Brianland

The White Knight and The Queen     Ya know how our favorite Beats were not exactly role-model parents? How there aren’t a lot of heart-warming parent-child stories in Beatlandia? Well, … there is one.   Carolyn Cassady and her son John were sumpthin else. Honestly I’m tearing up just now picturing them together. It […]

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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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Allen & Lucien — I mean, Radcliffe & DeHaan — sharing a laugh at the premiere gala at TIFF, next to Michael C. Hall (Kammerer) and Jack Huston (Kerouac). . Just home from “Kill Your Darlings” — the second of three movies based on Jack & the Beats being released within a few months of each […]

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 The Northport Report     Whale, we had another Jackfest — dancing with Big Sur by the Sea, My Brothers! — this time in Jack’s wave-lapping hometown of Northport, the idyllic little living Rockwell harbortown where he went to dock near the darkness of the city but still remain a slip away. I’m just back […]

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An excerpt from  “The Hitchhiker’s Guide to Jack Kerouac” The Adventure of the Boulder ’82 On The Road Conference — Finding Kerouac, Kesey and The Grateful Dead Alive & Rockin’ in the Rockies     I guess I haven’t mentioned who all was here yet . . .  This was the biggest gathering of Beats […]

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chapter 4 — Meeting Your Heroes 101 An excerpt from “The Hitchhiker’s Guide to Jack Kerouac” The Adventure of the Boulder ’82 On The Road Conference — Finding Kerouac, Kesey and The Grateful Dead Alive & Rockin’ in the Rockies .   One of the first and forever impressions I had was — being on […]

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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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Beat Movie Guide (dramatizations  —  not documentaries) Last Updated:  Feb 19th, 2023 With not one, not two, but three movies based on Jack Kerouac books coming out this year (2013) it makes sense to make sense of the world of cinematic dramatizations based on Beat works. Since real people are given different fictional names in […]

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“On The Road” Comes Home — The New York Premiere The day of the “On The Road” premiere in New York (Dec. 13th, 2012) I was up at the NYPL trying to get through the doors of the hermetically sealed vault of the Berg Collection, home to a gazillion literary papers from Emerson to Shelley […]

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Part I, The Author’s Song   The passing of the scroll … It’s gone to a good place … . . . with an iconoclastic, white-tie wearin’ John Lennon lovin’ “huge Bob Dylan fan,” spirit of the 60s, buddy of Brinkley’s, crony of Thompson’s, and owner of the Indianapolis Colts (my new and forever favorite […]

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