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 […]

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The Day I Thanked Arthur Miller   One of the nice things about living in Manhattan — you often bump into and sometimes get to talk to really smart people on the sidewalk.  When they’re famous, mostly you just nod acknowledgment and smile — like seeing Robin Williams walking and playing with his son on […]

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. Sphere & Laughing in Las Vegas   photo by Jay Blakesberg for Dead & Company . This is the Acid Tests … in a two-billion-dollar spaceship! I’d been reading about The Sphere for years before it was ever built.  It sounded too wild to be true!  And of course I immediately thought how perfect […]

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. TOTALLY DRAMATIC . . It wasn’t just a big-screen spectacular — it was a nail-biting drama! An old brother of ’70s shenanigans flew from Winterpeg to my place in Southern Ontario because I lived on the Path of Totality for the 2024 solar eclipse. We had invites to a big acid test weekend with […]

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Imaginestock . photo by Christy Worsoe . Imagine, if you will, a place where music and love fill the air, and every person works for free to build a utopian kingdom. Imagine a secret island hideaway whose location is only shared to people who’ve earned an invitation by a lifetime of good deeds. Imagine a […]

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The Art of Glass, the Art of Business, and the Art of Love . One day a hundred years ago, or maybe it was five, I noticed this store called the Squisha House opened around the corner with insanely cool glass pipes!  What the hell?!  In little Bronte Village?!  I had to investigate! After keeping […]

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Starry Nights in Bronte by Brian Hassett In my never-ending search for Adventure I stumbled into the coolest little enclave in the harbourfront park in front of my house — an astronomer’s meet-up digging infinity (to riff on Lord Buckley’s line).  And these people are really doing it! Whenever there’s something special going on in […]

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Fireworks in Oakville or The Day Florida Moved to Canada . . . What a riot we had last weekend in Oakville! A buncha teenagers came to my little harbourfront neighbourhood cuz it has a corner Variety store that’ll sell anything to anybody including fireworks to kids.  We had a little to-do here a couple […]

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The Setting: The new Bob Center is in Tulsa Oklahoma because the Woody Guthrie Center is there, and because both were paid for by the OK billionaire philanthropist George Kaiser. Tulsa is remarkably like the midwestern town of Winnipeg I grew up in — flat farmland, low-rise, about a half-million people — and both with […]

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David Amram and I have been performing together since we first started hanging in 1994 after an introduction by Teri McLuhan, Marshall’s daughter.  It was the big NYU Beat conference — I write about it in Blissfully Ravaged in Democracy — I first saw him unloading his congas from his Farm Aid jeep on opening night, […]

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