On Mon, Jul 12, 2010 at 5:19 PM, Doug Henwood <dhenwood at panix.com> wrote:
> <
> http://artsbeat.blogs.nytimes.com/2010/07/12/tuli-kupferberg-poet-and-singer-dies-at-86/
> >
>
> July 12, 2010, 4:01 PM
> Tuli Kupferberg, Poet and Singer, Dies at 86
> By BEN SISARIO
>
> Tuli Kupferberg, the poet, singer and professional bohemian who went from
> being a noted Beat to becoming, in his words, “the world’s oldest rock star”
> when he helped found the Fugs, the bawdy and politically pugnacious
> folk-rock group, died on Monday in Manhattan. He was 86 and had been a
> longtime resident of Greenwich Village.
>
> He had been in weak health after suffering two strokes last year, said Ed
> Sanders, his friend and fellow Fug.
>
> Mr. Kupferberg was something of a Beatnik celebrity when he and Mr. Sanders
> started the Fugs in 1964. Already in his 40s, he was an anthologized poet
> and published a series of literary magazines with titles like Birth and
> Yeah. And to his chagrin and embarrassment, he had also found a kind of
> notoriety as the inspiration for one of the characters in Allen Ginsberg’s
> poem “Howl.” He was the one who “jumped off the Brooklyn Bridge this
> actually happened and walked away unknown and forgotten.”
>
> Between 1965 and 1970 the Fugs released six albums of music that could be
> puerile (“Boobs a Lot”), politically provocative (“Kill for Peace”) or
> gentle and even scholarly (“Ah, Sunflower, Weary of Time,” based on a poem
> by Blake). The band became “the U.S.O. of the left,” Mr. Kupferberg once
> said, playing innumerable antiwar rallies, including the “exorcism” of the
> Pentagon in 1967 that was chronicled by Norman Mailer in his book “The
> Armies of the Night.”
>
> In the years since the Fugs, Mr. Kupferberg has been a regular sight in
> Lower Manhattan, selling his satirical cartoons on the street and serving as
> an grandfather for bohemian types of all ages. He embraced the bohemian
> designation, tracing the word back to its origins back to 12th-century
> Paris, where “the craziest students once came from Bohemia,” he once said in
> an interview with the music Web site Perfect Sound Forever. Among his books
> were “1,001 Ways to Live Without Working.”
>
> Lately he has been posting his sometimes ribald “perverbs” — brief videos
> punning on well-known aphorisms — on YouTube.
>
> His survivors include his wife, Sylvia Topp; and three children.
>
> A full obituary will follow.
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