Taylor Mead

Taylor Mead (born December 31 1924 in Grosse Pointe, Michigan) is a writer and performer who starred as Tarzan in Andy Warhol's "Tarzan," and in Ron Rice's beat classic "The Flower Thief," in which he "traipses with an elfin glee through a lost San Francisco of smoke-stuffed North Beach cafes..." [cite web|author=Ed Halter|title=Tracking shots: The Flower Thief|publisher=The Village Voice|year=2005|accessdate=2006-09-21|url=http://www.villagevoice.com/film/0511,trackingshots,62060,20.html] Film critic P. Adams Sitney called "The Flower Thief" "the purest expression of the Beat sensibility in cinema." Village Voice film critic J. Hoberman called Mead "the first underground movie star." [cite web|author=C. Carr|title=Buried Alive|publisher=Village Voice|year=Oct 23, 2002|accessdate=2006-09-21|url=http://www.villagevoice.com/news/0243,carr,39340,1.html]

In the mid 1970s, Gary Weis made some short films of Mead talking to his cat in the kitchen of his Ludlow Street apartment on the Lower East Side called "Taylor Mead's Cat." One film of Mead extemporizing on the virtues of constant television watching aired during the second season of "Saturday Night Live".

Mead lives in New York City, and continues to regularly perform and read poetry at The Bowery Poetry Club. His latest book of poems is called "A Simple Country Girl". He was the subject of a documentary called "Excavating Taylor Mead," which debuted at the Tribeca Film Festival in 2005. The film shows him engaging in his nightly habit of feeding stray cats in an East Village cemetery after bar-hopping, and features a cameo by Jim Jarmusch, in which Jarmusch explains that once, when Mead went to Europe, he enlisted Jarmusch's brother to feed the cemetery cats in Mead's absence. Mead appeared in the final segment of Jarmusch's 2003 film "Coffee and Cigarettes." He has been "a beloved icon of the downtown New York art scene since the 60s." [cite web|author=Dan Glass|title=Taylor Mead, Superstar|publisher=The L Magazine|year=2005|accessdate=2006-09-21|url=http://64.233.187.104/search?q=cache:Q8iMTG4etZoJ:www.thelmagazine.com/3/11/NYCProfiles/nycprofiles.cfm+taylor+mead&hl=en&gl=us&ct=clnk&cd=23&ie=UTF-8]

Filmography

*"The Flower Thief" directed by Ron Rice (1960)
*"Lemon Hearts" directed by Vernon Zimmerman (1962)
*"Too Young, Too Immoral" directed by Raymond Phelan (1962)
*"Hallelujah the Hills" directed by Adolfas Mekas (1963)
*"Queen of Sheba Meets the Atom Man" directed by Ron Rice (1963)
*"Tarzan and Jane Regained...Sort Of" directed by Andy Warhol (1964)
*"Couch" directed by Andy Warhol (1964)
*"Taylor Mead's Ass" directed by Andy Warhol (1965)
*"The Illiac Passion" directed by Gregory Markopoulos (1967)
*"Imitation Of Christ" directed by Andy Warhol (1967)
*"The Nude Restaurant" directed by Andy Warhol (1967)
*"Lonesome Cowboys" directed by Andy Warhol (1968)
*"The Secret Life of Hernando Cortez" directed by John Chamberlain (1969)
*"Brand X" directed by Win Chamberlain (1970)
*"Last Supper" directed by Robert Frank (1992)
*"Taylor Mead Unleashed" (1996) directed by Sebastian Piras
*"Ecstasy In Entropy" directed by Nick Zedd (1999)
*"Coffee and Cigarettes" directed by Jim Jarmusch (2003)
*"Excavating Taylor Mead" directed by William A. Kirkley (2005)
*"Electra Elf: The Beginning" directed by Nick Zedd (2005)
*"Man Under Wire" directed by Josh Bishop (2006)

Footnotes

References

*"Excavating Taylor Mead," 2005, William A. Kirkley
* Artist bio from the Whitney Museum 2006 Biennial, "Day for Night." [http://www.whitney.org/www/2006biennial/artists.php?artist=Mead_Taylor]

ee also

Taylor Mead's Ass

External links

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