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EVG reader William Klayer spotted a preliminary tree lighting last night in Tompkins Square Park … ahead of tomorrow's tree-lightng ceremony between 4-5 p.m.
And maybe they need another strand of lights on the tree?
Join us for an exclusive evening in Strand’s rare book room to honor the paperback release of Richard Hell’s acclaimed I Dreamed I Was a Very Clean Tramp. The autobiography has been called “A candid, sometimes brutal tour of punk’s gritty early days" by The New York Times Magazine, and "radically self-aware…wielding prose keen as a diamond knife" by cultural critic Luc Sante.
Richard will read briefly from I Dreamed I Was a Very Clean Tramp before being interviewed by NYU professor Bryan Waterman (author of the 33 1/3 volume Marquee Moon), and will then take audience questions. At the evening’s conclusion, Richard will inscribe copies of I Dreamed I Was a Very Clean Tramp. No other memorabilia, please.
Buy a copy of I Dreamed I Was A Very Clean Tramp or a $15 Strand gift card in order to attend this event, which will be located in the Strand's 3rd floor Rare Book Room at our store at 828 Broadway at 12th Street.
So many of the corporations in the city do horrible, inhumane things every day, on a much larger, often global scale, than spraying water on the homeless. Boycott the businesses that rely on sweatshop and child labor. Boycott the businesses that commit horrifying daily acts of animal cruelty. Boycott the businesses that deliberately destroy the fabric of our communities--and our environment. Do not boycott the Strand. To attack the Strand and not Apple, Amazon, The Gap, and others like them, is a gross misplacement of anger and energy.
"It was to keep people from sleeping out there," said a Strand bookseller who asked that her name not be used. "People used to sleep over there and in the morning we have to put out the book carts, so it was a little bit difficult and uncomfortable for some people."
I didn't see it myself, but... apparently Morrissey was in the store today and came to the rescue of an elderly woman who fainted.
— Strand Book Store (@strandbookstore) September 23, 2012
You'd hesitate to call him a celebrity by any stretch of the imagination, but New York street/performance poet Bingo Gazingo's obscurity likely served as an aid to his singular imagination and oddball creativity.
With his often crude, spiky, agitated and hilarious rants about sex, dementia, and, especially, popular culture, Gazingo (born Murray Wachs in Queens in 1924) was a Monday night regular every week at New York's Bowery Poetry Club. He was struck by a taxi on his way to one of these very events, presumably on December 28th, and died on New Year's Day.
As a young man, he says, he worked as a logger for Broadcast Music Incorporated, or B.M.I., the music licensing agency, sitting over radio play lists with a blue pencil, identifying songs for which the company was entitled to royalties. And then, he says, he disappeared into the United States Postal Service, where he worked for decades sorting mail and loading trucks. "Doing that is like spending 20 years in one day," he says.
But through it all, he says, he never abandoned his dream of being a songwriter. He wrote ballads, novelties, show tunes, country-and-western songs, anything he thought would sell, and left them at stage doors at the Roxy, the Paramount and the Strand, in a time-honored tradition "to try to get my songs to the artists."
"But they never took one of my songs," he says, waving his hands at the memory. ''I thought I would be discovered or something, but it doesn't work that way."