653 Chenery Street
in San Francisco's Glen Park neighborhood

1-415-586-3733
[email protected]

Open to walk-in trade and browsing
Tuesday to Sunday
noon to six

 

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But nothing beats being in the room
with the music & the musicians!

Bloomsday! June 16th
a benefit reading for
Bird & Beckett’s cash flow needs!
10 minutes of Ulysses read aloud every hour on the hour from 11 a.m. to 9 p.m.

Stately, plump Buck Mulligan came from the stairhead, bearing a bowl of lather on which a mirror and a razor lay crossed…

–Come up, Kinch.  Come up, you fearful Jesuit…

And thus is introduced young, intense Stephen Dedalus whose day unfolds in counterpoint to and occasionally overlapping that of ad salesman Leopold Bloom in 1904 Dublin — June 16th, to be precise — at the outset of James Joyce’s masterpiece, Ulysses.  Bloom himself is introduced in the second chapter, making his wife’s breakfast, feeding the cat some milk, stepping out to buy a pork kidney at the butcher’s to cook up back at home.

Bloomsday celebrations have taken place all over the globe for decades– we’ve staged a few ourselves in our modest way, and we’re game to do it again.

We figured the way we would do it this time would be to read bitsof the book, ten minutes a time, at hour intervals throughout the day, starting at 11 a.m.

At the outset, we’ll have a bit of catching up to do, as they seem early risers in summertime Dublin, but catch up we will. Every hour through the day, we’ll open the tome to someplace roughly approximating the time of day and do another ten minutes’ worth.  When we’re closing in on 9 o’clock San Francisco time, we’ll skip & hop through the rest of the book, sample from Molly Bloom’s ample soliloquy, then call it quits for the day.

As it happens, we need to raise a little coin for the shop to catch up with bills that have piled up, so consider this a celebration of James Joyce and also a fundraiser for the business named in half for Samuel Beckett, Joyce’s worthy acolyte and successor. Bring a little dough, if you can spare it, and throw it in the kitty.  We’ll appreciate it greatly if you do.  Mrkgnao…

If you’ve got a favorite bit of Ulysses, feel free to figure out the appropriate hour to read it, and we’ll pleased to hear from you.  Or if you just want to read without preconceptions, we’ll point to a page and set you going.  Or come just to take it in.

Welcome to Bird & Beckett!

james-joyce

 

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The Bird & Beckett Cultural Legacy Project

Our events are put on under the umbrella of the nonprofit Bird & Beckett Cultural Legacy Project (the "BBCLP"). That's how we fund our ambitious schedule of 300 or so concerts and literary events every year.

The BBCLP is a 501(c)(3) non-profit...
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The Independent Musicians Alliance

Gigging musicians! You have nothing to lose but your lack of a collective voice to achieve fair wages for your work!
The IMA can be a conduit for you, if you join in to make it work.

https://www.independentmusiciansalliance.org/

Read more here - Andy Gilbert's Feb 25 article about the IMA from KQED's site

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