Joe Nolan's Insomnia

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2010-03-22T16:30:00.001-05:00

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Happy St. Patrick's Day!

2010-03-17T11:20:00.004-05:00

Welcome, one and all to the annual St. Patrick's Day edition of Insomnia!

Every year I enjoy using this forum to present us - one and all - with a greeting of sorts on this, the yearly Wearing of the Green.

On with it:

HAPPY ST. PATRICK'S DAY!

THIS IS YOUR DRINK:

THIS IS YOUR DRINK'S COCKTAIL:

THIS IS YOUR DRINKING BUDDY:

THIS IS HIS DATE:

THIS IS YOUR DATE:

THIS IS YOUR OTHER DATE:

"

THIS IS THE OPENING BAND:

THIS IS THE HEADLINER:

THIS IS YOUR EVENT PLANNER:

THIS IS YOUR WINGMAN:

THIS IS MY MESSAGE TO YOU:

William Butler Yeats (1865-1939)
THE SECOND COMING

Turning and turning in the widening gyre
The falcon cannot hear the falconer;
Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;
Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,
The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere
The ceremony of innocence is drowned;
The best lack all conviction, while the worst
Are full of passionate intensity.

Surely some revelation is at hand;
Surely the Second Coming is at hand.
The Second Coming! Hardly are those words out
When a vast image out of Spiritus Mundi
Troubles my sight: a waste of desert sand;
A shape with lion body and the head of a man,
A gaze blank and pitiless as the sun,
Is moving its slow thighs, while all about it
Wind shadows of the indignant desert birds.
The darkness drops again but now I know
That twenty centuries of stony sleep
Were vexed to nightmare by a rocking cradle,
And what rough beast, its hour come round at last,
Slouches towards Bethlehem to be born?

HAPPY ST. PATRICK'S DAY!

Love, Joe Nolan

___________________________________________________________

Use this player to listen to my new CD. Purchase a song or two at your favorite digital outlet and help us stay awake here at Insomnia!

Find the archives to my Sleepless Film Festival, and more at my You Tube channel: Imagicon

Listen to my earlier releases, and enjoy free downloads here!

Please consider supporting this site by making a PayPal donation and check out our friends using the links on the right.

Love,
Joe Nolan

Une Amuse Bouche Pour Vous

2010-02-25T20:37:00.003-06:00

Bon soir.

Une amuse bouche pour vous:

"Notes on New Girlfriends"

Like bullets in a magazine, the next
one replaced the last with a
kind of brutal precision;
a murderous grace.

Love, Joe Nolan

___________________________________________________________

Use this player to listen to my new CD. Purchase a song or two at your favorite digital outlet and help us stay awake here at Insomnia!

Find the archives to my Sleepless Film Festival, and more at my You Tube channel: Imagicon

Listen to my earlier releases, and enjoy free downloads here!

Please consider supporting this site by making a PayPal donation and check out our friends using the links on the right.

Love,
Joe Nolan

Barbarians at the Gate

2010-02-12T21:49:00.003-06:00

Hey y'all,

A little ditty I've been popping together
for some weeks now. It was all there at the first
flush. Less was more in this case.

At the big
table
with the new
old friends.
The day Nick left
for New York
he looked like
CuChulainn in his knitted
beard.
The word barbarian means
"bearded one".
In Ancient Rome
the bearded ones
smashed the skulls
of the clean shaven
beneath the weight of
history. And James
Joyce wore a mustache in less
desperate times.

Love, Joe Nolan

___________________________________________________________

Use this player to listen to my new CD. Purchase a song or two at your favorite digital outlet and help us stay awake here at Insomnia!

Find the archives to my Sleepless Film Festival, and more at my You Tube channel: Imagicon

Listen to my earlier releases, and enjoy free downloads here!

Please consider supporting this site by making a PayPal donation and check out our friends using the links on the right.

Love,
Joe Nolan

On the Death of Howard Zinn...

2010-01-27T20:31:00.004-06:00

Hello all,

Howard Zinn died this evening. The legendary rabble-rouser was one of our best. An old football coach of mine always encouraged us to be "the firstest with the mostest" when it came to tackling ball carriers. Zinn exemplified that kind of practical enthusiasm when it came to the causes of peace and social justice.

His website is the best source for finding out more about the man and this sad, late news.

A few thoughts:

I cried
a bit
when Howard Zinn Died,
and the coffee was cold in the cup.
Bitter lips
speak no peace
and this prayer
is forgetting how to fly.
Somewhere,
now,
there is a hole
in this world
and it's shaped like a
straight-standing man.
I cried
a bit
when Howard Zinn died,
but my heart is ignorant
like a bill of sale
or a new coat of paint
on an age-old throne.
I cried
a bit
when Howard Zinn died,
but now my tears have organized.

Now, they are marching.

Love, Joe Nolan

___________________________________________________________

Use this player to listen to my new CD. Purchase a song or two at your favorite digital outlet and help us stay awake here at Insomnia!

Find the archives to my Sleepless Film Festival, and more at my You Tube channel: Imagicon

Listen to my earlier releases, and enjoy free downloads here!

Please consider supporting this site by making a PayPal donation and check out our friends using the links on the right.

Love,
Joe Nolan

Run Run Randolph

2010-01-21T08:09:00.005-06:00

Hello babies,

And welcome back.

Haven't posted in a bit and wanted to blow the dust off of this illuminated scroll to fill you in on some of the recent hap's.

The latest version of the Disinformation World News podcast has been kicking around on the site for some time now. This latest episode features pieces on robotic limbs controlled by the mind, Nigerian witch hunters and the Wal-Mart Gestapo. Yours truly chimes in with a short biography on the 19th Century sex-magician, Paschal Beverly Randolph.

Randolph was notable as an African American magician in the Western ritual magic tradition at a time when most black practitioners were root workers, practicing the various systems that evolved out of the African diaspora. Randolphs sex-magic system of Affectional Alchemy is considered to be the first fully-developed, modern system of erotic ritual.

If you'd like to explore more about Randolph, here are a number of the sources I used for the report:

PBR's Wikipedia Page
PBR at Lucky Mojo
Your Very Own Brotherhood of Eulis Invitation
Read PBR at Google Books
Hermetic Brotherhood of Luxor at Wikipedia
PBR at Soul.org
The Invisible Basilica
Article about PBR

If you missed the last episode which featured new stories about the South American rape-monster: the Popobawa. Check it out here. You can also read the transcript to my segment - the 2nd half of my report on the Hollow Earth - right here:

In our last segment, we discussed the early history of the Hollow Earth. Many cultures around the globe have their own unique beliefs regarding the various kingdoms that may reside beneath the surface of our planet, and respected scientists like comet discoverer Edmund Halley and noted politicians like Continental Congressman John Cleve Symmes promoted early ideas about the Hollow Earth and created the hypothetical models that the theory is based on.

Simply speaking, by the 20th Century, proponents of Hollow Earth theory believed that the Earth was a hollow sphere with large entrances to the interior world at the North and South Poles. Generally, these theories posited civilizations that thrived beneath the ground in a climate provided by an internal sun.

One modern evangelist of the Hollow Earth model was Dr. Raymond W . Bernard. Born Walter Seigmeister, Bernard grew up in New York City, where he attended Columbia and NYU. An intelligent successful young man, Bernard was was also an eccentric in the making. Although his parents hoped he'd earn an M.D. Bernard instead took a PhD in education, writing his dissertation on the controversial educational philosophies of Rudolph Steiner. Steiner's writings were also Bernard's entry into theories about Atlantis and other esoteric subjects.

By the mid 1940's, Bernard began dressing in all black and growing his hair out. Soon, he abandoned the Judaism of his childhood for a hodge-podge of Eastern mysticism and bizarre dietary restrictions. It was around this time that Seigmeister adopted his alias in order to avoid authorities who were after him for selling bogus nutritional supplements. After moving to Mexico for several years, Bernard returned to the States obsessed with ideas about the Hollow Earth. In 1964 – Bernard published The Hollow Earth - The Greatest Geographical Discovery in History Made by Admiral Richard E. Byrd in the Mysterious Land Beyond the Poles - The True Origin of the Flying Saucers. Not only is Bernard's volume in possession of what may be the greatest book title of all time, it is also one of the most important contributions to Hollow Earth theory.

Bernard filled his book with accounts of different explorers who claimed to have made successful journeys into the Hollow Earth. Admiral Byrd figures heavily in the book. Bernard latched on to a brief mention in Byrd's memoir where the Admiral writes about seeing a patch of green oasis in the midst of the endless white at the North pole. For Bernard, this passing observation was a hook on which he hung a fantastic cosmology and a fanatic belief in the world within the world.
Bernard went on to write the book Flying Saucers from the Earth's Interior and to claim that he was in contact with legendary mystics dwelling in secret ashrams as well as Blavatsky's Tibetan Grand Lamas. It was either madness or moxie that eventually led the good doctor back across the border - this time all the way to South America - where he was rumored to have disappeared or died from pneumonia, searching for a tunnel to Agartha deep in the interior jungles.

If the theory of the Hollow Earth had to be associated with only one man, that man would be Richard Sharpe Shaver. However, it's impossible to tell Shaver's story without including Ray Palmer the publisher of the pioneering science fiction magazine Amazing Stories.

In 1943, Shaver contacted Palmer at the magazine with an amazing tale of his own. Shaver claimed he had stumbled upon an ancient language called Mantong. In fact, Shaver claimed that Mantong was the root of all human languages and that by applying a few rules to any word in any tongue, a secret meaning could be revealed. Quizzing Shaver as to how he came across the discovery, Palmer realized he was tugging at the threads of an even stranger yarn.

Shaver replied to Palmer's inquiries with a 10,000 word document entitled A Warning to Future Man. In the document, Shaver let fly with one of the most complex Hollow Earth cosmologies that has ever been conceived.

Shaver's Hollow Earth was populated by a highly-advanced race of extraterrestrial Titans who had populated Atlantis and then the entire globe. This early race had built vast, complex underground caverns to escape damaging radiation from the sun. These ancient astronauts eventually left the earth for another planet, leaving behind the Teros: a race of servants they had created through genetic engineering. However, the rigors of life underground took their toll and many of the Teros transformed over time into Deros. Shaver explained that the “Deros” term was an abbreviation for “detrimental robots”. The Deros were organic creatures, but they were robot like in their brutal, sadistic behavior. Shaver also insisted that many of mankind's ills – from train wrecks to lost car keys – could be blamed on the Deros and their use of the advanced technology that they still manipulated in their underground cities.

Ray Palmer knew a great story when he heard one and he immediately began readying Shaver's tale for publication. Palmer added a long narrative plot to Shaver's account, eventually crafting a 31,000 word story that he entitled “I Remember Lemuria”. However, the most ingenious device Palmer employed was his insistence that Shaver's eye-witness account was absolutely factual. Whether or not Palmer was a true-believer, casting the account as an eye-witness report was a masterstroke. The “Lemuria” issue of Amazing Stories resulted in a record run that saw the magazine's circulation jump by 50,000 copies. Reader response went through the roof and the steady trickle of letters that Palmer had come to expect became a deluge of thousands, with many readers corroborating Shaver's tale, claiming they too had had contact with the Deros.

Before Shaver began to publish his stories in post-war America, another group on the other side of the world had begun to search for an entrance to Agartha at the South Pole. However, these were not science fiction fans, they were miltary men and their leader was Adolph Hitler.

In addition to an array of esoteric devotions that included astrology and the search for many ancient artifacts, Hitler and his top advisors were convinced that the Earth was hollow and populated by a race of great Masters that Hitler hoped to create a super-race of god-men with.

The most intriguing story of the Nazi's quest for the Hollow Earth states that in the last days of WWII, Hitler, his closest advisors and a number of German soldiers made a mad dash for the South Pole, entering the Hollow Earth where they remain to this day.

The idea that Hitler made such an escape persists because of a number tenuous speculations and the novelty of the Nazi's occult fascinations. While there is little evidence that Hitler and his henchmen actually found an interior earth, there is at least one document that keeps the speculation alive.

According to official records the German U-boat 209 reported for the last time on May 6, 1943. According to the report the submarine had been badly damaged in its confrontation with fighter planes from the Royal Canadian Air Force vessel the Canadian Catalina. U-209 was called back to base but never arrived. The crew was never heard from again.

Or were they?

The International Society for a Complete Earth claims to be in possession of a letter that was sent from a naval officer on U-209. They claim that the family has corroborated the hand writing on the letter as being that of their sibling and son.

The letter states that the sub did indeed make a bee-line for the South Pole at the end of the war and escape into the Hollow Earth. The sailor goes on to remark that his fellow crewmen were also safe and that – though they would not be returning to the surface world - they were not being held against their will.

Hollow Earth theory is as vast and complex as the subterranean kingdoms it strives to explain and – although we've only scratched the surface – it is my hope that we have entertained you dear listener with a fantastic tale populated by strange creatures in wondrous lands dwelling just over the horizon at the very edge of the human imagination. But more importantly it is my hope that this report has inspired you with the stories of men like Dr. Raymond Bernard and Richard Shaver. Individuals who stood their ground against one of the cruelest enemies known to man: the prejudice that is reserved for those bold souls among us who would abandon the complacencies of their times to live in a world of their own making.

For Disinformation World News, this has been another installment of Insomnia.

I'm Joe Nolan.

Stay awake.

I'll be back sooner than later, loved ones. I won't be a part of the next Disinfo podcast, but I'll be back in the flow on the next one.

'til then.

Love, Joe Nolan

___________________________________________________________

Use this player to listen to my new CD. Purchase a song or two at your favorite digital outlet and help us stay awake here at Insomnia!

Find the archives to my Sleepless Film Festival, and more at my You Tube channel: Imagicon

Listen to my earlier releases, and enjoy free downloads here!

Please consider supporting this site by making a PayPal donation and check out our friends using the links on the right.

Love,
Joe Nolan

Deep and Crisp and Even

2009-12-18T11:15:00.004-06:00

Hey all and all and then some,

Really feeling the spirit today. Was recently, nearly
reduced to tears of joy hearing "Feliz Navidad" at the
bean aisle in Kroger.

Check out this performance of the song, live in Denmark in 1973.
Hippest caroling ever!

Regardless of your religio/mystico/philosophical relationship to the world without and within, this season really does put people in mind of others. Within such sudden selflessness there lies that great, untapped potential for Total Revolution: psychic, spiritual, personal, interpersonal, galactic...

This tree will grow.
I saw it in a dream.

Here is the text for the poem I recited in an audio post in the last entry in this luminescent journal:

"Origami Gunship"

There is a truer
truth to be
known beneath the smoldering
sky of starving
leaves as winter takes
over the South.

(A Yankee front
sweeping down from Connecticut.
An icy grimace
in Union Blue).

There is a knowing to be known
between myself
and the girl with the black
hat
and the red
bag
and the white
teeth.
She smiles like a friendly
Nazi and she laughs
when I reach
past her
for the hot sauce.

There is a light
to bright
this grey window
with the frost
in the corners
and the dead
hornet:
legs up;
tobacco-colored wings more
delicate than Chinese
paper;
memento mori;
origami gunship;
an abdomen
swollen with
frozen poison.
A glinting light breaks
across the tip
of the stinger.
The sun roars to life
for the first time
in weeks.

One of my most enjoyable projects was being asked to edit an issue of Number: An Independent Journal of the Arts. I've been writing reviews, reports and interviews for the publication for years and this opportunity allowed me to make an issue that focused more exclusively on the Nashville art scene (The journal covers Arkansas, Mississippi and Tennessee and is a publication of University of Memphis).

I recently turned in new piece that features an interview with TSU curator Jodi Hays Gresham. Browsing through the Number site last night I noticed that the back issues have been updated. You can now download a .pdf version of all the recent issues.

Click here to download the Joe Nolan edited Number:62

And here is a special Holiday treat. In a recent post I offered this track for download and had so much response from the folks who heard it that I've decided to make it an open link so people don't have to keep emailing me here and on Facebook to get it. This is a demo for my new song "Phantom Punch". Inspired by the second boxing match between Cassius Clay and Sonny Liston, my pal Jean Paul Lilliston and I had some audio problems so I recorded these vocals on a cell phone in Nashville to a speaker phone in Chicago. Most people who've heard this insist that I have to use these vocals as they turned out surprisingly good. See what you think...

Phantom Punch

Enjoy the goodies. Travel safely and be grateful and thanks to all of you who've read this electric rag and listened to my noises this year.

___________________________________________________________

Use this player to listen to my new CD. Purchase a song or two at your favorite digital outlet and help us stay awake here at Insomnia!

Find the archives to my Sleepless Film Festival, and more at my You Tube channel: Imagicon

Listen to my earlier releases, and enjoy free downloads here!

Please consider supporting this site by making a PayPal donation and check out our friends using the links on the right.

Love,
Joe Nolan

Origami Gunship

2009-12-13T13:18:00.003-06:00

Seasons Greetings...and a new poem...

Mobile post sent by MightyJoeNolan using Utterli. Replies. mp3

___________________________________________________________

Use this player to listen to my new CD. Purchase a song or two at your favorite digital outlet and help us stay awake here at Insomnia!

Find the archives to my Sleepless Film Festival, and more at my You Tube channel: Imagicon

Listen to my earlier releases, and enjoy free downloads here!

Please consider supporting this site by making a PayPal donation and check out our friends using the links on the right.

Love,
Joe Nolan

Devil's Advocate: First Impressions of Antichrist

2009-11-21T01:25:00.008-06:00

Hey all,

Just returned from seeing Lars von Trier's new film Antichrist.

For those of you who may not be up to speed regarding this flick, it is a disturbing film peppered with very graphic sexual/violent images. It was both panned and praised at Cannes earlier this year. Here is the breakdown from IMDB:

A grieving couple retreats to their cabin in the woods, hoping to repair their broken hearts and troubled marriage. But nature takes its course and things go from bad to worse.

That really is the truth of the plot of the film. It is a very simple movie and the cast is made up almost exclusively of a husband and wife: She and He.

Ok, here we go...

The plot is very simple - and so is the theme. Although this is a movie full of symbols and layers it is a very basic fable dealing with the triumph of civilization over nature and reason over chaos. Mythological stories have layers and tangents - as this movie surely does - but - at their core they are simple tales that tell a basic truth.

This movie is full of rough hewn symbols and telling dialog, but there is not that much to it, and the hand wringing over the violence in the third act is also over-hyped. Although you will surely see some unique images in this part of the film it is actually less disturbing than the first and second acts. Remember how scary Jaws was until you saw the shark?

Although it may seem callous or a bit crazy to some viewers, I was actually relieved when the brutality got going. At that point in the film LVT simply leaves us with a schlocky horror film that I no longer had to fear.

At that point, it's just a movie.

This film is gorgeous in many ways and disturbing as well, but it's ultimately very flawed despite its ambitions. A lesser film for LVT without question, but not a failure by any stretch. However, this movie won't break your heart, strain your brain or sicken your stomach. The grief at the center of the film is never really communicated in a moving way. The simple fable at its heart will never withstand over-intellectualizing and he gore is ultimately silly movie tricks that fail to convey any real horror.

Again, they actually break the tension and create more relief than revulsion.

Anyway. See it for yourself and leave a comment or two. My thoughts may seem to be on the negative side, but I absolutely recommend the film. Gainsbourg and Dafoe are relentlessly brave in their roles and the cinematography is the best I've seen this year - outside of the gorgeous black and white in the film Tetro.

Now there is a movie worth talking about.

___________________________________________________________

Use this player to listen to my new CD. Purchase a song or two at your favorite digital outlet and help us stay awake here at Insomnia!

Find the archives to my Sleepless Film Festival, and more at my You Tube channel: Imagicon

Listen to my earlier releases, and enjoy free downloads here!

Please consider supporting this site by making a PayPal donation and check out our friends using the links on the right.

Love,
Joe Nolan

Sing a New Song

2009-11-19T17:29:00.005-06:00

Yo and what up, homestyle...

Just a quick word to the wise-up...

I've been cyber-collaborating with Jean Paul Lilliston, working on
my new CD, The Wicked.

I've had some technical difficulties as of late, so we decided to try cutting some vocals over the phone. I cued up the song (sans vocals)and put on my headphones while J.P. mic'd up his home phone and put it on speaker. The next step is obvious: The song kicked off and I commencedto screaming into my cell phone in my living room. Turned out great. We'll eventually do "real" vocals, but these are fine for now.

We've got some horn/bass/drum cats coming in from Austin soon and they needed a version with vocals.

If you leave me a comment or send me an email I'll give you a link where you can download the demo w the speaker phone vocals!

This is what the song is about:

___________________________________________________________

Use this player to listen to my new CD. Purchase a song or two at your favorite digital outlet and help us stay awake here at Insomnia!

Find the archives to my Sleepless Film Festival, and more at my You Tube channel: Imagicon

Listen to my earlier releases, and enjoy free downloads here!

Please consider supporting this site by making a PayPal donation and check out our friends using the links on the right.

Love,
Joe Nolan

I Remember Jacques de Molay

2009-11-13T16:05:00.004-06:00

Bonjour et bonsoir, mes amis,

Welcome back to another post-it note here where the photons do glow.

Just wanted to drop a few lines about Friday the 13th.

Fridays and the number 13 have been characterized by negative superstitions since before The Da Vinci Code was published. Long known as a kind of "day of bad luck", Friday the 13th is also steeped in conspiracy culture and its occult power reaches back to many deep secrets that lie at the heart of Judaism, Christianity, Islam, the Vatican, the Knights Templar, the founding of Freemasonry and the roots of international banking. Whether you believe the origins of "Friday the 13th" have anything to do with the Knights Templar, you've got to admit the intersection is a fun one to consider.

Here's some skinny from the Wiki(although they seem to deny a connection between the date and the fall of the KT):

On Friday, October 13, 1307 (a date sometimes incorrectly linked with the origin of the Friday the 13th superstition)[24][25] Philip ordered de Molay and scores of other French Templars to be simultaneously arrested. The Templars were charged with numerous offenses (including apostasy, idolatry, heresy, "obscene rituals" and homosexuality, corruption and fraud, and secrecy).[26] Many of the accused confessed to these charges under torture, and these confessions, even though obtained under duress, caused a scandal in Paris. After more bullying from Philip, Pope Clement then issued the papal bull Pastoralis Praeeminentiae on November 22, 1307, which instructed all Christian monarchs in Europe to arrest all Templars and seize their assets.[27]

Pope Clement called for papal hearings to determine the Templars' guilt or innocence, and once freed of the Inquisitors' torture, many Templars recanted their confessions. Some had sufficient legal experience to defend themselves in the trials, but in 1310 Philip blocked this attempt, using the previously forced confessions to have dozens of Templars burned at the stake in Paris.[28][29]

With Philip threatening military action unless the Pope complied with his wishes, Pope Clement finally agreed to disband the Order, citing the public scandal that had been generated by the confessions. At the Council of Vienne in 1312, he issued a series of papal bulls, including Vox in excelso, which officially dissolved the Order, and Ad providam, which turned over most Templar assets to the Hospitallers.[31]

As for the leaders of the Order, the elderly Grand Master Jacques de Molay, who had confessed under torture, retracted his statement. His associate Geoffrey de Charney, Preceptor of Normandy, followed de Molay's example and insisted on his innocence. Both men were declared guilty of being relapsed heretics, and they were sentenced to burn alive at the stake in Paris on March 18, 1314. De Molay reportedly remained defiant to the end, asking to be tied in such a way that he could face the Notre Dame Cathedral and hold his hands together in prayer.[32] According to legend, he called out from the flames that both Pope Clement and King Philip would soon meet him before God. Pope Clement died only a month later, and King Philip died in a hunting accident before the end of the year.[33]

With the last of the Order's leaders gone, the remaining Templars around Europe were either arrested and tried under the Papal investigation (with virtually none convicted), absorbed into other military orders such as the Knights Hospitaller, or pensioned and allowed to live out their days peacefully. Some may have fled to other territories outside Papal control, such as excommunicated Scotland or to Switzerland. Templar organizations in Portugal simply changed their name, from Knights Templar to Knights of Christ.[34]

Here at Insomnia, we associate these days with the undoing of Jacques de Molay and his Knights as well as with my birthday which I have always felt protects me from other "superstitions" like walking under ladders etc. When a black cat crosses my trail I feel "hey, I must be onto something". In other words, I feel that being born on a 13th gives me a kind of astral-immuno-booster, defending me from lesser demons and the frivolity of negative thinking.

For those of us who may feel a day like today to be frought with peril, here are the last words of the Templar's last leader, Jacques de Molay, right before he was executed by the Pope and King Philip IV. As you'll see, Jacques gets the last laugh:

"It is just that, in so terrible a day, and in the last moments of my life, I should discover all the iniquity of falsehood, and make the truth triumph. I declare, then, in the face of heaven and earth, and acknowledge, though to my eternal shame, that I have committed the greatest crimes but it has been the acknowledging of those which have been so foully charged on the order. I attest - and truth obliges me to attest - that it is innocent! I made the contrary declaration only to suspend the excessive pains of torture, and to mollify those who made me endure them. I know the punishments which have been inflicted on all the knights who had the courage to revoke a similar confession; but the dreadful spectacle which is presented to me is not able to make me confirm one lie by another. The life offered me on such infamous terms I abandon without regret."

The execution of Jacques DeMolay Reports say they were slowly roasted over a hot, smokeless fire prolonging their agony as their flesh slowly cooked and blackened. Jacques DeMolay insisted that his hands were not to be bound so that he could pray in his final moments and before he died he cursed both Philip and Pope Clement, summoning both of them to appear before God, the supreme judge, before the year was out. His last words were, "Let evil swiftly befall those who have wrongly condemned us - God will avenge us." Guy of Advernge is reported to have added, "I shall follow the way of my master as a martyr you have killed him. You have done and know not. God willing, on this day, I shall die in the Order like him."

The chilling irony of the conclusion of this story is that Jacques DeMolay's final words did, in fact, come true. Pope Clement V died only a month later on April 20th (he is suspected of having cancer of the bowel) and Philip IV was killed while on a hunting trip on November 29th 1314. True to the claim both men did indeed die within the year of Jacques DeMolay's own death.

Have a good day everyone.

Watch out for false benefactors.

Love, Joe
______________________________________________________________________________

Use this player to listen to my new CD. Purchase a song or two at your favorite digital outlet and help us stay awake here at Insomnia!

Find the archives to my Sleepless Film Festival, and more at my You Tube channel: Imagicon

Listen to my earlier releases, and enjoy free downloads here!

Please consider supporting this site by making a PayPal donation and check out our friends using the links on the right.

Love,
Joe Nolan

Our Somnambulant Republic

2009-11-06T11:19:00.004-06:00

Hola, mi amigos

As promised, here is a new post offering up some more goodies that spilled over
the edges of my latest installment of Insomnia for the Disinformation World News podcast.

Thanks to Raymond and Joe for putting up with two rather lengthy segments on a subject that is as vast as the Earth itself. The Hollow Earth has long been a favorite crypto-myth-consmology-theory and
having a chance to just burrow into it and share my notes has been lots of fun.

As I mention in the 'cast, the thing that I find most attractive about this line of thought is the freedom required to think it. While such notions may have pushed some men like Dr. Raymond Bernard a little closer to a dangerous edge, it seems that most of the proponents of the theory are of two specific types: the bold adventurer and the child-like dreamer. Both proud clans are always encouraged to join our somnambulant republic here in the world between dream and waking.

Here are a number of links to the resources I used in researching the second half of my installment on The Hollow Earth:

Crystal Links
Hitler and Secret Societies
The Complete Works of Dr. Raymond Bernard
Podcast about Dr. Raymond Bernard
Richard Sharpe Shaver

Raymond Palmer
The official word on the disappearance of U209

Have fun surfing these links. The Raymond Bernard podcast is especially good and the other 'casts at Memory Palace are worth checking into as well.

If you missed my first installment about the Hollow Earth, here is a transcript. You can also find the 'cast archived at Disinformation.

The Early History of the Hollow Earth

When exploring esoteric subjects it can be difficult to find the connections between various disciplines, notions, theories and organizations. Occult practices ultimately rely on systems of associations and it's compelling to imagine a kind of grand unified theory that encompasses all of the mysteries.

While such an ambitious task remains beyond the grasp of this humble report, there is an intersection point where occult mysteries, cryptozoology, conspiracy theories, ufology, ancient religious beliefs and straight-up-science fiction all meet on a strange horizon where a few brave souls have dared to believe the impossible.

Come with us now dear listener as we illuminate the early history of the Hollow Earth.

Cultures throughout time on every continent of the globe have believed that a paradise resides within our own planet. The Hopi tribes in North America, Tibetan monks, the People of Iceland and the fanatical beliefs of the highest ranks of the Nazi party all share in common a connection to the idea of the hollow earth. For Tibetan monks, Shambala is a real kingdom of peace and tranquility where ancient masters live within the earth's interior. The intricate folklore of Iceland is predicated on the notion of a hollow-earth and Hitler's Nazis ultimately claimed lineage to the powerful beings that are said to reside beneath the surface of our planet.

But where do our modern conceptions of the Hollow Earth originate?

In 1664, a Jesuit priest named Athanasius Kircher published his daunting, encyclopedic tome Mundus Subterraneas. An exhaustive compendium of geography and geology, Kircher's book also contained ambitious tracts on fantastic creatures, spontaneous generation, alchemy, fireworks, eclipses and a number of other eclectic subjects. Kircher's own hand supplied his readers with some of the first cross-section drawings of the earth, revealing pockets of interior fire, fueled by alchemical, cosmic rays. Kircher imagined that the freezing oceans at the north pole poured into the interior earth where they were warmed by the central fires, eventually flowing back to the planet's surface at the south pole. Kircher's imaginative model was one of the first that attempted to explain global weather patterns and oceanic circulation.

In 1692 Edmund Haley – of Haley's comet fame – posited that the earth contained a system of concentric spheres. He believed that each level was temperate and supported life and that the
Aurora borealois was caused by off-gassing from these inner realms

In the 19th century John Cleve Symmes - a delegate to the Continental Congress from the state of New Jersey - accepted Haley's theory but also claimed that there were 4,000-mile-wide entrances to the earth's interior at the north and south poles. In addition, Symmes forwarded the idea that the holes were inhabited by humanoids. In the face of daunting ridicule, Symmes lectured, published, and lobbied energetically to raise funds for an expedition to the North Pole in order to meet the inner-earth's inhabitants and open "new sources of trade and commerce."

Symmes helped to found The Smithsonian Institution which he envisioned as a future home for the artifacts and treasures that were anticipated to come from this journey, and he made such a strong case that he was able to bring pressure on then president J Q Adams

“I am fascinated by the possibilities.” Adams was quoted as saying “We need to be willing to go forward in discovering new lands, expanding our horizons.. I say give them the money! This could be the greatest discovery since America.”

Funding for the Sea Expedition was eventually squashed by Andrew Jackson when JQ Adams left office.

Given the kind of radical faith that a belief in the HJollow Earth requires, it's no surprise that an eccentric American physician named Cyrus Teed was able to found a religion based on Hollow-Earth doctrines in the 1800s. During an unconventional scientific experiment involving high-voltage electricity, Teed was badly shocked and knocked unconscious. Upon waking, Teed claimed to have been contacted by no less than the Mother of the Universe, who told Teed that he was the savior of the world. Teed promptly founded a Utopian enclave in Fort Myers, Florida. The group's central belief was that "the universe is a cell, a hollow globe, the physical body of which is the earth; the sun is at the center. We live on the inside of the cell; and the sun, moon, planets and stars are all within the globe." Teed and his believers were claiming that the universe was inside out. Outside of the earth – according to Teed – there was nothing. Teed never wavered in his convictions and his ideas attracted a fanatical following. Peter Bender a German aviator was one of the most outspoken believers in Teed's ideas. His enthusiasm for the notion excited a community in Germany who eventually formed the Hollow Earth Society, which still exists today.

Some simply believed that Teed had suffered brain damage when he was injured during his experiment.

IN 1929, Marshall B Gardener, author of A Journey to the Earth's Interior, returned to the Symmes model, but claimed that the inner Earth was illuminated by a sun that was 600 miles in diameter.

In (1934) Guy Ballard published Unveiled Mysteries, written under the pseudonym Godfre Ray King. Ballard claimed that while visiting Mount Shasta, he met a stranger who gave him a creamy liquid to drink. Having imbibed the brew, Ballard suddenly realized that the stranger was Count Saint Germaine, an eighteenth-century occultist who had become an immortal Tibetan Master according to the writings of H.P. Blavatsky

Ballard wrote that he had many meetings with the Count and the two enjoyed out-of-body visits to the inner-earth where Ballard witnessed scientific wonders, spiritual marvels and even attended a conference with along with 12 Venusian masters beneath the Grand Teton Range in Wyoming. Ballard and his family toured and lectured, spreading his ideas and attracting seekers to the occult group he founded: The "I AM" Activity.

Many hollow-earth publications, reports and rumors have persisted to this day.

In our next installment, we'll explore the Shaver Mystery, the disappearance of Doctor Raymond Bernard and the final destination of Nazi U-boat 209.

Until then this has been another installment of Insomnia for Disinformation World News, I'm Joe Nolan.

Stay awake.

______________________________________________________________________________

Use this player to listen to my new CD. Purchase a song or two at your favorite digital outlet and help us stay awake here at Insomnia!

Find the archives to my Sleepless Film Festival, and more at my You Tube channel: Imagicon

Listen to my earlier releases, and enjoy free downloads here!

Please consider supporting this site by making a PayPal donation and check out our friends using the links on the right.

Love,
Joe Nolan

Invitation and Farewell

2009-10-13T09:31:00.005-05:00

Amigos y amigas,

Bienvenido a la Nada.

"I had a friend who believed in UFO's"

This grey morning I
walk between the cracks.
Back
to the seen of the crime:
the true, original vision.

This grey morning I
steer into the current,
escaping the tangled embrace of morning
traffic and autumn
trees and sallow
light in the mist
like a kiss speaking
invitation and
farewell.

This grey morning I
sit in warm cafes drinking
in something more than
inspiration.

A poster on a board,
at the back,
near the busted fountain says that
"Air is an element".
But I am dreaming Russian
dolls.

The water that wets the air is -
in turn - grim with earth and
everything's born
from fire.

In grey mornings I
stopped worrying about
tears years ago.
Now, it's the not crying that is worrisome.

Sadness suckles salt.

Use this player to listen to my new CD. Purchase a song or two at your favorite digital outlet and help us stay awake here at Insomnia!

Find the archives to my Sleepless Film Festival, and more at my You Tube channel: Imagicon

Listen to my earlier releases, and enjoy free downloads here!

Please consider supporting this site by making a PayPal donation and check out our friends using the links on the right.

Love,
Joe Nolan

Pod Monk No Zero

2009-10-11T19:31:00.005-05:00

Greetings all and more again.

Just a quick one this time.

Thanks to everyone who has been messaging me regarding the Disinformation World News Podcast and The Wicked - the new CD I am in the middle of recording with Jean Paul Lilliston.

A new Podcast should be up in a few weeks so go subscribe to the 'cast at Disinfo' and you won't miss any of the weirdness. If you are interested in previewing the new CD, listen to this free download of The Ol'Double Zero. This brand new tune has been a highlight of the various festival shows I did this summer and this work-in-progress version is a fun listen to the project as it evolves. This tune is a really raggedy country-rocker.

In addition to all of this bloated self-promotion I'd like to give some props to Thelonious Monk on what would have been his 92nd birthday. Bless you Monk. Thanks for all those great tunes.

In lieu of 92 candles, enjoy this screening of the Clint-Eastwood-produced documentary Straight No Chaser. I first saw this movie in college in Michigan and this is what turned me on to jazz.

This playlist is hosted on my YouTube channel: Imagicon and is curated by your good friends in the AV department here at Insomnia, The Sleepless Film Festival.

If you need even more music, check out my latest project:

Use this player to listen to my new CD. Purchase a song or two at your favorite digital outlet and help us stay awake here at Insomnia!

Find the archives to my Sleepless Film Festival, and more at my You Tube channel: Imagicon

Listen to my earlier releases, and enjoy free downloads here!

Please consider supporting this site by making a PayPal donation and check out our friends using the links on the right.

Love,
Joe Nolan

The "I's" in Activism: A Chat with Nate C (Part 3)

2009-10-08T13:52:00.004-05:00

Hola amigos.

For this latest episode of Insomnia we are revisiting our discussion about anarchism, activism, revolution, evolution and possible solutions with Nate C. Nate
was a great addition to Nashville's activist community before relocating to the West. Our discussion began as a dialog about the unrest in Greece following the police shooting of a young boy last December. It has since evolved into an ongoing, wide-ranging discussion. Catch up by clicking through the "nate c" label at the bottom of this post.

And now, back to it...

JN: We had been discussing ways in which to disengage from the political system, the economic system, the cultural system...It seems that resistance defines these obstacles even more clearly - and allows them to define us and our ideas! The notion we were working towards was that disengagement is preferable to opposition.

NC: First of all, don't vote. Do you remember that game where one person takes something from you and tosses it back and forth with another person over your head to watch you squirm? You try to run to each person to take your thing back, but as soon as you catch up to them, they throw it and you're sent scampering after the other person. The only way to win that game is to stop. You are over-matched. Now imagine the Republicans on one side of the playground, the Democrats on the other, and the American people in the middle. They have stolen our freedom, liberty, money, land, and time and have proceeded to toss them back and forth over our heads, watching us frantically bounce from one party to the other in hopes that one will be better than the other. Just stop playing. Every government we have put in place, especially during the last century, has been guilty of unmentionable atrocities. Every congressman has voted for something embarrassing and deplorable. We are also coming to a point where the accountability of our politicians is non-existent because we're left to choose between vomiting or diarrhea.

JN: Graphic, but apt! This is something many readers of this illuminated manuscript may be very tuned into, but it is also one of the central lies that spellbinds the society at large. I can turn on the TV or the radio at any point in the next 24 hours and I can hear people arguing for and against the virtues of the Democrats or the values of the Republicans, but the truth is that both parties are beholden to the same corporate "citizens" and both parties have an interest in maintaining their mutual control despite the corrosive effect it has on something that could resemble real democracy. Of course, we even PAY for this circus to continue.

NC: Paying as little tax as possible is another way not to play. I've yet to pay any income tax, because I have always made less than the limit. When the refund check comes, it goes into printing or buying new zines, printing posters, or the ABC bail fund. The government grows in proportion to our greed. You can choose vocations that provide "under the table" pay, such as work in carpentry, plumbing, drywall, electrical, selling handmade goods or produce, fixing junk and selling it, flipping cars or motorcycles, becoming highly skilled and bartering when possible, or other such endeavors.

JN: Now you are beginning to pick at the nerve. Of course, the whole wheel spins on production and consumption. This requires ever-expanding markets. Setting aside the fact of limited resources for the time being, your solutions fly in the face of the marketing and advertising industries who are in the business of producing desire where their is none, need in the midst of excess and a system of FASCIon that creates demand based on planned obsolescence. We also find that people who refuse to excessively buy and produce automatically find themselves at odds with the mainstream, if only because mainstream, bourgeois behavior almost always guarantees subservience. We've all seen our conscientious, if not radical friends, marry, have children, buy homes and suddenly have an abrupt change in values. Instead of becoming MORE cooperative, MORE communal and MORE determined to live outside the mainstream, there is renewed pressure for re-integration. This just adds to the cut-off, fearful, love-lost existence that has become de rigueur in the US: Call the cops when your neighbor's music is too loud and then worry if they know it was you.

NC: Don't call the police. Buy a pistol, permit it if you plan to carry it, and learn how to use it to defend yourself and those around you. Less calls make it harder to justify increasing the police force. Know your neighbors, and have enough of a rapport that you can go knock on their door when they're making too much noise. Be involved in your community enough to take a man aside who's abusing his wife and let him know it won't be tolerated. Grow some balls and fight your own battles.

JN: Ha. Amen. But it's easier said than done for most of us. Most of us are stuck in this false game. I just saw the 1963 omnibus film RO.GO.PA.G. The title is an acronym made from the director's last names: Rosellini, Godard, Pasolini, and Uga Gregoretti. Gregoretti's segment dealt specifically with consumerism and the way it shapes us from cradle to grave. It was both very funny and really sad.

NC: Drop out of the consumerist game. Fix stuff, pick stuff out of the trash, give things away, share your work and teach your skills, share your tools and borrow others'. Pay cash, use money orders, and avoid banks. Buying used or directly from producers, you avoid sales tax and support a local economy, rather than multi-national corporate economies. Can and dry your own food and buy in bulk. Split a large house with people you get along with. Rather that going to bars, invite people over and share your new batch of home-brewed beer or wine. Rather than restaurants, have a potluck and someone's house a few nights a week. Host movie Netflix nights, rather than going to the movies. Ride your bike or walk instead of putting wear on publicly-funded roads with your car or buying gas to make it run. Maybe open a community space, but only if you like headaches.

JN: Ha. Amen, again. These suggestions remind me of Hakim Bey's notions that even a simple dinner party can have revolutionary consequences when we are willing to leave behind mediated entertainment and consumption - along with our social masks - in favor of real, human fellowship. It may sound corny, but we need to make room in our lives to love one another. How can there be real change where there is no love? And in the face of a wild, irrational love, what guard can stand its ground?

NC: Through these strategies, we can create a separate, parallel society that pushes our values, rather than supporting the status quo. We don't fight capitalism on its own turf. When it comes to riot gear, cities, asphalt, tazers, tear gas, and clubs they're the home team, and all their fans are there to cheer them on. Our home court advantage comes into play when we are in situations to be resourceful, loving, open, and persistent. When governments try to be resourceful, they take our tax dollars and fund a study to determine what kind of bureaucracy is required to solve their problem. When they try to be open, our FOIA requests are denied half the time, and the other half, they're full of black marker. I'm still waiting to see the government show love.

JN: Again, this kind of talk brings me back to Guevara's Guerilla Warfare, or even accounts I have read of America's Revolutionary War.

NC: From another perspective, take Carlos Marghiella's The Mini-Manual of the Urban Guerrilla, in which he mentions the basics of guerrilla warfare. He suggests never to attack an enemy at their strongest point. Hang back and wait for your opportunity. You'll see the same thing in the Art of War. At protests, like this September's G20, the government is at its very strongest. Why would you wage an attack then? We waste bail money, show our asses, smash up a lot of windows of well-meaning small businesses, shut traffic down, and allow the entire Anarchist movement to be associated with juvenile, crimethinc-style violence by the media. How do you actually win that battle? Would victory be the G20 moving to a different location or happening in private, or on an island and leaving Pittsburgh in ruins (again)?

JN: Amen...

Use this player to listen to my new CD. Purchase a song or two at your favorite digital outlet and help us stay awake here at Insomnia!

Find the archives to my Sleepless Film Festival, and more at my You Tube channel: Imagicon

Listen to my earlier releases, and enjoy free downloads here!

Please consider supporting this site by making a PayPal donation and check out our friends using the links on the right.

Love,
Joe Nolan

A Bridge on the River Why

2009-09-28T20:18:00.005-05:00

Bon soir, mes amis.

I've actually been sleeping more like a normal human being as of late. As a result, I haven't been posting as much as I do when I am in my werewolf state. The wolf likes to post. I like to write, but the final results seem to take longer when I'm not as blood-thirsty.

This post is actually an interview with Nashville photographer/musician/bon vivant and raconteur, Tony Doling. We discuss Halfway Across A Bridge: Super8 Stills, his latest exhibit at Twist Art Gallery in downtown Nashville's historic Arcade building.

JN: Why don't you tell me a little bit about your new exhibit. How did the concept evolve?

TD: I've been thinking about this show for a couple of years now. I lived in Marin County from 1999-2000. LA for 2 months in 2000. I lived across the Golden Gate Bridge from San Francisco for almost a year, and crossed that bridge probably 50-60 times. For an individual who would like to consider himself an artist/photographer, I never took a single photo of that bridge. I mean, why bother? It's all been done. What I did do is shoot about 10 seconds of black and white Super 8 film footage by sticking my camera out of the window of a moving car while crossing that bridge. For some time now, I've wanted to display the random, incomplete images that came out of these 10 seconds. After a stunning amount of time scanning tiny little frames, that's the show that I came up with.

JN: Obviously, in Marin County the bridge takes on a number of practical, symbolic and historical meanings. How did the bridge figure into your world view during that time?

TD: As a guy who grew up in Louisiana, I was clearly affected by all the many definitive images I'd seen across the rest of the country (The Golden Gate Bridge, The Chicago and NYC skylines, The Seattle Space Needle and on and on). My only relationship was to see something become more beautiful and majestic in person than any of the media images could have attempted to portray.

JN: Still, the images of the bridge color the perception of the real thing. The real thing can sometimes become almost unreal once we have been saturated with mediated messages about what something is. In this case, images of the bridge are a cliché. What made you decide to shoot your footage at that moment? What made you roll down that window?

TD: We were shooting a lot of Super 8 at the time (my brother, Shane and I, when we had common days off) and I had a camera loaded with film and didn't want to turn around to get a legit shot, but couldn't pass up the opportunity to capture the fact that we had actually seen the thing in person. Not a lot of foresight involved.

JN: Its one thing to create some work, its another thing to put it on display. You've started showing more work formally in the last year, but what made you decide to pursue getting this show together?

TD: Again, to be totally honest, an opening came up for the main gallery at Twist, and, given the age of the footage and concept, I realized I would probably never do it if I didn't force myself to do it now.

JN: You've displayed your photos before, but this is more of a conceptual installation. Does this show represent something new in your opinion? A step up? A step out?

TD: I don't know the specific term I would give it, but it is an artistic risk for me. I like to consider myself a simple, no frills guy who doesn't take himself too seriously. I never had a "Master Plan" for this when I shot this. I was just glad to have a day off. The biggest fear for me doing something different than I've done before is that the reaction may be "Who does this guy think he is?" There's definitely a worry that people will think I'm intentionally trying to do something conceptual out of context with my character, and that the result may be insincere. I hope it's not.

JN: At first, I began to suspect that your ambivalence regarding this show was disingenuous, especially given your confidence regarding your musical projects. (Doling is a composer/musician with the Nashville-based pop-collective, Bulb). However, I was fascinated to find out that you look at this show as something separate from your other projects. And you're genuinely worried about it! (Laughs). Tell me a bit about how this is "something different" from your musical efforts.

TD: Well, first of all, I've been playing music for so long, I don't really even have to think about it. In the work I do with Todd ((Greene), a great artist here in Nashville, as well) in bulb, it's so collaborative. I write most of the music and he writes the lyrics and melodies. It's a kind of assembly line in regards to the specialization and by far the most collaborative thing I've ever done. It's a unique way of doing music, but seems to work as we are just wrapping up our 15th album. www.bulbmusic.com (thanks for the plug, Joe). With the Twist show, although I've used many great suggestions from friends, it's still just my name on it - so I feel alot more pressure. There's always a worry in my new ventures into visual arts about the fact that by displaying your work, you have to be willing to let people like it or not, and maybe even tell you that they don't like it. I need to get used to that and be okay with it.

JN: We all certainly have to find a way to continually take ground despite criticism, rejection or - even worse - disinterest. I think my solution is always to stay so busy that I don't have time to consider how others might perceive a given effort. It helps to be immersed in an expansive project. Have you been looking for a bigger project to do or did the material inspire the show?

TD: The accidental nature of the footage and the question of what to do with it definitely inspired the show. The "something bigger" idea scares the shit out of me.

JN: Will you be pursuing similar ideas/projects in the future?

TD: I have no idea where to go now. Any ideas?

JN: What will make this show “successful” in your eyes?

TD: I hope that some of the girls at the after-party might talk to me since I had stuff at the Gallery Crawl.

Doling's project will open this Saturday night, October 3 with an artist reception from 6 – 9 p.m. at Twist Gallery's space at 73 Arcade.

If you're going out of your mind searching for new music, check out the Bulb music link above and download my latest CD at your favorite digital site below.

Use this player to listen to my new CD. Purchase a song or two at your favorite digital outlet and help us stay awake here at Insomnia!

Find the archives to my Sleepless Film Festival, and more at my You Tube channel: Imagicon

Listen to my earlier releases, and enjoy free downloads here!

Please consider supporting this site by making a PayPal donation and check out our friends using the links on the right.

Love,
Joe Nolan

Hollow Can You Go?

2009-09-14T14:30:00.006-05:00

Yo Ho Ho, YoYo's

Hope this writeywrite finds you well.

I am pleased to present you with a bit of follow-up to my recent segment on the latest Disinformation World News podcast.

The segment is called Insomnia - just like this glowing tome - and I plan on following up with extras on this blog for listeners who might want to dig a bit deeper into the 'cast segments.

This week's segment featured the early history of the Hollow Earth. My sources for the piece came from all over the Internet and from my own library. I modeled the arc of the story on this entertaining, short documentary that I am hosting at my YouTube Channel.

Here are some additional sources on The Hollow Earth:

Agartha
Edmond Halley
Hollow Earth
Hollow Earth page at the UnMuseum

If you missed the last podcast, here is a transcript of my segment about R. Crumb's new graphic project on the Book of Genesis:

When visual artist R. Crumb set out to create a new story based on Adam and Eve, a friend suggested "Why not the entire Book of Genesis?" Crumb – who had planned on a twisted tale of his own- soon found himself face-to-face with a much stranger story: the one found in the first book of the Bible itself.

Crumb first came to popular consciousness for creating timeless characters like Mr Natural and Fritz the Cat as well as the Keep on Truckin' comics that have become icons of the counter-cultural upheaval that marked the American 1960's and 70's. Although Crumb's savage satire continues to divide critics, it has engendered him to an avant garde that place him among some of the best storytellers and visual artists of his generation. Crumb's work was most recently given a mainstream resurgence with the release of Terry Zwigoff's 1994 documentary, “Crumb” which won the Grand Jury Prize at Sundance in that same year. Ten years later, in 2004, the Guardian published one of the first articles about Crumb's Genesis project. The book is finally set to be published this fall by Norton.

Even after he'd returned to the original biblical story, Crumb still planned on the kind of satirical approach he's best known for. Imagining a tale full of slapstick hi-jinx and Yiddish humor, Crumb – who was raised Catholic – set about re-reading the Book of Genesis and was stunned by what he found.

A recent New Yorker article claims that Crumb was so stupefied by the sheer weirdness of the Biblical tale that he quickly changed his approach from a satirical send up to a straight illustration job that he applied himself to with fervent devotion.

Its easy to understand why.

The New Yorker piece included pages of Crumb's story, telling the entire tale of the creation of the world, the birth of Adam, God's creation of Eve and their eventual expulsion from the Garden of Eden. Crumb's illustrations bring the story to life in such a simple matter-of-fact style that the odd, eerie, quirks in the narration pop out in stark relief in a way that is easier to miss when simply reading the text from a Bible.
The three strangest points that are brought to the fore by Crumb's take on the tale are the identity of the Forbidden Fruit eve shares with Adam, the nature of the creature that eve meets in the Garden, and the nature of the God in the story, angry, worried, and referencing himself in the plural at the oddest moments.

If you'd like to read a great essay about apples, pick up Michael Pollan's Botany of Desire. Pollan discusses the apple's evolution from a few fruiting trees on a tiny hillside in Kazakhstan to a world wide staple. He also touches lightly on Eve's apple, wondering aloud – as many have – if actual apples could have even been available in an earthly Garden of Eden that the Bible states was located in the region of the Tigris and Euphrates rivers. Many have posited the notion that the apple could have actually been a fig or a pomegranate or another species more easily found in the region. However, if we are going to concern ourselves with actual geography and real botany, we must quickly admit that neither apples or pomegranates or figs, seem to be capable of the kind of world-changing, shattering of consciousness that occurred when Adam and Eve first plucked and sucked their way into the longest after-school detention of all time. But what if the fruit wasn't a fruit at all? What if it was a mushroom?

The late great Terence mckenna provides us with one of the most entertaining creation narratives of all time in his book Food of the Gods. Mckenna posits that early proto-humans, faced with receding forests and food sources, left the trees for the grass lands where they discovered the first holy trinity: cows, cowpies and psilocybin mushrooms. Another book that every loyal listener should pour over for their own satisfaction, McKenna's hypothesis goes on to claim that our ancestors who ate the mushrooms would hunt better, screw more effectively, and eventually be so overwhelmed with the spiritual tremendum revealed at the core of the mushroom's mystery that they would found the first religion, focused on the great horned female deity that represented the origin of the foodstuff that had made them something more than monkees. According to Mckenna they lived in communal villages as gentle hunters and gatherers who encouraged extended families, eschewed monogamy in favor of group bonding orgies and created the first spoken language while they sang their songs to an ancient sky.
In other words - Paradise.

Or not.

There doesn't seem to be a way to identify the Forbidden Fruit of the Bible's first book , or even to determine if it is strictly a symbol for a time when man became aware of himself in a way that he wasn't before. But what about the snake? Is the serpent in the garden to be taken literally? Symbolically? And are we even correct to think of the serpent as a serpent?

Again, dear listener, it is beyond the scope of this report to determine whether or not a real creature actually spoke to the first woman in that garden so long ago. But one thing we can't ignore is the nature of the serpent the bible itself describes. A creature that is brought weirdly to life in Crumb's new book.

The most striking detail in Crumb's Genesis is his representation of the serpent in the garden as a scaly lizard man walking upright on two legs. I was taken aback by this until I remembered my own catholic upbringing in which we learned that the serpent doesn't crawl on its belly until God curses him to do so as punishment for interfering with eve and encouraging her to eat the fruit. Most Bibles don't say so explicitly, but the implication, one that is backed up by most theologians, is that the serpent walked like a man before he was cursed.

The obvious leap – and one we will now gleefully take together – is to David Ikke and his reptilian conspiracy theory. Listeners to this program are no doubt familiar with David Ikke and his theory that the Illuminati rulers of this world are in fact not human at all. In the Wikipedia entry about Icke it is stated that “In 1999, he published The Biggest Secret, in which he wrote that the Illuminati are a race of reptilian humanoids known as the Babylonian Brotherhood, and that many prominent figures are reptilian, including George W. Bush, Queen Elizabeth II, Kris Kristofferson, and Boxcar Willie ” For Icke, the shape-shifters are aliens that have come to the earth from the constellation Draco. They are required to drink human blood to shapeshift and they have interbred with humans so that they can continue to appear normal to us, but still hold on to traces of their true DNA. Does this account for the prominence of the dragon in myths and fables from all over the world and does the serpent still whisper in our ears when we turn on the television to listen to the latest political debate? Is it possible that the Draco's do exist on Earth and that they may have been here since time immemorial interfering with man's development all along?

Crumb addresses the birth of man like he does the rest of the story of Creation – simply illustrating a strictly biblical narrative of the tale – and what a tale it is. Although there are a number of contradictions and oddities to the bible's story of the creation of man, we'll only take a look at the oddest bits. When God creates Adam he builds him out of dust and breathes life into his nostrils. This strikes me as a fairly straight fable that one would expect in any of the creation myths from around the world. However, when he creates Eve, God performs a weird surgery of sorts, causing a deep sleep to fall over Adam, removing his rib and fashioning her from what I feel comfortable referring to as his genetic material. In addition God states “Now we have made man in our own image”. Who is the we god is referring to?
Perhaps we can clear up some of these questions by referring to an earlier text.

In his Twelfth Planet series, scholar Zachariah Sitchin claims that ancient Sumerian texts tell the creation story in greater detail then the bible he claims they influenced. Sitchins interpretations state that the man was genetically engineered by aliens from the planet Niburu to mine gold that the visitors required to stabilize the atmosphere on their home planet. Sitchin would argue that we were created by Gods and that the plural references in the bible are an important clue pointing to this deeper tale. The idea that an advance race engineered humanity also provides some kind of explanation regarding why the God of the bible would need to perform some strange medical procedure to create a woman when he has been able to think the entirety of the universe into existence by evocation alone.

If the rest of Crumb's book is as thought provoking as the snippets that have been published, written up and leaked on the Internet, we are certainly in for a wild ride, one that will surely provoke more questions than it will be able to provide answers for. But – dear listeners – if you keep wondering, we'll keep asking and together we'll take a tip from the man himself and keep on trucking.

For Disinformation World News,

I'm Joe Nolan

All the podcasts are archived at Disinfo.com. Disinformation World News podcast">Check 'em out, listen to episodes you may have missed and subscribe so you won't miss any more!

Once you return to the surface world, take a listen to my latest CD and pick up a few downloads at your favorite digital music provider...

Use this player to listen to my new CD. Purchase a song or two at your favorite digital outlet and help us stay awake here at Insomnia!

Find the archives to my Sleepless Film Festival, and more at my You Tube channel: Imagicon

Listen to my earlier releases, and enjoy free downloads here!

Please consider supporting this site by making a PayPal donation and check out our friends using the links on the right.

Love,
Joe Nolan

And Now a Special Announcement

2009-08-25T11:46:00.002-05:00

Good days and day dreams daemons and deities alike.

In my last post on this illuminated scroll, I alluded to some workings that were in the works and asked you to keep your eyes open for a new upcoming and tomorrow.

We are now at that tomorrow.

I am pleased to announce that I have been asked to contribute to the Disinformation World News Podcast. I have been a fan of this site and this 'cast for ages and I am really looking forward to contributing to this alternative news/occult/Fortean/ultracultural stew of goodness.

For those of you who are unfamiliar with the site, Disinformation - IMHO - was one of the first great websites that made use of the internet as a kind of feedback engine, pointing the curious toward the ever more curious-er and creating a sort of clearing-house of counter-cultural information and energetics.

The Disinformation Podcasts are the evolution of the popular Out There podcasts that were pioneered by Raymond Wiley and Joe McFall at the University of Georgia. This show was a huge hit in the occult/weirdness scene and Disinfo smartly tapped them to develop their new podcasts about a year ago.

Check out our first episode together. My segment covers the psychedelic implications of artist R. Crumb's new Book of Genesis project that will be released this fall.

If you just can't get enough of my golden voice, take a listen to my latest CD and pick up a few downloads at your favorite digital music provider...

Use this player to listen to my new CD. Purchase a song or two at your favorite digital outlet and help us stay awake here at Insomnia!

Find the archives to my Sleepless Film Festival, and more at my You Tube channel: Imagicon

Listen to my earlier releases, and enjoy free downloads here!

Please consider supporting this site by making a PayPal donation and check out our friends using the links on the right.

Love,
Joe Nolan

I Like Iron Mike

2009-08-14T10:40:00.004-05:00

Hello small babies,

God bless us every one.

So last night I had the pleasure of enjoying the new Mike Tyson documentary, Tyson.

Tyson is directed by James Toback, one of the most eccentric, challenging directors working today.

This is Toback's first doc, but Tyson explores themes of sexuality, racism, madness and drug use that permeate his body of work. If you are interested in exploring his work I recommend watching all of his films, but Fingers (starring Harvey Keitel as a pianist/mob enforcer) and Black and White (a sprawling, Altmanesque exploration of race and class that features Mike Tyson as himself in a supporting role) are both particularly good.

Toback - who wrote a notorious biography of NFL great Jim Brown - befriended Tyson years ago and his film gives Iron Mike a chance to tell his side of his sad, maddening, bizarre story. In fact, Tyson is mostly just our eponymous anti-hero speaking on camera, telling his own story in his own words. Toback's masterful use of split-screen, audio editing and found footage creates a gripping setting for the loquacious ex-champ to express himself - sometimes laughing, sometimes crying - in his own unique way.

Tyson comes off as a troubled man who was driven to become Heavyweight Champion of the World not through a sense of mission or a striving for greatness, but by a terrible, gnawing insecurity for his own physical safety that resulted from experiences he had as a child, growing up in a particularly brutal section of Brooklyn, NY.

The Tyson we see in the film, is poetic, thoughtful, humbled, regretful, joyous when he speaks about his 6 children and generous when he speaks about his fellow fighters. He is also, clearly a complex, sensitive man who may always be haunted by his own peculiar demons, but Tyson makes no apologies. In much the same manner that Mike used to enter the ring with no robe save for a lather of sweat or a kind of improvised tunic fashioned from a gym towel, Tyson wastes little time with formalities. This film comes out swinging and its a knockout.

If you live in Nashville, you missed your last chance to see the film last night. However, I understand the movie has already been released to DVD and is available on Netflix. Check it out.

In the meantime, here are two Tyson docs I am hosting on my YouTube channel.

This first one from ESPN's excellent Beyond the Glory series of boxing career retrospectives.

This next doc is a film made for The Learning Channel entitled The Mike Tyson story.

If all that punching has you wanting to rock out. Check out my newest CD...

Use this player to listen to my new CD. Purchase a song or two at your favorite digital outlet and help us stay awake here at Insomnia!

Find the archives to my Sleepless Film Festival, and more at my You Tube channel: Imagicon

Listen to my earlier releases, and enjoy free downloads here!

Please consider supporting this site by making a PayPal donation and check out our friends using the links on the right.

Love,
Joe Nolan

The "I's" in Activism: A Chat with Nate C (Part 2)

2009-08-13T12:32:00.006-05:00

Ca vas, Comrades

I have been in touch with Nate again after a lull in our conversation due to his being preoccupied with a recent move to a City in the Sky.

A few how-you-dos and a couple restaurant recommendations later and we are back up to speed with our ongoing discussion. For the uninitiated, Nate is a friend of mine who recently left Nashville. More accurately, Nate was a guy I met one time at a party who I promptly had an hour of engaging conversation with concerning his upcoming wedding, his impending move and - most importantly for our purposes - his upcoming trip to Greece to make a film about the civil unrest that had erupted in Athens following the police shooting of a teenage boy that occurred last December.

To catch up on our earlier installment, simply click the "Nate C" label at the bottom of this post.

I got the last word in our last post, addressing the idea that people in America are to prosperous to revolt in the way we've recently seen in Iran. Nate touches on this idea and then we get back to our talk about Greece.

And now, back to our conversation...

The "I's" in Activism: A Chat with Nate C (Part 2)

NC: The Iranian people seem to have a pretty miserable daily existence. I'm poor in this country and I can still manage to eat out some, have a couple of drinks, and pay for an education. Iranians also believe in a god, and that leads them to believe in justice and absolutes. Religion makes people militant.

In Greece, the Greek Orthodox church runs the show. They own real estate that they rent out to the Greek Government. To believe in the State is to believe in the Church. Inversely, to not believe in the Church is to not believe in the State. Kids in school there are reading the existentialists. They read classical philosophy in middle school. They were wearing black, riding scooters, smoking cigarettes, and drinking red wine before it was cool. The educated youth are godless and stateless, unbound by any sense of dominance or other assortments of damnation.

JN: I would assume that this plays into the appeal of Anarchistic ideas among the young. There is universal yearning among all young people everywhere, you can see the literary echoes of the idea of this kind of Children's Paradise in Burrough's Wild Boys or among Peter Pan's Lost Boys. However, the Greek youth obviously have their own particular circumstances in regards to the way the State and the Church affect their lives. In America, these forces also wield tremendous power, but not officially. It's far more subtle, and ultimately, can't really be compared. Apples to Oranges. Of course, they are living within a historic shadow that is so vast and ancient that it literally stretches across the ideals, values and foundations of our own country. Contemporary Americans have a hard time comprehending the weight of that kind of history.

NC: The word paradigm starts to address the question, but it's even broader than that. The paradigms of Athens are influenced by the cultural heritage and history, and vice versa. The Athenian lifestyle would be a good starting place toward understanding.

From what I was able to gather, my perception of Athenian culture is that it's very leisurely. Wait staff in restaurants there are paid a healthy hourly wage, so rushing around to earn the highest amount of gratuity possible within a shift is alien to them. Friends stop by to visit waiters in the cafe, and they sit and have coffee together while on the clock. At cafes in the U.S., I've seen owners disable electrical outlets to keep people from "camping" with their laptops. It's not that way at all in Athens.

They take vacations regularly--little weekend excursions to an island or the countryside. That sort of thing isn't cordoned off and reserved for a week each year like in U.S. working culture.

Television is very new in Greece. The teens didn't grow up in front of it, and the mid-thirties is the beginning of the main TV-watching demographic. The difference between the TV watchers and the others is shocking; early teens are taking up the styles and lifestyles they see on MTV-- a fairly new development in Greece. When people are not watching television, they are engaged in active forms of entertainment, rather than passively watching pictures of other people being active. I would argue that this creates a predisposition toward action, such as what culminated in political action.

JN: This is an important point. As we began to address in our last conversation, revolt is rarely the result of cause and effect. There has to be an underlying predisposition that will allow for people to activate for change. There may be a demand, but a willingness to answer that call cannot be assumed. Clearly many factors go into such decisions, but the passivity of American media culture can undermine activism on many levels including physical health, education, political awareness etc.

NC: We can't make the mistake of putting too much stock in the types of entertainment available there though. Education in Greece is free. Even college is free, and without limits on the amount of time they can continue their studies if in good standing. Many young people are very well read and educated. Most speak a few languages, and know their history and government. Their "classics" are not puritanical popular novels and poems but philosophical tracts thousands of years old about free thought, democracy, and the nature of man's existence. They have a better shot from the beginning reading Plato than Edgar Allen Poe.

JN: Although I have read and enjoyed much of the Am. Lit. canon, your point is well taken. Another continuing irony is that our culture shares the same common roots, but I don't think I would've read Plato until late in high school - if not college - if it hadn't been for the library of books my father had collected. It's become such a cliche - especially in the last 8 years - but people who don't know their past are truly doomed to create wrong-headed tomorrows or at least let them be created in their name.

NC: In a town where there's a sense of a past, there's also a clearer idea of the future perhaps. Athenians want their mark on the world to be minimal, and the mark they do leave to be positive, like all healthy humans. When they see their government threatening that with their actions, they take it very seriously. An awareness of what effected change in the past makes "true believers" that believe in future reforms.

JN: There is a sense of empowerment in this kind of recollection. Successful civil actions build on themselves. I find it so odd that America is still trying to decide whether is was right for the radicals in the '60's to protest the Vietnam War.
This gets very Chomskyan. There is a constant battle over which version of history we will honor. Members of the Labor Movement literally fought and died in the streets of this country so that children were no longer employed in factories and so workers could work only 40 hours with a weekend. Today, many Americans will ignorantly talk down unions, but you can bet they'd never give up their weekends. There is a lack of understanding/knowledge about events that aren't even 100 years old.

The unrest in Greece began with the police shooting of a teenager in Athens. America isn't immune to such brutality. What is the relationship between the average Athenian and the police?

NC: Law in general in Greece is not taken very seriously. In the U.S. we have the most skilled guns in the world pointed at us every time we step out of line. The cops in Athens are twenty-something college drop outs. They lounge in the shade on street corners flirting with the one or two female soldiers stationed with the group, hassle immigrants, smoke cigarettes, drink frappes and play with the many stray dogs in the city. They don't write speeding tickets. Public intoxication, assault, etc. are par for the course. People drink beer walking down the streets and the police won't even bother to put down their cigarettes.

JN: How does the economic situation compare to America or to Guevara's Argentina and Cuba as per our last discussion?

NC: In the Cuban struggle, and the ones in Argentina where Guevara spent his formative years, people were poor, desperate, hungry, bored, and informed. That's similar to how things are in Greece.

To have a perfect storm for radical social change, we need a few factors:
1. An accessible geography. The United States is too damn big.
2. Dominant modes of transit that are communal.
3. A culture where death is a part of life, not something alien to be feared.
4. A leisurely pace that allows people to catch their breath and look around.
5. Graffiti and wheat pasting as street media forms, or access to other media.
6. Civil unrest due to unemployment--especially among the educated.
7. A widespread awareness of exactly how fucked up the system is.
8. Enough anonymity to organize effectively in underground resistance movements.
9. An awareness of, and an environment dominated by, the history of one's civilization.
10. Interaction with people from other parts of the world.

Now, what of these factors above can we change in the States? Which factor are changing on their own? Who controls the factors that seem here to stay? A good beginning would be to:
1. Turn off the television.
2. Start organizing community social events that are available at little or no cost.
3. Make education free and open to all, both practical skills and the traditional fields of study.
4. Make politics fun and interesting.
5. Liberate stigmatized words from the conventional lexicon.
6. Eat less, drink less, and ride bikes more.
7. Never pay for another permit of any sort.
8. Write letters and send books to prisoners.
9. Just like when you were fighting with your little sister, ignoring her is the best way to fight back. The government is insecure and craves your attention. "You're a terrorist!" "I know you are, but what am I?" "Stop it!!!!!" Works every time.
10. Drink, fuck, smoke, eat good food, and dance.

Amen.

More to come...

Use this player to listen to my new CD. Purchase a song or two at your favorite digital outlet and help us stay awake here at Insomnia!

Find the archives to my Sleepless Film Festival, and more at my You Tube channel: Imagicon

Listen to my earlier releases, and enjoy free downloads here!

Please consider supporting this site by making a PayPal donation and check out our friends using the links on the right.

Love,
Joe Nolan

Miguel Angel Torres VS Brian Bowles

2009-08-09T22:07:00.004-05:00

Hey everybody,

Tonight's the night. Miguel Angel Torres and Brian Bowles are just about to meet in the cage for the third challenge to Torres' WEC Bantam Weight title.

Going into this fight, I am - of course - in favor of Torres: my vote for best pound for pound fighter in the world. However, it may not be so simple.

Bowles is less experienced than Torres, but he is undefeated, he's never gone the distance, he has proven that he can take a punch.

Torres is coming off a very close win against Mizugaki - also covered on this blog...

You can bet that Bowles studied that fight and will try to bring some strategy to the fight tonight. Mizugaki confounded Torres by taking his shattering punches better than previous opponents while also standing up Torres, pushing his own agenda, showing little fear of - and little respect for - Torres formidable striking skills.

Look for Bowles to pressure Torres right off the bat looking for a quick knockout. This won't be easy. Torres is as tough as they come.

The fighters are being announced and we're about to begin...

Round One:
Both fighters look to be in amazing condition. Neither fighter shows any signs of rushing in, both waiting for the other to make a move. A full minute has gone by with NO contact. BOWLES DROPS TORRES WITH HIS FIRST PUNCH OF THE NIGHT, but Torres immediately jumps up and appears to be pissed. Bowles gets Torres to the cage and manages a takedown. Torres attacks Bowles with heel kicks from the guard, Bowles stands up and eats a few up kicks. Bowles and Torres are back on their feet. One minute and a half to go. Bowles moves in, Torres connects with a hard right driving Bowles back. Torres chases him to the cage with a flurry of blows, but Bowles is covering up and backing up before scoring a solid right to the chin of Torres. Torres buckles and rolls to the ground. Bowles follows him down scoring right punches and elbows to the face as Torres attempts to maneuver into a position where he can utilize his up-kicks. Bowles lands a very clean right to Torres chin and he appears to go limp just before Bowles lands a series of hard lefts and gets the TKO.

UNBELIEVABLE.

Congratulations Brian Bowles. An amazing fight. First Faber loses two in a row, now Torres 17 fight winning streak comes to a close.

Fighters like Faber and Torres remain two of the most exciting fighters in the sport, but it is a credit to the evolution of mixed martial arts that even such amazing fighters can lose a given fight in a given night.

I feel like Torres amazing jab has been absent during both of the last two fights. Not to take anything from Bowles, but I think Torres can take this belt back if he is willing and able to go back to fundamentals, putting an emphasis on the techniques that lead him to the championship in the first place.

Use this player to listen to my new CD. Purchase a song or two at your favorite digital outlet and help us stay awake here at Insomnia!

Find the archives to my Sleepless Film Festival, and more at my You Tube channel: Imagicon

Listen to my earlier releases, and enjoy free downloads here!

Please consider supporting this site by making a PayPal donation and check out our friends using the links on the right.

Love,
Joe Nolan

Radio Radio

2009-08-09T13:50:00.003-05:00

Hey y'all and then some,

Hope everyone is enjoying a lazy Sunday. I am marinating some chicken thighs in anticipation of my potluck supper later with a girl from a faraway land. We will also be frying green tomatoes and assembling ravioli while staring longingly into one another's eyes and trying not to laugh.

Wanted to say thanks again to all the good people who came out to my latest show at Ugly Mugs cafe in Nashville last night. We had a real blast and this was definitely the funner-est show I've had on this recent run of performances this spring and summer.

Here's the set list:

San Fransisco Girl
Like I never Knew You
The Wicked
See About You
Rush Hour Blues/Goodnight Irene

A few of these tunes (The Wicked, Like I never knew you) are songs I've been playing a lot lately. I am currently working on them for my new CD. Not sure when that will be done...

Also I have some fun news coming soon regarding a great podcast that I have been asked to contribute to. I should be making an announcement soon so stay tuned. In the meantime, whet your appetite on this fun interview with Austin Gandy from the Invisible College segments on Disinformation Podcasts.

I am also planning on making the recent recording of my show at the chapel in the Downtown Presbyterian Church in Nashville available online soon. There is a new site I've been wanting to investigate and I am contemplating creating a kind of bootleg clearing house where I can post live recordings, outtakes and demos for download, stream etc. Of course, I already have a similar archive on the jukebox page at my website, but this would include more material like my recent performance at the Kalamazoo Art Hop in Michigan and more.

Also, take some time to listen to my latest report for Nashville Public Radio. I recently did a story about Nashville's visual art scene, focusing on the economics of running a gallery during tough times.

Here is the transcript:

The Arts Economy – A Tale of Two Galleries (transcript)
Thursday, July 23rd, 2009

By Joe Nolan

As the economic recession continues, the always-risky art business has proved particularly vulnerable. In January, art sales were down by half at the Christies and Sotheby’s auction houses in New York. Here in Nashville, WPLN’s Joe Nolan reports on the fortunes of two local galleries trying to attract the difficult art dollar.

Audio for this feature is available here.

dotted line

(SOUND: Twist Gallery)

In downtown Nashville, the 106 year old Arcade building has become the epicenter of the city’s latest art scene. The first Saturday of every month, art fans head downtown for a Gallery Crawl, visiting the fourteen art spaces that call the Arcade and Nashville’s 5th Avenue of the Arts home.

Twist Gallery was one of the first venues to help transform the mostly-vacant Arcade, and was one of a handful of galleries that participated in the inaugural Art Crawl.

CARLISLE: “I’m Caroline Carlisle with Twist Art Gallery and we’re standing in the front room of Twist…”

The storefront gallery at Twist is displaying a show of drawings by two artists from Atlanta’s Beep Beep Gallery. Jason R. Butcher’s odd-ball narratives feature characters like a man whose his inner-child’s arms and legs are growing out of his chest. The exhibit spills into the gallery’s back room where an inventory of small retail items helps to pay the rent for Twist’s more challenging shows.

CARLISLE: “….handmade items, artist created things, t-shirts, vinyl record bowls, note cards, handmade bags and whatnot, all priced below $250. It could go from $3 on up, but we try to keep things affordable for people.”

By executing this one-two punch of challenging programming and savvy retail, Carlisle says Twist is effectively weathering a current dip in sales.

CARLISLE: “I would say we’ve seen a little bit of a slow down this year. The funny thing is we’ve seen more people in the gallery – less sales.”

Despite lean times, Twist has added an additional gallery on the Arcade’s upper level, adding to its space in the real world while it simultaneously increase their reach online.

CARLISLE: “We just recently added several features that we’re excited about. One is our shop button that takes you to our Etsy shop. I’ll click on that now.”

Etsy.com is an Internet bazaar where the gallery can sell their artist’s work online. Twist also employs a blog, social networking profiles and Twitter to carry their exhibits beyond the gallery’s walls extending the Twist brand well beyond the Arcade.

CARLISLE: “That’s just how you do it now. You can’t just have a website or just have a blog or you can’t just have a physical bricks and mortar space. We haven’t quite figured out what it is, but I think we’re trying to and I think that’s the next step.”

Another gallery contemplating its next step is only 6 blocks from the Arcade. Although the two galleries are within walking distance from one another, Ruby Green has a different, longer story to tell, one that can sometimes feel a world away from the Avenue of the Arts that Ruby Green also calls home.

CAMPBELL: “I am Chris Campbell and I’m the founding director of Ruby Green, and this is what we call the main gallery. We have divided our entire gallery space into 5 working artist studios. We’re just trying to survive and pay our bills right now.”

The studios recall the venue’s roots as a collection of ramshackle artist spaces that Campbell transformed into a non-profit art gallery in 1998. Ruby Green quickly became known as one of the largest, most engaging art gallery spaces in Nashville. The gallery’s art-for-art’s-sake programming offered challenging installations, video art and experimental live music.

(SOUND OF EXPERIMENTAL MUSIC)

The interest generated by bands like German Castro as well as the gallery’s well-attended exhibits paid off in 2005 when the Andy Warhol Foundation recognized the gallery’s achievements.

CAMPBELL: “It was one of the best things that’s ever happened to I think Nashville’s contemporary art scene personally, because we’re in the books. We’re in the history.”

The Foundation provided Ruby Green with $135,000 dollars, allowing the gallery to hire some of its loyal volunteers.

CAMPBELL: “So for a few years we had paid employees and we were able to reach out and do a lot more and serve a lot more artists. But like all non-profits you still always have to cover all of your operating costs. It’s very rare to get money that’s going to go just for rent and electricity.”

Today at Ruby Green, the main gallery has come full circle. The newly-erected walls fill the formerly spacious room, and the artist studios are linked by a common hallway. Although this latest effort is creating income for the space, the gallery is facing greater challenges.

Campbell worries that possible downtown development plans for green spaces and new Convention Center parking may mean the end of the building that is the gallery’s ten-year old home, forcing Ruby Green to find a new venue even further removed from 5th Avenue and a Gallery Crawl that they already feel a world away from.

CAMPBELL: “I was told that 5th Avenue of the arts is a big elephant and that they can only eat a bite at a time and they’re starting up at TPAC so, you know, we’re at the end of the elephant. The other end (laughs).”

As of the airing of this report, the doors were locked at Ruby Green. The gallery has put in a 30 days notice with their landlord and will be leaving their space to search for a new home in the coming weeks.

For Nashville public radio, I’m Joe Nolan.

Use this player to listen to my new CD. Purchase a song or two at your favorite digital outlet and help us stay awake here at Insomnia!

Find the archives to my Sleepless Film Festival, and more at my You Tube channel: Imagicon

Listen to my earlier releases, and enjoy free downloads here!

Please consider supporting this site by making a PayPal donation and check out our friends using the links on the right.

Love,
Joe Nolan

Real to Reel

2009-08-04T09:59:00.004-05:00

Yes and what up?

A quick update on some of what's going down with what's coming up...

First of all, I have played several shows in the past months and have been enjoying a musically active summer playing festivals and other such gigs that have been embedded in sunny funny goings-on.

This last weekend I played at the Downtown Presbyterian Church in Nashville during the First Saturday Gallery Crawl. The 'Crawl draws 1000's of folks downtown for art gawking, free wine and live tunes.

The guys from Eastern Block played in the Arcade while David Hellams, Harvey Gerard and myself played the Church along with the Team from Welcome to 1979.

The cats from '79 are an analog recording collective/full blown studio on the west side of our fair city. The guys came in with the reel to reel and we recorded each of our sets to shiny, black tape; curling around itself like a noisy little viper. I just found out that I am also going get my filthy little hands on all the audio from my performance at the Kalamazoo art hop earlier this summer.

All of this archiving is inspiring me to find a new outlet for all this live/demo material. I recently began digitizing a bunch of stuff that I have on cassettes from the early 90's.

More on that soon.

For those of you in Nashville, I'll be doing a short set at Ugly Mugs coffee in East Nashville at 6:30 PM this coming Saturday, August 8.

See you there?

Use this player to listen to my new CD. Purchase a song or two at your favorite digital outlet and help us stay awake here at Insomnia!

Find the archives to my Sleepless Film Festival, and more at my You Tube channel: Imagicon

Listen to my earlier releases, and enjoy free downloads here!

Please consider supporting this site by making a PayPal donation and check out our friends using the links on the right.

Love,
Joe Nolan

The "I's" in Activism: A Chat with Nate C (Part 1)

2009-07-28T16:05:00.008-05:00

Hello my people,

Welcome back.

Haven't had a chance to catch up here in awhile, so I thought it would be a good time to do something special.

In the early spring I found myself at a birthday party for a friend of mine at Nashville's Little Hamilton space. "Little Hamilton" is the name most of us use for the Firebrand Anarchist Collective located on Little Hamilton street in a warehouse/small industry district in Nashville.

The group has worked - in various forms - for years to make the space a reality and over the last year they finally did. They have become a lighthouse of sorts for Nashville's activist community, attracting punks, hippies, bike kids, Greens, anti-war and Food-Not-Bombs groups with their resources and activities.

At the party, I met a guy named Nate C just a few days before he was to be married on the pedestrian bridge that crosses the Cumberland River downtown. He was also a few weeks away from a trip to Athens, Greece where he intended to document the civil unrest that stemmed from the shooting of a young Anarchist in December of 2008 by filming footage for a short documentary.

Nate and I had a chance to touch base when he got back to The South, but he has recently departed for The Western Lands. His story, his insights and his commitment have fueled an ongoing discussion that we are continuing online and sharing via this illuminated document.

This discussion will be presented in a series of posts as our discussion continues. Please click on the "Anarchism" label at the end of this post to access the entire series.

Enjoy!

The "I's" in Activism: A Chat with Nate C (Part 1)

Joe Nolan: Hey, Nate! Why don't you start by filling us in on your story and lead us up to your trip to Athens and the situation in Greece.

Nate Cougill: I'm an activist in my mid-20's. I've been active in establishing Little Hamilton Collective and the Firebrand Infoshop in Nashville for the past two years. I think there are better ways to organize a society than a representative democracy, and I see my work as a manifestation of that belief. Rather than engaging the government and seeking to change it, I disregard the government whenever possible and work at creating a parallel society by building self-directed community projects. I believe in everyone's right to live as the please, harming noone. This is the greatest degree of freedom is the kind where nobody's exercise of freedom infringes on the freedom of others. With LHC, I've been lucky enough to find other people in this backwards Southern town that think about things in a similar way, and try to make a physical space that expresses these beliefs.

Now, you might be wondering where Greece falls into all this. Last December, a teenager was shot in cold blood by a police officer. The kid was being harrassed by two officers abusing their authority, and he didn't back down. News of what happened spread like wildfire. The kid was a professed Anarchist and was involved in organizing around Athens. Rather than considering the cost of expressing dissent, then holding signs in front of state buildings until their permits expired, Athenians took to the streets and set everything in sight on fire, including police officers and squad cars. The movement spread to other cities on the European continent. Absolut Vodka put out an ad with a picture of an Absolut bottle with a burning rag stuffed into it bearing the phrase, "Absolut Athens." There were solidarity demonstrations in the United States, but the wildfires were extinguished in the Atlantic. Aside from those who watch fringe political news on the internet, the story was a passing headline on CNN presented without an appropriate amount context.

As things stand currently in this country, police brutality is nothing out of the ordinary. We imprison a larger portion of our population than any other country in the world. The constitution has become a punchline at political fundraisers. What makes Greeks take to the streets over a single injustice, and why are people in the U.S. still sitting on their hands as they watch their country being destroyed and their birthright stolen by madmen? I went to Greece to seek out some answers and bring them back to share with anti-authoritarians in the States.

JN: Lets get a little more into Greece and the conversation we had at Little Hamilton. Tell me about your original plans to document your visit.

NC: When I was headed to Greece originally, I had planned to make a documentary about Athenian politics. There's been enough said already about the rioting last December, but nobody was talking about why there were riots in Athens over one teen's unjust death, and here in the States such an act is usually met with apathy. More important than studying the events in Greece is the study of why they happened in Greece.

Despite my best efforts, fine video camera was pretty far out of my reach, and I ended up arriving in Athens during a lull in the commotion. This was before the kidnappings and bombings started and about a month before police began shooting immigrants in Platia Omonia-- a block away from where I was staying. I thought it best to write an article about my findings.

It's still in progress, but it goes into the tactical advantages of staging political events in a place like Athens, versus a U.S. city.

JN: One thing that I find interesting is the way that this kind of unrest occurs in places like Greece, but we see it less here. There were a lot of under-covered protests leading up to the Iraq war and many large protests during the first four years of Bush, but the recent months call to mind the perfect example: Iran.

You don't see this point of view represented in our media, and - of course - the cultural context is very different, but the people of Iran are essentially risking their lives because they believe an election was stolen, just like many people in the U.S. believed after the 2000 election. However, things never reached that fever pitch here in the states.

In Che Guevara's book "Guerilla Warfare", he spends a lot of time talking about the pre-conditions for revolution. Suffice to say that its easier to revolt when you are hungry. The logic follows that Americans - even most low income Americans - don't miss enough meals to take real chances and demand fundamental changes.

Tell me more about the differences that exist between a place like Athens and a place like New York or Chicago regarding civil disobedience and revolutionary consciousness. Are the differences primarily economic or is it more complicated than that in your opinion?

(To be continued)

Check out this Wikipedia entry to brush up on the history of Anarchism in Greece.

Here is the entry's blurb regarding the riots that occurred last December:

December 2008

On December 6, 2008, a 15-year old youth was shot dead by a policeman after a verbal exchange in the libertarian stronghold of Exarchia, Athens. Within an hour, anarchists, leftists and sympathisers rioted and attacked banks, police vehicles and government offices in the area.The police refusal to apologise brought thousands to the streets for daily clashes and demonstrations. The parliament building was besieged for weeks by angry crowds. Major violence erupted during one of the marches, with rioters attacking and setting on fire many public buildings, banks and shops. Thousands of young people staged angry protests across Greece, attacking police stations in every town. Almost in every neighbourhood of Athens and Pireus police stations, banks and big businesses were firebombed. The "December Unrest", as it became known, gave a new impetus to the Anarchists, who were in the forefront of the movement.

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Love,
Joe Nolan

Goodnight, Captain: The Death of Steve McNair

2009-07-04T15:46:00.008-05:00

In a week of high-profile deaths, none has been as shocking - or as seemingly senseless - as the apparent murder/suicide (hours later being referred to as a double-homicide) of the former Nashville Titans quarterback in downtown Nashville today.

I had been attending a Hot Chicken Festival on the other side of the Cumberland river in east Nashville. On my way home, I passed on the highway in favor of a trip over the bridge and along the waterfront to Crema to get a cup of coffee. Crema was closed for the holiday, so I began the slow meander west towards the main artery to my side of town that is 8th Avenue.

Passing by 2nd and Lea, I found that my my path towards 8th was blocked at several points by what turned out to be a number of police cars and a tangle of yellow crime scene tape.

By the time I got home I heard that Steve may have been killed. As usual, my Facebook friends and I were spreading the news before many of the local stations had even gone through with official stories.

As some of you know, I spent an earlier lifetime as a jock. For all of my dark poetics I used to be totally dedicated to playing football as a co-captain of my varsity team. A lover of the smashing and the crashing, I usually look down on quarterbacks in favor of defensive ends and pulling guards. I've never cared for the glory-boy posturing that goes along with the QB position.

Steve was different. He was everything a good quarterback should be AND he was one of the toughest dudes to ever play the game. "Country Strong" as someone once said. McNair was a stoic, heroic leader, a true inspiration and a great warrior-citizen for the city of Nashville and the Titans.

Goodnight, Captain.

If you have the time, watch this great video online at NFL dot com. It tells the story of Steve's road to the NFL. It lasts for about 7 minutes. Sorry I couldn't embed it.

Use this player to listen to my new CD. Purchase a song or two at your favorite digital outlet and help us stay awake here at Insomnia!

Find the archives to my Sleepless Film Festival, and more at my You Tube channel: Imagicon

Listen to my earlier releases, and enjoy free downloads here!

Please consider supporting this site by making a PayPal donation and check out our friends using the links on the right.

Love,
Joe Nolan