Taylor Mead (born December 31, 1924) is an American writer, actor, and performer. Mead appeared in several of Andy Warhol’s underground films including Tarzan and Jane Regained… Sort of and Taylor Mead’s Ass.
Born in Grosse Pointe, Michigan, Mead appeared 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…”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.”
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 perform and read poetry… read more
Taylor Mead (born December 31, 1924) is an American writer, actor, and performer. Mead appeared in several of Andy Warhol’s underground films including Tarzan and Jane Regained… Sort of and Taylor Mead’s Ass.
Born in Grosse Pointe, Michigan, Mead appeared 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…”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.”
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 perform and read poetry regularly at The Bowery Poetry Club. His latest book of poems is called A Simple Country Girl. He was the subject of a documentary entitled 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.” —wikipedia
