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Booksmith
The Booksmith is an independent bookstore located in the Haight Ashbury neighborhood of San Francisco. When first opened in October 1976, the store was located at 1746 Haight Street, below the former I-Beam nightclub. In 1985, the store moved to 1644 Haight Street at Belvedere, about a block and a half from the intersection of Haight and Ashbury. In 2021 the store moved down the street to 1727 Haight, the former site of its sister bookstore, the Bindery, now defunct. The Booksmith caters to neighborhood residents as well as tourists seeking the counter-cultural ambiance of Haight Street. The Booksmith is general interest shop, and is a member of both the Northern California Independent Booksellers Association (NCIBA) and the American Booksellers Association (ABA). In June 2007, The Booksmith was sold by its founder Gary Frank to married couple Christin Evans and Praveen Madan. The original business was closed, and a new business, Haight Booksmith LLC, opened in its place. Accord ...
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Allen Ginsberg
Irwin Allen Ginsberg (; June 3, 1926 – April 5, 1997) was an American poet and writer. As a student at Columbia University in the 1940s, he began friendships with William S. Burroughs and Jack Kerouac, forming the core of the Beat Generation. He vigorously opposed militarism, economic materialism, and sexual repression, and he embodied various aspects of this counterculture with his views on drugs, sex, multiculturalism, hostility to bureaucracy, and openness to Eastern religions. Ginsberg is best known for his poem "Howl", in which he denounced what he saw as the destructive forces of capitalism and conformity in the United States. San Francisco police and US Customs seized "Howl" in 1956, and it attracted widespread publicity in 1957 when it became the subject of an obscenity trial, as it described heterosexual and homosexual sex at a time when sodomy laws made (male) homosexual acts a crime in every state. The poem reflected Ginsberg's own sexuality and his relatio ...
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Kiara Brinkman
Kiara Brinkman (born November 29, 1979) is an American writer born in Omaha, Nebraska now living in San Francisco, California. Her 2007 novel, ''Up High in the Trees'', was published by Grove Press and was widely reviewed. Brinkman has also authored several short stories. Her work has appeared in ''One Story'', ''Pinelboyz'', '' Failbetter'' and elsewhere. Her contribution to ''McSweeney’s'', "Counting Underwater," was named one of the 100 Other Distinguished Stories of 2005 in ''The Best American Short Stories 2006''. Biography Brinkman graduated from Brown University and earned an MFA from Goddard College. Recently, Brinkman has worked with children as a teacher and tutor, and has led workshops at Mills College and 826 Valencia (a youth arts center in San Francisco). Brinkman is currently employed part-time at the Booksmith, an independent bookstore located in San Francisco. Upon its release in 2007, ''Up High in the Trees'' earned positive reviews in the ''Washington Post' ...
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Haight Street
Haight Street () is the principal street in San Francisco's Haight-Ashbury district, also known as the Upper Haight due to its elevation. The street stretches from Market Street, through the Lower Haight neighborhood, to Stanyan Street in the Upper Haight, at Golden Gate Park. In most blocks it is residential, but in the Upper and Lower Haight it is also a neighborhood shopping street, with residences above the ground floor shops. It is named after California pioneer and exchange banker Henry Haight (1820–1869). Structures and places fronting on Haight Street * Booksmith * Bound Together Bookstore Collective * Buena Vista Park * Chinese Immersion School at De Avila * Diggers (theater) The Diggers were a radical community-action group of activists and Street Theatre actors operating from 1966 to 1968, based in the Haight-Ashbury neighborhood of San Francisco. Their politics have been categorized as "left-wing"; more accurately, ... * The Red Victorian References ...
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San Francisco
San Francisco (; Spanish language, Spanish for "Francis of Assisi, Saint Francis"), officially the City and County of San Francisco, is the commercial, financial, and cultural center of Northern California. The city proper is the List of California cities by population, fourth most populous in California and List of United States cities by population, 17th most populous in the United States, with 815,201 residents as of 2021. It covers a land area of , at the end of the San Francisco Peninsula, making it the second most densely populated large U.S. city after New York City, and the County statistics of the United States, fifth most densely populated U.S. county, behind only four of the five New York City boroughs. Among the 91 U.S. cities proper with over 250,000 residents, San Francisco was ranked first by per capita income (at $160,749) and sixth by aggregate income as of 2021. Colloquial nicknames for San Francisco include ''SF'', ''San Fran'', ''The '', ''Frisco'', and '' ...
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Richard Avedon
Richard Avedon (May 15, 1923 – October 1, 2004) was an American fashion and portrait photographer. He worked for ''Harper's Bazaar'', ''Vogue'' and ''Elle'' specializing in capturing movement in still pictures of fashion, theater and dance. An obituary published in ''The New York Times'' said that "his fashion and portrait photographs helped define America's image of style, beauty and culture for the last half-century"."Richard Avedon, the Eye of Fashion, Dies at 81"
Andy Grundberg, '''', October 1, 2004.


Early life and education

Avedon was born in New York City to a Jewish family. His father, Jacob Israel ...
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Lewis Buzbee
Lewis Buzbee is a San Francisco based author and poet. He is "a fourth generation California native on his mother’s side, and a Dust Bowl Okie on his father’s." Work He is the author of the novels ''Fliegelman's Desire'' (1990), ''Steinbeck's Ghost'' (2008) and ''The Haunting of Charles Dickens'' (2010), the short story collection ''After the Gold Rush'' (2006) and the memoir ''The Yellow-Lighted Bookshop'' (2006). He is also the author of the children's book ''Bridge of Time'' (2012). Buzbee's work has appeared in ''The Paris Review'', '' Harper's'', ''The New York Times Book Review'', '' GQ'' and ''ZYZZYVA''. His poem "Sunday, Tarzan in His Hammock" was featured in Best American Poetry 1995. Buzbee currently teaches in the MFA in Creative Writing program at the University of San Francisco. He is married to Canadian poet Julie Bruck.Ann Ireland"The Cloven Lychee Nut: Poems & Interview with Julie Bruck" ''Numéro Cinq ''Numéro Cinq'' was an online international journal of ar ...
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Diane DiPrima
Diane di Prima (August 6, 1934October 25, 2020) was an American poet, known for her association with the Beat movement. She was also an artist, prose writer, and teacher. Her magnum opus is widely considered to be ''Loba'', a collection of poems first published in 1978 then extended in 1998. Early life and education Di Prima was born in Brooklyn, New York, on August 6, 1934. She was a second generation American of Italian descent. Her father Francis was a lawyer, and her mother Emma (née Mallozzi) was a teacher. Her maternal grandfather, Domenico Mallozzi, was an activist and associated with anarchists Carlo Tresca and Emma Goldman. Di Prima changed her last name from DiPrima to di Prima because she believed it better reflected her Italian ancestry. She attended academically elite Hunter College High School where she became part of a small group of friends including classmate Audre Lorde who formed a sort of Dead Poets Society calling themselves “the Branded.” They cut cl ...
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Michael McClure
Michael McClure (October 20, 1932 – May 4, 2020) was an American poet, playwright, songwriter, and novelist. After moving to San Francisco as a young man, he found fame as one of the five poets (including Allen Ginsberg) who read at the famous San Francisco Six Gallery reading in 1955, which was rendered in barely fictionalized terms in Jack Kerouac's ''The Dharma Bums''. He soon became a key member of the Beat Generation and was immortalized as Pat McLear in Kerouac's ''Big Sur''. Career overview Educated at the Municipal University of Wichita (1951–1953), the University of Arizona (1953-1954) and San Francisco State College (B.A., 1955) McClure's first book of poetry, ''Passage'', was published in 1956 by small press publisher Jonathan Williams. Stan Brakhage, a friend of McClure, stated in the ''Chicago Review'' that: McClure always, and more and more as he grows older, gives his reader access to the verbal impulses of his whole body's thought (as distinct from simply and ...
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Lawrence Ferlinghetti
Lawrence Monsanto Ferlinghetti (March 24, 1919 – February 22, 2021) was an American poet, painter, social activist, and co-founder of City Lights Booksellers & Publishers. The author of poetry, translations, fiction, theatre, art criticism, and film narration, Ferlinghetti was best known for his second collection of poems, ''A Coney Island of the Mind'' (1958), which has been translated into nine languages and sold over a million copies. When Ferlinghetti turned 100 in March 2019, the city of San Francisco turned his birthday, March 24, into "Lawrence Ferlinghetti Day". Early life Ferlinghetti was born on March 24, 1919, in Yonkers, New York. Shortly before his birth, his father, Carlo, a native of Brescia, died of a heart attack; and his mother, Clemence Albertine (née Mendes-Monsanto), of Portuguese Sephardic Jewish descent, was committed to a mental hospital shortly after. He was raised by an aunt, and later by foster parents. He attended the Mount Hermon School for Boys ...
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The Doors
The Doors were an American Rock music, rock band formed in Los Angeles in 1965, with vocalist Jim Morrison, keyboardist Ray Manzarek, guitarist Robby Krieger, and drummer John Densmore. They were among the most controversial and influential rock acts of the 1960s, partly due to Morrison's lyrics and voice, along with his erratic stage persona. The group is widely regarded as an important figure of the counterculture of the 1960s, era's counterculture. The band took its name from the title of Aldous Huxley's book ''The Doors of Perception'', itself a reference to a quote by William Blake. After signing with Elektra Records in 1966, the Doors with Morrison recorded and released six studio albums in five years, some of which are generally considered among the greatest of all time, including The Doors (album), their self-titled debut (1967), ''Strange Days (The Doors album), Strange Days'' (1967), and ''L.A. Woman'' (1971). They were one of the most successful bands during that tim ...
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Grace Slick
Grace Slick (born Grace Barnett Wing; October 30, 1939) is an American singer-songwriter, artist, and painter. Slick was a key figure in San Francisco's early psychedelic music scene in the mid-1960s. With a music career spanning four decades, she first performed with the Great Society, but is best known for her work with Jefferson Airplane and the subsequent successor bands Jefferson Starship and Starship. Slick and Jefferson Airplane first achieved fame with their 1967 album '' Surrealistic Pillow'', which included the top-ten ''Billboard'' hits "White Rabbit" and " Somebody to Love". She provided the lead vocals on both tracks. With Starship, she sang co-lead for two number one hits, "We Built This City" and "Nothing's Gonna Stop Us Now". She also released four solo albums. Slick retired from music in 1990, but continues to be active in the visual arts field. Slick was inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in 1996 as a member of Jefferson Airplane. Early life Grace Ba ...
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Grateful Dead
The Grateful Dead was an American rock music, rock band formed in 1965 in Palo Alto, California. The band is known for its eclectic style, which fused elements of rock, Folk music, folk, country music, country, jazz, bluegrass music, bluegrass, blues, rock and roll, gospel music, gospel, reggae, world music, and psychedelic music, psychedelia; for Concert, live performances of lengthy jam session, instrumental jams that typically incorporated mode (music), modal and tonality, tonal musical improvisation, improvisation; and for its devoted fan base, known as "Deadheads". "Their music", writes Lenny Kaye, "touches on ground that most other groups don't even know exists." These various influences were distilled into a diverse and psychedelic whole that made the Grateful Dead "the pioneering Godfathers of the jam band world". The band was ranked 57th by ''Rolling Stone'' magazine in its "Rolling Stone's 100 Greatest Artists of All Time, The Greatest Artists of All Time" issue. The ...
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