I’ve had a busy Monday after a relaxing weekend that included a trip to Bowling Green, Kentucky with my partner-in-crime, AP. Bowling Green is about an hour north of Nashville – just far enough to feel like you’re getting out of town without logging a ton of miles.
The longest road trip I’ve ever been on found my companions and I driving from Michigan to Washington state, down the coast to Los Angeles, across to Las Vegas, down through Phoenix to Albuquerque, up through Denver to Nebraska and back home. Many days the only real meal we’d eat would be breakfast as one gets the most bang for one’s buck when skimping on the move.
Ever since then, breakfast and road trips go hand in hand for me and Bowling Green is a road breakfast paradise! Just off the highway there is a Bob Evans, a Cracker Barrel, an IHOP, a Denny’s and TWO Waffle Houses!
After a-lingering over massive platters of grits, eggs, bacon, waffles, sausages, hashbrowns, toast and coffee, AP gave me a short tour of the place including driving past a cemetery where her ancestors are taking their rest. Driving home on a cool, damp, melancholy day, I wrote this poem on my phone:
A Verse for a Kentucky Cemetery
Southern gloom,
Southern doom,
Southern smoke rise in a plume.
The winter bride takes
a winter groom
in the winter’s grasp
on a Southern tomb.
Joe Nolan <3
Watch this performance of my OccupySong at Occupy Congress in DC!
Stream or download my brand new OccupySong right here!
It’s a rainy Tuesday morn here in The Old South and it feels more like spring than winter. I’m drinking coffee in a cafe watching a little girl in a dress covered with pink flowers spin until she’s dizzy and nearly careen her head right through a dessert case – a sure sign of spring. Her mother is too busy gabbing and looking at her cell phone to know that she’s given birth to a seer and a prophet.
As some of you may know I was recently awarded Writer in Residence status at the Main Library in downtown Nashville. Essentially this means I have a private Writer’s Room for the next several months right in the heart of my downtown arts beat and literally overlooking the Occupy Nashville encampment.
This opportunity has me taking the bus back and forth pretty often as the driving and parking fees end up at about triple my daily bus fare. However, I’m new to Nashville’s transit system and still finding my groove.
One of the best things about riding the bus is that you have time to do something instead of driving. I’m playing with the idea of writing a bus poem everyday. Which is to say, I wrote one this morning:
Rapid Transit
On this rainy
Tuesday bus,
a boy with a
bow tie
is studying
for class
while a butternut squash
pays his way
in change.
And the seasons change all
around us
on this
not-so-magic bus.
It’s cold in the winter and
hot in the summer and
it always stops
more than it
starts.
Now it’s just me
and the driver,
and he looks like a double
fudge brownie
with a smile.
And he smiles back at
me
in the mirror
as if to say
“Finally! Now I can show you…”
as the bus bursts
into a
tongue of blue
flame
and the wheels lift
up
and off of
the street.
Joe Nolan <3
Watch this performance of my OccupySong at Occupy Congress in DC!
Stream or download my brand new OccupySong right here!
Have you ever noticed that Oscar the Grouch looks like he’s made outta weed? Seriously. Of course, I don’t think this is intentional. Frank Oz probably had a run of the green shaggy stuff laying around and the rest is history.
Along with groovy music and the kind of social awareness that came of age during an era when battles for equality were being fought on the racial, sexual and gender fronts, Sesame Street was also influenced by the drug culture of its time. I don’t have any specific info about who was doing what when, but its likely that the dynamic, young artists who created that magical place sought inspiration – as most artists will – wherever they could find it.
Here are a few funny SS videos that teach kids about letters and numbers while simultaneously goofing on a the lingo of the drug buy…
Just for good measure, here is one of the better psychedelic/mystical scenes from the show:
Keep learning, kids! If you know of any other videos that fits this bill, please leave your links in the comments section!
Joe Nolan <3
Stream or download my brand new OccupySong right here!
I have been so busy working on other creative projects and responding to requests for art/book/movie reviews that I’ve been neglecting this little bright blinking space where we seldom – if ever – bother to sleep.
With that said, I’ve decided to fill you in on some of my latest doings by sharing a number of my recent writings/singings/dancings/rantings with you here on the blog.
Teach a Man to Fish
A new gallery recently opened in Nashville and in the course of penning a monthly art column I write for the Nashville Scene weekly, I was made curious about this show of installations and objects that purported to document one of the city’s hidden wild spaces. I must admit, I was a bit skeptical when I read the propaganda, but as soon as I saw the show, I knew it was one of a small number of exhibits that have really stood out in the usually slow winter art season in the city.
I’m always happy to see new art spaces in Nashville and if the opening at this gallery is a sign of things to come, we’ve reason to be very excited indeed. 40AU is a start-up website/digital app studio at 69 Arcade. While the back room is all business, the front space is set to remain an Art Crawl gallery. Their inaugural show was curated by HAUS Rotations and it features work by local artist/COOP member Will Tucker’s students from David Lipscomb University. Sevenmile Creek: Relic, Rhythm and Process includes work by Alana Thomas, Alexa LeBouef, Erin Watkins, Joe Ernst, Jessica Richardson, John Hillin, Mariel Bolton and Zac Swann. I’ve recently seen a number of student shows, but this one is particularly impressive. It speaks to a natural place in Nashville where Sevenmile Creek, Paragon Mills Park and a diverse Nolensville Road neighborhood all merge. Several pieces capture the physical presence of the place, making the gallery at 40AU feel nearly as vital as the creek itself.
With “Sugar Hives, 2011” Alexa LeBouef creates artificial bee hives out of beeswax, honey and sugar. The pieces were made in an attempt to attract the bees from the Paragon Park area, encouraging them to build hives of their own inside of the structures. The latest understanding of honey bee colony collapse disorder places the blame on systemic pesticides which effectively turn the blossoms of blooming plants into tiny pesticide factories. LeBouef’s work can be seen as a gesture of reconciliation to these bees. Her comparatively clumsy construction also highlights the incredible skills of worker bees in building their own beautiful, delicate factories.
With “Fly Fishing, 2011” Joseph Ernst explores the fish populations that call Sevenmile Creek home, interacting with them through the age old tradition of fly fishing. The Romans recorded one of the earliest reports of fly fishing near the end of the 2nd Century and it’s important to understand that Ernst and the fish he caught are participating in an ancient rite, connected by the artistry of an artificial bug and the athleticism required for its precise presentation. Ernst’s project is centered on a performance art of sorts that he documents by dousing his fish with gouache and allowing them to flip and flop across the surfaces of his drawing paper before releasing them. The designs are dynamic and surprisingly composed. Ernst’s use of his own hair, fingernails and clothing in the construction of his flies further embeds the artist – and the viewer – in the experience of literally hooking into the life of the creek.
Other pieces in the show connect the viewer just as directly to the more ephemeral stuff of the place. John Hillin’s “Wind Drawings” are rendered with a machine he constructed by attaching a pencil to a board with a series of springs. Six white balloons filled with helium are attached to the pencil by a long length of mono-filament fishing line. A piece of paper is positioned under the pencil. As the wind blows, the point of the pencil skips bounces and scratches across the surface of the paper, creating the eerily similar-seeming drawings the artist also has on display.
Erin Watkins’ “Creek Fossils, 2011” may be best described by the artist: “These fossils speak of the earth gathering itself together and birthing new beauty from its remains.” Watkins presents actual fossils from the bed of Sevenmile Creek along with the beeswax molds she made of them, the plaster casts she used in her process, and even abstract, decorative interpretations of her own fossils made from her leftover materials – aptly mirroring the creek’s own cycle of life, death, decay and preservation.
Joe Nolan <3
Stream or download my brand new OccupySong right here!
I read a lot of great books last year, but one of the best was a new biography of cult actor Lance Henriksen. Published by a new Nashville book concern, Not Bad for a Human is a necessary read for Henriksen fans and anyone else who is interested in a fascinating look at how this artist finds his unique characters.
I was asked to review the book for the online art journal ArtNowNashville.com
A Portrait of the Artist on a Book Cover
In the television series Millennium, and in movies like Dog Day Afternoon, Aliens, Hard Target and Dead Man, Lance Henriksen is the bad guy you root for and the good guy you’re afraid to trust. The actor with the deep, gritty voice always brings complexity to cliches when embodying his characters, but never more so than when standing in his own shoes. Henriksen’s new biography is deep and delirious, cracked, crazy and carefully crafted. It’s also one of my favorite books of the year.
On the first page of Not Bad for a Human: The Life and Films of Lance Henriksen, the reader is greeted with an illustration of the book’s subject in his most famous big screen role as “Bishop” – the sympathetic android from the film Aliens. He’s pictured here just after one of the eponymous monsters has literally torn him in half – wires and tubes swim from beneath his ribcage, a pool of shiny white liquid spills across the page. The illustration is a fitting beginning to a life story that is simultaneously messy, absurd, painful and iconic.
The actor describes his first 20 years of life as “total chaos.” Abandoned by his dad as a young boy, the actor gave his first performances – claiming he’d traveled with his merchant marine father to exotic locales in Borneo and Fiji. Henriksen’s mother was a waitress who’d survived the Great Depression through charming but humiliating cons. Henriksen describes her as a good woman with real dreams but no skills to realize them. The pair often got by on creative scams with Henriksen cast in the role of the pitiful child. While the actor found real love and warmth among his grandparents and aunts, his stints at orphanages, foster homes and boarding schools found him becoming an illiterate dropout after the 3rd grade.
Henriksen crafted his own understanding of the world in the anonymous silence of movie theaters and in the boundless possibilities of the open road. “A lot of movies from that time told the same story,” Henriksen explains. “A man is born, he marries, he has kids, he dies. I thought ‘I don’t want my life to be like that. I want to live a thousand lifetimes!’” This thirst for experience saw the actor becoming a seasoned hitchhiker while still in his early teens, but it was in acting that Henriksen found the supportive, respectful family he’d always yearned for. Moving to New York, Henriksen embarked on a stage-acting career that found him regularly cast in angry-young-man roles, treading the boards in both New York and Boston and connecting with the community at the Actors Studio. It was the need to memorize scripts that slowly but surely taught the actor how to read.
In Not Bad, Henriksen revisits his first appearances on screen in unforgettable 1970′s films like Dog Day Afternoon, Close Encounters of the Third Kind and Network. Playing minor characters in major movies, the actor was eager to show more of his chops. This lead to his pursuit of larger roles in small-budget genre films like Damien Omen II and Savage Dawn. The nearly-disastrous shooting of Piranha 2: The Spawning almost cost the actor his life. Instead, he found a close friend in James Cameron – the film’s young director. The connection would eventually bring Henriksen his breakthrough role in Aliens.
Henriksen’s book is penned by writer/filmmaker Joseph Maddrey. Maddrey’s prose is familiar, but focused. He ties up loose ends, creates effortless segues and illuminates Henriksen’s remembering with clarifying context. This frees the actor to ramble in running rants that blast the page with big blocks of separated quotations that are by turns profane and profound – and almost always hilarious. Henriksen’s anecdotes, recollections and revelations are the priceless stuff the book is built around, and this structure finds the actor’s voice coming through loud and clear, allowing the reader to experience Henriksen’s story directly from the man himself.
Laugh out loud funny, Not Bad for a Human manages to be both a poignant biography as well as the blazing-bright documenting of a life lived for art’s sake. While this volume would be a welcome addition to any cinephile’s bookshelf, it should be required reading for beginning actors. Henriksen isn’t giving lessons here, but he is offering a rare, inside-out glimpse at what it means to live the actor’s life.
Not Bad for a Human: The Life and Films of Lance Henriksen
Softcover
Author: Lance Henriksen and Joseph Maddrey
ISBN: 978-0983432500
Publisher: Alexander Henriksen Press
Limited Edition Hardcover Publisher: Bloody Pulp Books
Joe Nolan <3
Stream or download my brand new OccupySong right here!
This week, we celebrate the birthday of Jimmy Page: a guitar hero, an occult dabbler, and – just like Jesus – a Capricorn.
Page was a well-known session guitarist before working with the Yardbirds and – of course – Led Zeppelin. One of the most influential musician/songwriters of all time, Page has been inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame twice – as a member a each band.
Page’s interest in the occult found him creating the original (unreleased) score for magician/filmmaker Kenneth Anger’s film Lucifer Rising. The guitarist also resided for a short time in Aleister Crowley’s old house on Loch Ness. Page also operated his own occult bookstore and publishing imprint, and the album Led Zeppelin IV features an illustration of The Hermit from the tarot card deck. Page himself transforms into this character in one of the more bizarre sequences of the concert film The Song Remains the Same which we present here in its entirety.
Joe Nolan <3
Stream or download my brand new OccupySong right here!
A good friend of mine recently suggested my teaching a course on writing and William Burroughs came to mind.
"In the U.S. you have to be a deviant or die of boredom."
Although it might seem strange to think of El Hombre Invisible standing in front of a room of eager students, teaching them the fine art of writing (“I’m not sure I really believe this scene. I need to be able to really smell the mugwump jism…”), he did exactly that in the 1970’s. After years of living in London, near poverty and all-but-forgotten by American readers, Allen Ginsberg (What didn’t he do for his friends?) arranged for Burroughs to return to the states and take a teaching job at City College in New York City.
This change of scene lead to important developments for the writer. First, Burroughs was crowned with avant garde celebrity by the city’s punk rock underground – known for their dark proclivities and literary preoccupations. Burroughs new position as a teacher also gave rise to a number of questions for the author:
What is good writing?
Can good writing be taught?
These questions resulted in one of my favorite Burroughs reads, a collection of non-fiction essays about writers and writing and other Burroughsian themes entitled The Adding Machine. The book is currently available for browsing online. The entire book isn’t here, but most of it is. Check it out! If you ever end up in a writing class of mine it will be required reading.
What are your favorite books about writing? Leave a comment and join the conversation.
Joe Nolan <3
Listen to two of my CD’s – Blue Turns Black and Plain Jane! Download your free songs, stream both discs and find both projects at your favorite digital music shop.
Those of you who follow me on Facebook and Twitter and Coincidence Control Network may already be hip to this jive, but I’ve become fairly occupied with OWS/OccupyNashville in the past several months. I’ve attended numerous GA’s and have joined in with the People’s Library Working Group to help maintain and organize the books and magazines at Legislative Plaza. I wrote a feature about OccupyNashville for the city’s street newspaper, The Contributor, and I’ve spent many late nights covering local and far-flung raids and events via social network activism on: Facebook, Twitter, Ustream and Livestream.
In Nashville, the Occupy movement really began with February ‘11 protests alongside the local Egyptian community in solidarity with the overthrow of the Mubarak government. These protests were energized, focused and more organized than one normally sees from the rather anemic old guard of Nashville progressives. I didn’t know it at the time, but those protests were only a portent of what became an entire year in revolt.
Next came the uprising in Madison, Wisconsin which soon lead to Nashville’s own protests as our corporatist-scum Governor Haslam followed suit, crushing public unions and destroying collective bargaining rights.
While the wider Arab Spring is often cited as a precursor to Occupy, these specific events were crucial to galvanizing Tennessean dissent leading up to OWS.
OccupyNashville is one of the few encampments in the country that has been able to hold its ground. After withstanding two raids in our Legislative Plaza downtown, OccupyNashville is still going strong. After my first GA, I was a bit dumbstruck. As I mentioned, progressive events in Nashville are usually terribly disappointing, but what I found at Occupy was staggeringly inspired – mostly do to an influx of new blood and new ideas that found members of the aforementioned old guard participating happily from the sidelines while folks with ideas, energy and a passion for ORGANIZATION pushed Nashville’s progressive left right into the 21st Century after decades of aimless posing.
By the time of my second GA, I found the capacity to explain the experience to myself. Driving home through downtown Nashville, it occurred to me: “Occupy is an apathy inoculation.” Immediately, the thought was followed by “Come on down to this Occupation.” I realized that whether or not the movement needed a song, I was going to write one.
OccupySong is being offered as a free download under a Creative Commons License to be shared and used by anyone associated with the Occupy movement. The song can be used in documentaries, music videos, audio projects, playlists, mixtapes, blog posts, direct actions, Occupy choir and band repertoires or in any creative capacity that furthers the Occupy movement.
Listen to the song and download it from the player below and check out the new artwork by OccupySong co-producer and engineer J. Todd Greene. Be sure to leave a comment!
Joe Nolan <3
Listen to two of my CD’s – Blue Turns Black and Plain Jane! Download your free songs, stream both discs and find both projects at your favorite digital music shop.
As is our tradition here at Insomnia, we proudly present this year’s presentation of William S. Burrough’s A Junky’s Christmas…
Joe Nolan <3
Listen to two of my CD’s – Blue Turns Black and Plain Jane! Download your free songs, stream both discs and find both projects at your favorite digital music shop.
As I mentioned in a recent post, I’ve been writing a lot of art reviews lately. ArtNowNashville is a new online journal that asked me to take a trip to Clarksville, TN to take a look at a show by student photographers from Austin Peay State University. I cranked up The Monkees and headed north…
The Framemaker frame shop and gallery in Clarksville is currently offering passersby a chance to peer into the future of Middle Tennessee’s art scene and catch a glimpse of what’s to come from a group of five young photographers at Austin Peay State University. The Framemaker hosts an annual show of student photos and this year’s exhibit – “Foresight” – finds Rian Barger, Amanda Flowers, Jon Chisholm, Kathryn Griffin, and Synthia Clark addressing both visual and psychological themes.
Rian Barger’s contribution to the show includes several close-ups of eyeballs staring into the lens of the camera. The artist culled her collection from “over a thousand photos of eyes.” Her five photos make a statement about the voyeurism that is intrinsic to photography while commenting on the gaze of the viewer. Synthia Clark’s photo montages respond to the Paul Lawrence Dunbar poem “We Wear the Mask,” juxtaposing photos of professional performers alongside Facebook pics of her friends “performing” for the camera.
Listen to two of my CD’s – Blue Turns Black and Plain Jane! Download your free songs, stream both discs and find both projects at your favorite digital music shop.
