Brianland

. Let There Be Songs To Fill The Screen . . I remember when I first saw the long-in-the-works Beat Generation documentary “The Source” at its premiere in Manhattan with McClure, Amram and all these other luminaries and we all went to the afterparty at the Nuyorican Poets Cafe and everybody was freaking out that […]

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. Satori in Lowell   — The Intentional Nothingness of Everything . Every year the Lowell Celebrates Kerouac Festival is five blissfully crazy days of non-stop events from early morning to late night — from David Amram performances and other concerts to movie screenings and art shows to walking and bus tours to guest speakers and […]

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. On The Bus and On The Road . . “Put your good where it will do the most,” …….. as Ken Kesey said, and Wavy Gravy recounted in the luminous new documentary, Going Furthur. This movie is really funny — and not in a you-had-to-be-there way.  A huge part of the Merry Band of […]

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. Shindig Sutra . aahhh — San Francisco — home of everything holy. Home of the Beats, home of The Dead, home of the wild.  The United States of San Francisco.  The city that makes its own rules . . . and that’s that. Of course we’re coming home.  To the Museum that Jerry built. […]

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The Hitchhiker’s Guide to Jack Kerouac  . Reviews, feedback, and other buzzes over the transom . . . . Brian Hassett had the presence of mind to pack a good old cassette recorder in his rucksack back in 1982 when he was alerted to the Jack Kerouac Conference being staged in Boulder, Colorado.  The real […]

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The Prankster Woodstock . “I’ve got to get back to the land and set my soul free … “ Two of the coolest events of the ’60s just came together in the 21st century — and I lived it from start to finish. The Merry Pranksters’ Bus, which pulled out of Ken Kesey’s house in […]

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. Larry David & Jerry Seinfeld were the Lennon & McCartney of comedy. That’s the way I see it, anyway. Larry was a Lennon — mercurial, opinionated, sharp tongued, bull-headed, idea generating, creatively uncompromising, a supremely gifted artist born to his medium, with an enormous elaborate expansive vision. And Jerry was the McCartney — an […]

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Another giant has fallen — another angel taken flight. Carolyn Cassady has just left us to join Neal and Jack on that great road trip in the sky. Her son John, the light of her life, was there by her side till the end. After a year’s refusal of entry into the U.K., just 3 […]

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  Soooo, this happened . . . We were out there at Sands Point, Long Island, shooting a Steve Winwood video in one of those Great Gatsby mansions, hanging at this round banquet table with just Steve and the prop guy and a couple others, and he was talking in his gentle British accent which […]

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Wailin’ at The Whitney  (a feature story from 1995 on the historic Whitney Museum show)   Communities of creative minds exchanging ideas has been a dream of artists from the moment they first walked away from the other apes and got back to the land to set their soul free.  The Lost Generation café klatch […]

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