Brianland

the Best in Kerouac & the Beats, Adventure, Politics, Music, Movies, Poetry & other Lifejoys

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The Greatest Night in Pop movie review

February 10th, 2024 · 20 Comments · Movies, Music

“The Greatest Night in Pop” is The Greatest Documentary About Collective Creation . The Greatest Night in Pop (Netflix, 2024) directed by Bao Nguyen, is a spectacular riveting colorful fun documentary about the behind-the-scenes making of We Are The World in 1985 with footage of everybody who was involved.  This is not only one of […]

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Taylor Swift, the Grateful Dead and The Beat Generation

November 30th, 2023 · 28 Comments · Grateful Dead, Kerouac and The Beats, Music

. Why this Deadhead Beatnik Beatlemaniac loves Pop’s Princess   I’ve been into Taylor Swift since a New York Times profile in 2008 talked about her confessional songwriting and use of social media — at the time, MySpace.  (!)  Her second album Fearless was set to come out (and would go on to win Album […]

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The Bob Dylan Center in Tulsa

April 30th, 2023 · 5 Comments · Music, Real-life Adventure Tales

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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The Beats, The Beatles & The Brotherhood

January 31st, 2023 · 3 Comments · Weird Things About Me

The Beats, The Beatles & The Brotherhood . . This month I met a fellow Toronto-area author, John Arnone, who’s just written a book about The Beatles and Canada — Us and Them: Canada, Canadians and The Beatles.  In fact, in keeping with our Canadian heritage, we met after a ball hockey game and then […]

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The Play’s The Thing

April 30th, 2021 · 2 Comments · New York City, Real-life Adventure Tales

The Play’s The Thing 113 different Playbills that survived. An approximate history of my life in theater audiences . . . Some of the highlights . . . which you can see the Playbills of in chronological order starting at the top . . . Mousetrap — London — 1972 — the longest running play […]

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Beat Versus Beatnik

March 3rd, 2021 · 29 Comments · Kerouac and The Beats

21st Century Beatniks versus Hieroglyphic Caricatures . There’s long been a debate about the word “beatnik” — originally coined by a sensationalist San Francisco gossip columnist in 1958, playing on the Yiddish suffix “nik” and the first Russian satellite launched in September ’57, colloquially known as “Sputnik.”  Jack and Allen & company hated the word […]

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Ode to Neal

October 31st, 2019 · 14 Comments · Kerouac and The Beats

. Neal Cassady — by Carolyn Cassady (courtesy of the Cassady fam) . From Dean Moriarty . . . to Dead immortality, The street-kid who read . . . was a legend in bed, But more than the lays . . . he inspired a blaze In the hearths of the writers . . . […]

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Hillary Clinton Javits Center 2016

November 13th, 2016 · 18 Comments · New York City, Politics, Real-life Adventure Tales

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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Bill Clinton’s First Inauguration 1993

January 20th, 2016 · 12 Comments · Blissfully Ravaged in Democracy, Politics

. Originally published in Interchange Magazine, and TransForum Magazine, Jan. and Feb. 1993. . “We march to the music of our time.” ……………………………………….Bill Clinton at his Inauguration . Little Dorothy Washington slowly snuck up to the Iron Curtain of Oz, and peaked behind the screen. Her eyes popped when she discovered only a hungry old […]

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The Long Island Mansions Adventure

May 11th, 2013 · 14 Comments · Music, New York City, Real-life Adventure Tales

  Soooo, this happened . . . We were out there at Sands Point, Long Island, shooting a Steve Winwood video in one of those Great Gatsby mansions, hanging at this round banquet table with just Steve and the prop guy and a couple others, and he was talking in his gentle British accent which […]

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