Brianland

The  Maltese  Fall . It’s Friday, May 15th, 1998, our final port of call, Valletta, Malta, the ancient capital, site of The Great Siege, home of the thousand-year-old Knights of St. John, the nomadic Christian healers who were granted refuge on the island by the Emperor of Spain in 1530 for the rent of two […]

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The Grateful Dead Played My 30th  Or Everything I Ever Needed to Know I Learned At A Grateful Dead Concert             The weekend of my 30th birthday, four old friends drove from Winnipeg to New York to help celebrate it, and the Grateful Dead flew in from San Francisco to play. It’s a curious story […]

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Every Day Is A Gift   by Brian Hassett Every day you’re alive is a gawd-damned gift.  And that’s the whole shot, as Gregory Corso would say. Try adding up all the times your Indomitable Spirit was challenged but did not topple in a deathly firestorm of adversity.  There’s probably been a hundred of them, […]

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It was a grey newspaper day during “papers” week at Camp Cleanup — digging through layers of mounds of newsprint and letters and notes like an archeological dig, uncovering the strata of history in this ancient city of my life. Overnight, the cat tipped over an old Safeways bag full of newspapers from a closet […]

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Obama’s election night in New York City may have been my favorite single night / moment in 25+ years of living in Manhattan. (You can read about it here: https://brianhassett.com//2008/11/election-night-2008/ ) That feeling was extended to a week-long celebration in my second favorite city, Washington, D.C. — a home-game in the History League — And lo, […]

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The Half-Centennial Celebrations   Saturday June 18th on the Caddy patty-o    (also Sir Paul McCartney’s birthday!  😉 6:00 dinner — the food’s tasty and diverse with a great new chef doin’ mmm duck quesadilla … southern pulled-pork … New York Strip … ginger salmon . . . here’s the menu — http://www.cadillaclounge.com/the_menu.html All-night  come-as-you-may  hang […]

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. NYC, Dec. 8th, 1980 . . . the 3rd month and 3rd day in New York City, America, for this 19 year old kid.  My first week in town I went to the free Elton John concert in Central Park.  He played Imagine, and introduced it with, “He can probably hear us right now,” referring […]

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I’m just stunned. Speechless. Maybe it was the set-up, cuz i was thinkin early on … this ain’t happening, this is sad, capitalizing on their name and what they’d done. . . . and then . . . . . . . :-0 they were playing Dylan’s “Infidels” as the warm-up music!!!! The whole album, […]

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. {the piece painted onto the wall of the Artomatic+ Art Gallery in London} . Lights dimmed, room hushed, MC in silhouette at center stage blessing the packed room of book-reading edge-cutting hipsters from all over the world thanks to email and web sites and a collective unconscious that keeps them striving for the new, […]

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Sans Sons — a Song in Names Only . . . This the most complete, up-to-date and diligently researched list of childless people anywhere on the internet or in print. Just for fun — if you speak each name aloud or to yourself (rather than just scan) it takes you on much more of a […]

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