OBIT
Tuli Kupferberg, 86, iconic poet and singer of the Fugs
http://www.downtownexpress.com/de_377/tulikupferberg.html
By Albert Amateau
July 16 - 22, 2010
Tuli Kupferberg, poet, singer and rambunctious jester who was a
co-founder of the Fugs, the anarchic band of the 1960s, died Mon.,
July 12, in Manhattan at the age of 86.
In poor health for more than two years, he suffered two strokes last
year, according to Ed Sanders, his friend and fellow Fugs founder.
By the time Kupferberg was singing such songs as "Kill for Peace"
with the Fugs, he was an anthologized poet and a bohemian icon much
loved by the current inheritors of the Beats. He was a familiar
figure at counterculture events and peace rallies, offering his
poetry and drawings for sale.
"I've been truly blessed to have known Tuli," said Clayton Patterson,
an artist and art organizer on the Lower East Side. "He's one of the
few who had the ability and the strength to swim down, touch the
bottom of the ocean, resurface and tell us what treasures lay hidden
in the darkness where only the 1 percenters and the forgotten ones
could see… I loved and respected Tuli," Patterson said.
Robert Lederman, president of A.R.T.I.S.T. (Artists' Response to
Illegal State Tactics), also paid tribute to Kupferberg.
"Tuli was a longtime member of A.R.T.I.S.T. who in recent years sold
his art in Soho. He was a truly unique character with a biting sense
of humor," Lederman said.
In an interview with him conducted in 2007, three of his friends,
Steve Dalachinsky, Jim Feast and Yuko Otomo, call Kupferberg "a
provocative humorist of the left… At one moment he may be puncturing
an inflated windbag of media propaganda and at another slicing
through the fatuous rhetoric of a labor faker."
In the interview, which is to appear in 2011 as part of a larger book
"Jews: The People's History of the Lower East Side," edited by Dr.
Mareleyn Schneider and Patterson Kupferberg spoke about his roots,
his childhood and life.
Naphtali Kupferberg was born in 1923 on the Lower East Side on Cannon
Street near the Williamsburg Bridge to immigrant parents who were
part of an extended Jewish family. The family moved to Yorkville and
Kupferberg went to Townsend Harris High School, an elite school
located on E. 23rd Street where Baruch College is now. At one point,
he said to himself, "I'm in the wrong place," so he transferred to
New Utrecht High School when the family moved to Brooklyn. He went on
to Brooklyn College in the depth of the Depression where he was
astounded to find Communists, anarchists and Trotskyites.
Kupferberg was declared 4F and exempt from the draft during World War II.
Although attracted to the militant left, he knew he would not abide
party discipline.
He graduated from college and moved to Broome Street on the Lower
East Side where rents were cheap.
"I was paying $17 for a steam-heated apartment a lot of money at
the time," he recalled in the 2007 interview.
He talked of his membership in the Wobblies (Industrial Workers of
the World), joining the War Resisters League and meeting Julian Beck
and Judith Malina of the Living Theatre and Paul Goodman, a radical
educator and writer.
Kupferberg was involved in Birth, a magazine that published LeRoi
Jones, Allen Ginsberg and Diane DiPalma. He joined his friend
Sanders, who published Fuck You: A Magazine of the Arts.
Kupferberg himself published Yaah: "It was a poetry magazine but it
published anything odd and strange," he said.
Kupferberg's last apartment was on the western edge of Soho, at Sixth
Avenue and Spring Street, where he lived for many years.
"The place was just filled with books," said Patterson. "It was like
a library. There was very little living space because there were so
many books."
Kupferberg is survived by his wife, Sylvia Topp; three children,
Joseph Sacks, Noah Kupferberg and Samara Kupferberg; and three grandchildren.
--------
Tuli Kupferberg
Tuli Kupferberg, who died on July 12 aged 86, was a founder of the
Sixties rock group the Fugs, as well as a Beat journalism publisher
and an anarcho-pacifist.
18 Jul 2010
Kupferberg, the poet Ed Sanders and Texan Ken Weaver formed the
backbone of the Fugs, a band formed on New York's Lower East Side in
1964. The band's name came from Norman Mailer's substitute for the
word "f---" in his novel The Naked and the Dead. Kupferberg wrote the
lyrics for the song Kill for Peace, an anti-war number considered
timely by many owing to the escalating conflict in Vietnam.
Over the following years the Fugs played at numerous anti-war rallies
including the so-called "exorcism" of the Pentagon in 1967, where
along with other demonstrators such as Allen Ginsberg and Abbie
Hoffman, the band called on "the demons of the Pentagon to rid
themselves of the cancerous tumours of the war generals". Supergirl,
Nothing and CIA Man were notable tracks from the band's first album,
The Village Fugs Sing Ballads of Contemporary Protest, Points of View
and General Dissatisfaction, released in 1965.
In contrast to most baby-boomer Sixties musicians, Kupferberg was in
his forties by the time he got around to founding the Fugs, becoming
in his words "the world's oldest rock star". Although the name was
intended to shock and the lyrics to some of their songs were profane,
other songs demonstrated some appreciation for higher culture. Poetry
was a key medium in Beat art, so it was perhaps unsurprising that the
Fugs used a William Blake poem as inspiration for their song Ah,
Sunflower, Weary of Time.
Naftali Kupferberg was born on September 28 1923 in New York into a
Jewish, Yiddish-speaking household on the Lower East side. After high
school he attended the Brooklyn College of Arts, graduating cum laude
in 1944. While at college he became interested in Beat writing and
poetry and became a Left wing activist; after graduation he got a job
as a medical librarian.
In 1958 Kupferberg still based on Manhattan's Lower East Side
founded the magazine Birth. It ran for only three issues but
published notable Beat Generation authors such as Allen Ginsberg and
LeRoi Jones and became something of a cult hit, as did his other
published periodicals of that era, such as Swing and Yeah.
He was also the inspiration for the man who jumped off the Brooklyn
Bridge and survived in Allen Ginsberg's poem Howl. "I went one night
to the top of the Manhattan Bridge and after a few minutes I jumped
off," Kupferberg recalled in an interview. "But nothing happened. I
landed in the water and I wasn't dead. So I swam ashore and went home
and took a bath and went to bed. Nobody even noticed.".
In 1961 he self-published his first book The War Against Beats and
1001 Ways to Live Without Working, which actually contained 1005 ways
to live without working. His next best-known literary effort was 1001
Ways to Beat the Draft (1966). His most recent work is Teach Yourself
F*****g, a collection of cartoons published in 2000.
Although the Fugs broke up in 1969, they reunited for a string of
concerts in 1984. Kupferberg's age was at the time unknown to the
press his bandmate Sanders merely commenting that his colleague was
"ready for Medicare". They kept up periodic tour appearances until
2009, when Kupferberg suffered two strokes. In 2003, the group
released The Fugs Final CD (Part 1). Their last album Be Free: The
Fugs Final CD (Part 2) was released earlier this year.
Tuli Kupferberg is survived by his wife, Sylvia Topp, and three children.
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