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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  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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Kaddish in Canada   We Are Continually Exposed To The Flashbulb Of Death The Allen Ginsberg Photo Exhibit University of Toronto Art Centre Sept. 2nd – Dec. 6th, 2014 . So, here’s a weird trip! I’ve been going to Beat gatherings for 30 years — and even at the very first one — the Kerouac […]

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chapter 4 — Meeting Your Heroes 101 An excerpt from “The Hitchhiker’s Guide to Jack Kerouac” The Adventure of the Boulder ’82 On The Road Conference — Finding Kerouac, Kesey and The Grateful Dead Alive & Rockin’ in the Rockies .   One of the first and forever impressions I had was — being on […]

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