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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), 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 i ...
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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 Lucien Carr, 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. Best known for his poem " Howl", Ginsberg denounced what he saw as the destructive forces of capitalism and conformity in the United States. San Francisco police and US Customs seized copies of "Howl" in 1956, and a subsequent obscenity trial in 1957 attracted widespread publicity due to the poem's language and descriptions of 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 a ...
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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 Weltha Haight, who for decades helped run the San Francisco Protestant Orphan Asylum. 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 Vict ...
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San Francisco
San Francisco, officially the City and County of San Francisco, is a commercial, Financial District, San Francisco, financial, and Culture of San Francisco, cultural center of Northern California. With a population of 827,526 residents as of 2024, San Francisco is the List of California cities by population, fourth-most populous city in the U.S. state of California and the List of United States cities by population, 17th-most populous in the United States. San Francisco has a land area of at the upper end of the San Francisco Peninsula and is the County statistics of the United States, fifth-most densely populated U.S. county. Among U.S. cities proper with over 250,000 residents, San Francisco is ranked first by per capita income and sixth by aggregate income as of 2023. San Francisco anchors the Metropolitan statistical area#United States, 13th-most populous metropolitan statistical area in the U.S., with almost 4.6 million residents in 2023. The larger San Francisco Bay Area ...
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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 I ...
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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 ...
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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 fro ...
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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. An 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 band formed in Los Angeles in 1965, comprising vocalist Jim Morrison, keyboardist Ray Manzarek, guitarist Robby Krieger and drummer John Densmore. They were among the most influential and controversial rock acts of the 1960s, primarily due to Morrison's lyrics and voice, along with his erratic stage persona and legal issues. 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 the English writer Aldous Huxley's book ''The Doors of Perception'', itself a reference to a quote by the English poet 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 their debut ''The Doors (album), The Doors'' (1967), ''Strange Days (The Doors album), Strange Days'' (1967), and ''L.A. Woman'' (1971). Dubbed t ...
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Grace Slick
Grace Slick (born Grace Barnett Wing; October 30, 1939) is an American painter and retired musician whose musical career spanned four decades. She was a prominent figure in San Francisco's psychedelic music scene during the mid-1960s to the early 1970s. Initially performing with The Great Society (band), the Great Society, Slick achieved fame as the lead singer and frontwoman of Jefferson Airplane and the subsequent spinoff bands Jefferson Starship and Starship (band), Starship. Slick and Jefferson Airplane achieved significant success and popularity with their 1967 studio album ''Surrealistic Pillow'', which included the top-ten US Billboard Hot 100, ''Billboard'' hits "White Rabbit (song), White Rabbit" and "Somebody to Love (Jefferson Airplane song), Somebody to Love". With Starship, she sang co-lead for two number-one hits, "We Built This City" and "Nothing's Gonna Stop Us Now". She has released four studio albums as an independent artist. Slick retired from music in 1990, b ...
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Grateful Dead
The Grateful Dead was an American rock music, rock band formed in Palo Alto, California, in 1965. Known for their eclectic style that fused elements of rock, blues, jazz, Folk music, folk, country music, country, bluegrass music, bluegrass, rock and roll, gospel music, gospel, reggae, and world music with psychedelic music, psychedelia, the band is famous for Musical improvisation, improvisation during their Concert, live performances, and for their devoted fan base, known as "Deadhead, Deadheads". According to the musician and writer Lenny Kaye, the music of the Grateful Dead "touches on ground that most other groups don't even know exists." For the range of their influences and the structure of their live performances, the Grateful Dead are considered "the pioneering godfathers of the jam band world". The Grateful Dead was founded in the San Francisco Bay Area during the rise of the counterculture of the 1960s. The band's founding members were Jerry Garcia (electric guitar, le ...
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