Brianland

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 […]

[Read more →]

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 […]

[Read more →]

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 […]

[Read more →]

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 […]

[Read more →]

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 […]

[Read more →]

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, […]

[Read more →]

  Stories, videos and photos from the annual Kerouac hometown festival over the last several years I’ve been going. Edie Parker-Kerouac called and told me about the the initial commemorative dedication in July 1988 — which birthed LCK — saying that she, Henri Cru and “Big Tim” Moran were driving up for it, and that […]

[Read more →]

The Chad Allan Story . When I was in grade 7 at St. John’s Ravenscourt school, a teacher, Bernie Beare, told me I could write well.  I didn’t know what-the-hell good that was gonna be, but apparently it was something I could do. So I started to focus on it, and pay attention in English […]

[Read more →]

. Everybody’s known for ages that Jack Kerouac’s 100th birthday was coming up on March 12th, 2022, but it was still the dark Covid times, and I hadn’t been On The Road in over two years — not since the New Hampshire Democratic primaries in February 2020 — plus I was really in no mood […]

[Read more →]

When The Good Guys Win — Head To The Skyscraper Rooftop .   A wee rooftop Adventure excerpt from Blissfully Ravaged in Democracy  . . .  The Democratic Party victory party at the Sheraton Hotel in Midtown Manhattan in 1996 . . . New York City is a very liberal and a very Democratic town.  […]

[Read more →]