Brianland

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

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First Live Shows After the Pandemic Lockdown

July 31st, 2022 · 1 Comment · Brian on YouTube etc., Kerouac and The Beats, Poetry

The Magic Genie’s Happy Place —  Saturday July 9th, 2022 . The matinee show (4PM) stemmed from a massive reorganization of all my performance pieces — many dating back to New York in the 1980s and ’90s.  A bunch of them still held up — and since nobody’s heard me do them in 20 or […]

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Kerouac in Billy Joel’s “We Didn’t Start The Fire” Podcast

May 31st, 2022 · 1 Comment · Interviews, Kerouac and The Beats

Billy Joel Interview Story   . I was contacted by this Since The World’s Been Turning podcast production out of New Zealand to talk about Kerouac. Ever since Peter Jackson’s masterful recreation of The Beatles: Get Back, and watching a thousand interviews with him with his New Zealand accent and sensibilities, I developed a real […]

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Kerouac’s 100th birthday celebration in Lowell

March 20th, 2022 · 25 Comments · Kerouac and The Beats, Real-life Adventure Tales

. 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 […]

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Beatles post Get Back Lessons and Reflections

January 30th, 2022 · 3 Comments · Movies, Music

Some reflections on The Beatles post Peter Jackson’s masterpiece, and some fun facts picked up along the way . . . It was so much the blending of the four compatible yet different personalities that was key to their creativity and longevity. And that there were four different individuals for people to identify with and […]

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Holly George-Warren Jack Kerouac biography

June 9th, 2021 · 14 Comments · Interviews, Kerouac and The Beats

In some of the best news in Beatlandia in many a year — it’s just been announced that (A) the Kerouac estate has signed the inimitable Holly George-Warren to be the official biographer of Jack — a role originally filled by Doug Brinkley back in the ’90s until he got lured away by some other […]

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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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Brian Hassett – Adventures in Print

January 26th, 2020 · 21 Comments · Blissfully Ravaged in Democracy, Kerouac and The Beats, Politics, Real-life Adventure Tales, Weird Things About Me

40 YEARS IN PRINT . A CHRONOLOGY OF THE PUBLISHED REAL-LIFE ADVENTURE TALES . . 1977 – May — writing a song with Guess Who founder Chad Allen – not in print as of yet, but it is on my website here. 1980 – April — John Anderson in San Diego – Blissfully Ravaged in […]

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Kerouac in Provincetown

December 4th, 2019 · 37 Comments · Kerouac and The Beats

  How History Could Have Been Different Kerouac’s and Otherwise   . It was a quiet day in Facelandia when my Beat / Deadhead friend Steve Silberman posted: “Social media is amazing sometimes. In response to my posting a Cape Cod Times article about Kerouac’s time there, a woman posted a previously unseen photo of […]

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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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Ode to Jack

September 30th, 2019 · 11 Comments · Kerouac and The Beats

. . Jack fights back from off the Beaten track still alive at 100 as if any of us ever wondered if THAT would happen  after his track star sprint  — through the pages of history, seeing around corners like Neal at the wheel, knockin over grammar cops and blowin past the door stops to […]

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