Taylor Mead
Anointed the first “superstar” as the term was coined by Andy Warhol, Taylor Mead starred in American experimental films from the very beginning and has never let the sun set on his art and poetry from San Francisco to New York. Born of well-off and influential mid-west parents in the 1920s, Mead was left to fend for himself emotionally and broke away from his politically connected parentage to be one of America’s first self-ordained art outcasts. He has devoted his life to working in writing, films and theatre that push the envelope.
His envelope now consists of a tiny roach infested apartment in downtown New York City, where he feeds stray cats and still writes and does poetry reading. His apartment is knee deep in everything he has written and accumulated over the last fifty years. Faced with eviction at the hands of the new gentry, Mead’s friends excavated his apartment and, in so doing, excavated the iconic life of Taylor Mead.
Denied entry into the US armed forces because of a mis-diagnosed birth defect, Mead began hitchhiking across America in the early 1950s and had completed five such trips across the US before Ginsburg’s and Kerouac’s tomes of like adventures. He landed in San Francisco and in 1956 shouted his first lines of poetry over drunken crowds in a beat tavern. Ron Rice had learned of a vast supply of US Armed Forces’ black and white film that was being dumped at garbage prices because of expired usability dates. The film was in good shape, except it produced images somewhat darker and grainier than standard. Rice bought a carload and filmed Mead’s Beat poetry reading and the first experimental film was born. The “The Flower Thief,” was the first of some fifty films that Mead would either star or appear in, which included many of Warhol’s experimental works between 1963 and 1968. “The Flower Thief” remains to this day one of the seminal pieces of Beat expression in film---the ultimate expression of anarchy and rejection of convention.
In an ill-fated attempt to rid the streets of low-life bohemia, San Francisco police cracked down and Mead abandoned the city for the downtown streets of New York, the place he has called home ever since. In 1963 he starred in his first Warhol film, “Tarzan and Jane Regained.... Sort of” which also features Dennis Hopper. Taylor became a member of Al Pacino’s theatre company, starring in the play “Arturo Ui” and won an Obie for his work in Frank O’Hara’s “The General Returns From One Place To Another.”
Director William Kirkley met Taylor in the summer of 2000, as the two would get coffee from the same coffeehouse. The first footage he shot was of Taylor holding forth in a dank coffeehouse on New York’s lower west side, speaking to a room filled with people two or three generations removed from his Beat days. But hold forth he did. Taylor was living in a rent-controlled apartment officially occupied by an old friend who let Taylor live there because he had nowhere else. The apartment was filled with insects of all types to the point that gentrified neighbors were pushing for his eviction. Friends of Kirkley donned protective masks and bailed out the place to allow Mead’s continued occupancy. As they did so they dug down through layers of poetry, pictures of Taylor with Allen Ginsburg, invitations, pictures of his parents and himself. It was a strange archeological dig in a down town apartment that could have been forgotten. But it was history now and Kirkley was not going to let it get away.
On the opening night of this film in Tribeca, Taylor Mead once again held forth for the crowd, to a standing ovation. At Tribeca last year, Jim Jarmusch’s “Coffee and Cigarettes” premiered and Taylor’s part was a hit. The film had solid backing and suddenly he was back in the limelight again. He commented that it was good to be in a film that had distribution, because none of his previous films did. His lifetime of acting in films that defied the establishment had finally produced results.
Containing rare clips of Mead’s work in Warhol’s and Rice’s films, “Excavating Taylor Mead” is a priceless look into those Beat barrooms where so much of today’s independent arts movements started. If there are awards for keeping the faith, surely Taylor Mead is up for the Medal of Honor.
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