Brianland

On this weekend 17 years ago — in the heat of the Democratic primary of 2008 between Hillary & Obama — I started BrianHassett.com.

Every month since then for 17 years I’ve written at least one new piece for the site.

“17” has been a weird number that’s followed me around my whole life from my hockey team jersey as a kid through the books I’ve written to today’s anniversary – a date I never think about, except this year I did . . . on the 17th year!

From my book The Hitchhiker’s Guide to Jack Kerouac  . . . 

Strangely enough, the piece more people click on year after year is Famous People Who Don’t Have Kids!  This page was started back in 2010 when someone made a smart-aleck comment that anyone who had kids was superior to anyone who didn’t.  I thought it was so ridiculous/repulsive an idea that I jotted down a list of some influential folks who didn’t have kids.  It’s continued to grow over the years and is now over 500 people from Jesus to Janis, and it’s still read by people every single day.

Crazily enough the second most popular piece in the site’s history was last year’s Why I Love Joe Biden because it went viral when not that many people were coming out and saying it.

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The third most popular is one I’m particularly proud of because it took a lot of work — The Beatles: Get Back – Time-Coded and Annotated.  When Peter Jackson’s epic documentary came out in 2021, it was so overwhelming that I started my own little cheat-sheet to be able to find songs and quotes and stuff within its 7½ hour span.  That just kinda kept growing with each time I’d watch it, and I realized this would be valuable to others, so I really filled it in with every deet from every scene and transcribed whole passages to get the quotes in print.  Over the years I’ve heard from both college professors and high school teachers in both the U.K. and the U.S. thanking me for doing it because they use it in their classes.

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The fourth & fifth most popular all-time are a bit of a surprise — my Carolyn Cassady Tribute and last year’s piece about Anne Murphy and her book about Neal Cassady.  This is some sort of proof that both the Beats and the Cassadys are more popular than commonly thought.

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Six & seven were also both recent but maybe not as surprising — Taylor Swift, The Grateful Dead and The Beat Generation, and Taylor Swift from a Deadhead’s Perspective.  They both got another huge bounce in readers this past weekend when Bob Weir & Taylor were photographed together at the Grammys and it went viral and all these Deadhead Swifties came out of the closet.  I thought the connection between the two artists and their fan bases was obvious from the get-go, but it’s nice that it’s now a bit more of an accepted fact.

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Number eight was also not that surprising — a piece about the only photo known to exist of Jack Kerouac actually writing at a typewriter.  He posed for a bunch once he got famous, but this was taken before then by a girl he was chasing on the sand dunes of Provincetown.  The piece ended up being a cover story in Beat Scene magazine, and The Beat Museum in San Francisco made a big deal about it, and it kinda rightfully got celebrated far & wide.

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The ninth most popular is my massive movie page that’s broken down into Comedies, Dramas, Biopics, Documentaries, Music Movies, Political Movies, Movies About Making Movies, the Made-For-TV Exceptions, and with 72 different Auteurs singled out.  It now has over 900 movies and is getting expanded all the time.

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The tenth is something that keeps coming up so keeps getting read — Beat versus Beatnik.  It was written after years of having to beat back (ha-ha) self-appointed know-it-all-wannabes saying that if someone ever used the word ‘beatnik’ they were either doing it as an insult or because they were uneducated about the Beats.  I had to correct this nonsense so many times I decided to just write one piece so I could use it as needed.  Turned out to be a super popular idea.

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There’s now nearly 300 pieces on the site — articles, features, reviews, book excerpts, firsthand Adventure Tales, some fiction & poetry — but those are the Top Ten most read.

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Some didn’t make the Top Ten but were close and maybe shoulda . . .

The Northport Report about the Big Sur reading on Long Island in 2001 with the Cassadys and a cast of thousands.

The David Amram & Brian jamming together video collection.

The Cannastra’s loft photograph & background piece is amazing — the historic Beat center that I’ve never seen explored anywhere else.

With the recent passing of the great Grateful Dead founder and musical prodigy Phil Lesh makes our Cassady-themed hang resonate even more beautifully.

And the new A Complete Unknown deep dive is still climbing the charts.  😀

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by Brian Hassett

karmacoupon@gmail.com   —  BrianHassett.com

Or here’s my Facebook page if you wanna join in there —

https://www.facebook.com/Brian.Hassett.Canada