to their travelling brothers and [...]
Foucault on Sex
This year we celebrate the 40th anniversary of the publication of the first volume of Michel Foucault’s The History of Sexuality. Among other ideas this study of sex in the West posited that the notion that every person possessed their own unique sexuality was a relatively new one. Of course it’s a notion that couldn’t [...]
The Intercepting Post
This year The Big Boss turns 45, and next year we’ll celebrate the birthday of Bruce Lee’s fighting philosophy, Jeet Kune Do. In 1967, during his first season of The Green Hornet, Lee was inspired to create his own martial arts system. The action star and Kung Fu sensei felt that his traditional style of [...]
