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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. . The Spilled Coffee Test . . .  . How to know if you’re happy and centered . . . Something I’ve being using for decades . . .  Very simple —  If I ding (or worse) my coffee cup (or whatever) and cause a spill on the table (or wherever) my split-second reaction […]

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. . 15 minutes before this show I was lying on the ground behind the Cassady’s booth trying not to lose consciousness. . . . An hour into it I was running around the stage playing Gregory Corso on a football team.  The build from wounded wobbly to careening comedy is completely crazy. Everything had been […]

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. Dalai-Rama! or The Light at the End of the Tunnel is the Twinkle in Your Own Eye! . In the days leading up to This Great Spirit Gathering in Central Park, The news reports were predicting 20,000 people or something. I was thinking, “This is going to be a LOT bigger than that!” I […]

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Finding Kesey . Following the November 2016 election I knew it was time to get my own house in order.  A year had been lost to a losing campaign, added to five years of On The Road domino-tumbling madness that had passed since my mother had passed in 2011, and there was a lot of […]

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The Hitchhiker’s Guide to Jack Kerouac Reviews & Reactions — Part Three . Here’s the first round of incoming reviews. Or here’s a whole second round. .  I am bathing in the pages. Your book is a page turner of improbable adventures and characters — one crazy one after another.  The writing is high spirited and […]

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Election Night 2016 in New York City . . It was such a beautiful fall Tuesday in New York. We were all in such a good mood. But in retrospect there were some early warning signs I’d rationalized and dismissed: The tollbooth clerk I had a happy election exchange with but when asked who she […]

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. . In the Spirit of Jack — a spontaneous love ode that just flowed out … to that thing they do in Lowell . . . What’s cool about LCK is — everybody’s there for Jack . . . but all on their own terms. Everybody has a completely different relationship with their family […]

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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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. I Pick Pic . Thirty years ago I remember saying to my Beat brothers at the Cedar Tavern in Greenwich Village that I thought Vanity of Duluoz was right up there with Jack’s greatest works.  And they all looked at me like I was crazy and said, “Yeah, but nobody else thinks that.” 🙂 […]

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