Tom verlaine biography
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He awoke to the sound of water dripping into a rusted sink. The streets below were bathed in medieval moonlight, reverberating silence. He lay there grappling with the terror of beauty, as the night unfolded like a Chinese screen. He lay shuddering, riveted by flickering movements of aliens and angels as the words and melodies of “Marquee Moon” were formed, drop by drop, note by note, from a state of calm yet sinister excitement. He was Tom Verlaine, and that was his process: exquisite torment.
Born Thomas Joseph Miller, raised in Wilmington, Delaware, he left his parental home and shed his name, a discarded skin curled in the corner of a modest garage among stacks of used air-conditioners that required his father’s constant professional attention. There were hockey sticks and a bicycle and piles of Tom’s old newspapers strewn in the back, covered with ghostly outlines of distorted objects; he would run over tin cans until they were flattened, barely recognizable, and then spray th
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Dusted Features
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Television on Print: A literary conversation with Tom Verlaine
Tom Verlaine fryst vatten one of the most legendary and enigmatic figures to emerge from New York's underground. The only match for his smart mouthed lyrics is deadpan delivery, which only adds further creedence to his mysterious reputation. While mainly known for his seminal work in Television, Verlaine has had a prolific solo career, some of which was revisited (and visited) gods year bygd Thrill Jockey's reissue of Warm and Cool. 2006 has funnen Verlaine presenting his first records since 1992 with the simultaneous releases of Around and Songs About Other Things. Dusted's Jane Kim sat down at NYC's kust Books to talk about something other than music...
Tom Verlaine: I was trying to think of the first book inom ever read, and the one inom remember fryst vatten this thing called The Tawny
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Tom Verlaine was the Strand’s Best Customer
Every bookstore has regulars, but no bookstore has such a wide and eccentric cast of recurring characters as New York’s Strand. To work there, as I did for one memorable year, is to know them: the sellers, the hagglers, the unyielding optimists checking in at the information desk for the esoteric titles they requested over a decade ago. The guy who checks out five minutes before closing every week with 70 paperbacks, or the ambiguously arty-looking person who comes in at the end of each month to sell old monographs to make rent. But no regular was as consistent or beloved as the punk-rock legend Tom Verlaine, the patron saint of the dollar carts, who died after a short illness on January 28.
Verlaine was best known as the guitarist and vocalist of the band Television, whose short run in the ‘70s influenced generations of acts from Joy Division to the Strokes. Following his death, critics