Brianland

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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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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(collage and poem by S.A. Griffin)   Lawrence Ferlinghetti is Dead, Long Live Lawrence Ferlinghetti!   Howling Allen Ginsberggot shot out of history’s atomic canonand never stopped flyingFerlinghetti prints the poem as news hysterical nakedand gets busted for publishing obscene odes the law fought the poem and the poem won without this greeting at such […]

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  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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