[Photo from 1979, © Deborah Feingold/Corbis]
The New York Times files its feature obituary on Taylor Mead, who died Wednesday night after suffering a massive stroke.
Mr. Mead was the quintessential Downtown figure. He read his poems in a Bowery bar, walked as many as 80 blocks a day and fed stray cats in a cemetery, usually after midnight. His last years were consumed by a classic Gotham battle against a landlord, which ended in his agreeing to leave his tenement apartment in return for money. At his death, he had been intending to return to New York after visiting a niece in Colorado.
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The film critic J. Hoberman called Mr. Mead “the first underground movie star.” The film historian P. Adams Sitney called one of Mr. Mead’s earliest films, “The Flower Thief” (1960), “the purest expression of the Beat sensibility in cinema.”
Read the whole feature here.
Here's a video from 1996 featuring Mead and Quentin Crisp at the Cooper Square Diner on Second Avenue...
BoweryBoogie compiled several other videos featuring Taylor. Find those here.
May his passing been painless as possible... RIP to a grand artist.
ReplyDeleteThese were some of the folks that made the East Village the EAST VILLAGE, rather than just a point on the compass (as it has now become). I also miss Quentin Crisp, a long time EV resident), his one man shows were hysterical. Gawd I miss the old East Village!
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