Before The Mothers of Invention or The Velvet Underground there was a group of New York Lower East Side poets and musicians called The Fugs. At the center of The Fugs were Ed Sanders and Tuli Kupferberg. Tuli has had some significant medical problems lately, and therefore this Friday there is a benefit concert for him. Janine Nichols who is one half of the group Flutterbox, sent me the following announcement about it:
Flutterbox will join the gathering horde including John Zorn, Lenny Pickett and Christine Ohlman, Sonic Youth, Lou Reed, John Kruth, Peter Stampfel and of course that old Fug Ed Sanders and who knows who else assembling for a benefit at St. Ann’s Warehouse in DUMBO on behalf of that great old insurrectionist, Tuli Kupferberg, a visionary who has lost most or all of his vision to recent strokes and is in other ways victimized by the American health care system.
Please come out for this most worthy cause, in support of a poet who helped a generation find its voice while honoring the olden ways and bards and maintaining a downright lascivious front parlor work ethic. Show him some love.
The evening will no doubt also have some resonance with the death last night of that singular beauty, Kate McGarrigle. She was a hurricane. I loved watching her work on the Leonard Cohen shows. Hal adored Kate and loved her singing beyond measure. We’ll raise a glass to the old girl.
Please come out! Tickets are on the steep side, like health care bills: $75 or $125. Donations are welcome if you can’t afford the ticket. Here’s the link to St. Ann’s: https://www.ovationtix.com/trs/pe/7900805
Benefit for Tuli Kupferberg, St. Anne’s Warehouse, 38 Water Street, Brooklyn (F Train to York Street , A or C Trains to High Street, 2 or 3 Trains to Clark Street; see walking direction from the subway here), 7:30pm, $75/$125.
RIP – Tuli Kupferberg, 86, was born in, lived in, and died in New York City. This is where he was a pacifist, an anarchist, an artist, a musician, an author and an all around freak. http://urdead2me.wordpress.com/2010/07/12/rip-tuli-kupferberg/