Hobo Film Festival is on tour

I always wanted to hop on a train and see the country in the true hobo way but I never did. I would love to see the film from Shawn Lukitsch and to see what he has to offer. I hope someone makes it to one of his showings and gives me a full review of the film.
~Corey aka C.S. Webbspun


Photo is from the New York Times

For nearly as long as rail lines have crisscrossed the country, there have been stories about wanderers covertly climbing aboard train cars and riding away from problems or speeding toward some glimmering promise on the horizon.

The paths of train hoppers, tramps, hobos and travelers, looking for work, adventure or merely free transportation, have been recorded in lyrics and in literature. Jack Kerouac, Jack London and John Steinbeck have written about them. They have populated the songs of Merle Haggard
and Woody Guthrie.

More recently, filmmakers have documented the experience of riding the rails across the country’s varied terrain. And some of those works were recently screened in a storefront community center in Bedford-Stuyvesant, Brooklyn, as part of a traveling cinematic exhibition called the Hobo Film Festival, which is progressing from state to state by way of a $200 Toyota station wagon driven by a 31-year-old train hopper from Asheville, N.C., named Shawn Lukitsch.

Read the entire story in the New York Times.

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Here are some hobo markings and what they mean

On the Road to Jack Kerouac's House in Orlando, Florida

Jack Kerouac lived in this home at the time On the Road made him a national sensation. And it was in this home that Kerouac wrote his follow-up, The Dharma Bums, during eleven frenetic days and nights. The Kerouac House, as it has come to be known, is now a living, literary tribute to one of the great American writers of the twentieth century.

Like all the other places in Kerouac’s nomadic journey, he didn’t live here long. But the home represents a critical juncture in Kerouac’s life, when he made the transition from a 35-year-old nobody writer, to the bard of the Beat Generation.



Visit the Kerouac Project to learn more.

Hit the road like Jack: Retracing Kerouac's Novel on its 50th Anniversary

For wannabe hipsters of long ago, Jack Kerouac's novel On the Road gave permission to swipe a knapsack and hitchhike across the country in search of jumpin' jazz joints, pliant bohemian chicks and The Meaning of Life. Today's young readers perhaps dream of strangling their American lit prof with an iPod cord. Such is the litmus-test nature of this book, which was published 50 years ago and still reportedly sells 100,000 copies a year.

Kerouac's semi-autobiographical, stream-of-consciousness prose, spontaneously written during a three-week binge, is said to have energized the Beat Generation subculture and laid intellectual groundwork for the social upheavals of the '60s. The work is less a travelogue than a pulsating tale of searchers living on the edge, but it inspired a passion for carefree, bare-bones travel. And it rose to popularity just as the interstate highway system (and before The Texas Chain Saw Massacre) came into being.

USA TODAY's Jerry Shriver reread the book during a 1,727-mile journey trip through America's midsection. His goals: to See What's Out There and give armchair Kerouac fans an update on the state of roadside culture. (Owing to his middle age and hopeless entrenchment in the establishment, pliant bohemian chicks were off-limits.)

Read the entire article in the USA Today