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City Lights Books
City Lights is an independent bookstore-publisher combination in San Francisco, California, that specializes in world literature, the arts, and progressive politics. It also houses the nonprofit City Lights Foundation, which publishes selected titles related to San Francisco culture. It was founded in 1953 by poet Lawrence Ferlinghetti and Peter D. Martin (who left two years later). Both the store and the publishers became widely known following the obscenity trial of Ferlinghetti for publishing Allen Ginsberg's influential collection ''Howl and Other Poems'' (City Lights, 1956). Nancy Peters started working there in 1971 and retired as executive director in 2007. In 2001, City Lights was made an official historic landmark. City Lights is located at 261 Columbus Avenue. While formally located in Chinatown, it self-identifies as part of immediately adjacent North Beach. History Founding and early years City Lights was the inspiration of Peter D. Martin, who relocated from New Yor ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
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 '' ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
City Lights
''City Lights'' is a 1931 American silent romantic comedy film written, produced, directed by, and starring Charlie Chaplin. The story follows the misadventures of Chaplin's Tramp as he falls in love with a blind girl (Virginia Cherrill) and develops a turbulent friendship with an alcoholic millionaire (Harry Myers). Although sound films were on the rise when Chaplin started developing the script in 1928, he decided to continue working with silent productions. Filming started in December 1928 and ended in September 1930. ''City Lights'' marked the first time Chaplin composed the film score to one of his productions and it was written in six weeks with Arthur Johnston. The main theme, used as a leitmotif for the blind flower girl, is the song "La Violetera" ("Who'll Buy my Violets") from Spanish composer José Padilla. Chaplin lost a lawsuit to Padilla for not crediting him. ''City Lights'' was immediately successful upon release on January 30, 1931, with positive reviews an ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
San Francisco Board Of Supervisors
The San Francisco Board of Supervisors is the legislative body within the government of the City and County of San Francisco. Government and politics The City and County of San Francisco is a consolidated city-county, being simultaneously a charter city and charter county with a consolidated government, a status it has had since 1856. Since it is the only such consolidation in California, it is therefore the only California city with a mayor who is also the county executive, and a county board of supervisors that also acts as the city council. Whereas the overall annual budget of the city and county is about $9 billion as of 2016, various legal restrictions and voter-imposed set-asides mean that Board of Supervisors can allocate only about $20 million directly without constraints, according to its president's chief of staff. Salaries Members of the San Francisco Board of Supervisors are paid $140,148 per year. Election There are 11 members of the Board of Supervisors, e ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Timothy Leary
Timothy Francis Leary (October 22, 1920 – May 31, 1996) was an American psychologist and author known for his strong advocacy of psychedelic drugs. Evaluations of Leary are polarized, ranging from bold oracle to publicity hound. He was "a hero of American consciousness", according to Allen Ginsberg, and Tom Robbins called him a "brave neuronaut". As a clinical psychologist at Harvard University, Leary founded the Harvard Psilocybin Project after a revealing experience with magic mushrooms in Mexico. He led the Project from 1960 to 1962, testing the therapeutic effects of lysergic acid diethylamide (LSD) and psilocybin, which were legal in the U.S., in the Concord Prison Experiment and the Marsh Chapel Experiment. Other Harvard faculty questioned his research's scientific legitimacy and ethics because he took psychedelics along with his subjects and allegedly pressured students to join in. One of Leary's students, Robert Thurman, has denied that Leary pressured unwilling studen ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Paul Krassner
Paul Krassner (April 9, 1932 – July 21, 2019) was an American author, journalist, and comedian. He was the founder, editor, and a frequent contributor to the freethought magazine ''The Realist'', first published in 1958. Krassner became a key figure in the counterculture of the 1960s as a member of Ken Kesey's Merry Pranksters and a founding member of the Yippies, a term he is credited with coining. He died on July 21, 2019, in Desert Hot Springs, California. Early life Krassner was a child violin prodigy and was the youngest person ever to play Carnegie Hall, in 1939 at age six. His parents practiced Judaism, but Krassner chose to be firmly secular, considering religion "organized superstition". He majored in journalism at Baruch College (then a branch of the City College of New York) and began performing as a comedian under the name Paul Maul. He recalled: While in college, I started working for an anti-censorship paper, ''The Independent''. After I left college I starte ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Library Of Congress
The Library of Congress (LOC) is the research library that officially serves the United States Congress and is the ''de facto'' national library of the United States. It is the oldest federal cultural institution in the country. The library is housed in three buildings on Capitol Hill in Washington, D.C.; it also maintains a conservation center in Culpeper, Virginia. The library's functions are overseen by the Librarian of Congress, and its buildings are maintained by the Architect of the Capitol. The Library of Congress is one of the largest libraries in the world. Its "collections are universal, not limited by subject, format, or national boundary, and include research materials from all parts of the world and in more than 470 languages." Congress moved to Washington, D.C., in 1800 after holding sessions for eleven years in the temporary national capitals in New York City and Philadelphia. In both cities, members of the U.S. Congress had access to the sizable collection ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Rudolf Koch
Rudolf Koch (20 November 1876 – 9 April 1934) was a German type designer, professor, and a master of lettering, calligraphy, typography and illustration. Commonly known for his typefaces created for the Klingspor Type Foundry, his most widely used typefaces include Neuland and Kabel. Overview Koch spent his teenage years working in Hanau as an apprentice in a metal goods workshop, whilst also attending art school, where he learned to draw, and soon after went to the Academy of Fine Arts, Nuremberg. Between 1897 and 1906 he worked for various businesses in the book trade in Leipzig, illustrating and designing book covers in the Art Nouveau style that was popular at the time. In 1906 Koch began working for the Rudhard Type foundry in Offenbach, later known as the Klingspor Type foundry. Other notable designers who worked for the foundry include Otto Eckmann and Peter Behrens. Koch was deeply spiritual and a devout Lutheran, spending much of his time working on religious ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Shel Silverstein
Sheldon Allan Silverstein (; September 25, 1930 – May 10, 1999) was an American writer, poet, cartoonist, singer / songwriter, musician, and playwright. Born and raised in Chicago, Chicago, Illinois, Silverstein briefly attended university before being drafted into the United States Army. Though perhaps best known for his children's books, Silverstein did not limit his audience to children. During his rise to prominence in the 1950s, his illustrations were published in various newspapers and magazines, notably the adult-oriented ''Playboy''. He also wrote a satirical, adult-oriented alphabet book, ''Uncle Shelby's ABZ Book'', under the stylized name "Uncle Shelby", which he used as an occasional pen name. As a children's author, some of his most acclaimed works include ''The Giving Tree'', ''Where the Sidewalk Ends'', and ''A Light in the Attic''. His works have been translated into more than 47 languages and have sold more than 20 million copies.Rogak, Lisa. ''A Boy ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Charles Bukowski
Henry Charles Bukowski ( ; born Heinrich Karl Bukowski, ; August 16, 1920 – March 9, 1994) was a German-American poet, novelist, and short story writer. His writing was influenced by the social, cultural, and economic ambience of his adopted home city of Los Angeles. Bukowski's work addresses the ordinary lives of poor Americans, the act of writing, alcohol, relationships with women, and the drudgery of work. The FBI kept a file on him as a result of his column '' Notes of a Dirty Old Man'' in the LA underground newspaper ''Open City''. Bukowski published extensively in small literary magazines and with small presses beginning in the early 1940s and continuing on through the early 1990s. He wrote thousands of poems, hundreds of short stories and six novels, eventually publishing over sixty books during the course of his career. Some of these works include his ''Poems Written Before Jumping Out of an 8 Story Window'', published by his friend and fellow poet Charles Potts, and ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Shig Murao
Shigeyoshi "Shig" Murao (村尾 重芳, ''Murao Shigeyoshi'', b. December 8, 1926 – d. October 18, 1999) was a Japanese-American bookseller who is mainly remembered as the City Lights manager and clerk who was arrested on June 3, 1957, for selling Allen Ginsberg's ''Howl'' to an undercover San Francisco police officer. In the trial that followed, Murao was charged with selling the book and Lawrence Ferlinghetti with publishing it. Murao and Ferlinghetti were exonerated, and ''Howl'' was judged protected under the First Amendment, a decision that paved the way for the publication of Henry Miller, D.H. Lawrence, William Burroughs, and many other writers who offended the sensibilities of the majority. Family background Murao's father, Shigekata Murao, was born in 1888 (d. early 1970s) in Chiran, Kagoshima (now part of the city of Minamikyūshū) to a former samurai family. He attended business school, and immigrated to Vancouver in 1910 against his family's wishes, working menial ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
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 ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Robert Duncan (poet)
Robert Edward Duncan (January 7, 1919 – February 3, 1988) was an American poet and a devotee of Hilda "H.D." Doolittle and the Western esoteric tradition who spent most of his career in and around San Francisco. Though associated with any number of literary traditions and schools, Duncan is often identified with the poets of the New American Poetry and Black Mountain College. Duncan saw his work as emerging especially from the tradition of Pound, Williams and Lawrence. Duncan was a key figure in the San Francisco Renaissance. Overview Not only a poet, but also a public intellectual, Duncan's presence was felt across many facets of popular culture. His name is prominent in the history of pre- Stonewall gay culture and in the emergence of bohemian socialist communities of the 1930s and '40s, in the Beat Generation, and also in the cultural and political upheaval of the 1960s, influencing occult and gnostic circles of the time. During the later part of his life, Duncan's wor ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
