"Friday, for a change, a little more nothing": Deceased Artiste Tuli Kupferberg

The fact that poet-rocker-activist-access pioneer-wildman Tuli Kupferberg died this week wasn’t a great surprise, as he had been having some heavy health problems for months now. The fact that he continued to have videos put up on YouTube until only a month ago was the real surprise, a further indication that Tuli was a dedicated creator of poetic anarchy until the end. He gave away his best work in his latter years, and we in Manhattan (as his access audience) and around the world (as the viewers of his YouTube “perverbs”) were all the better for it.

I already wrote a blog post paying tribute to Tuli, on the occasion of seeing a Hal Willner-produced tribute to his work, and that of his legendary band the Fugs, at St. Ann’s in Brooklyn. I direct you back to that blog post, as it contains some of the best links to Tuli’s work then and now.

To present an update, I would simply like to link to the latest additions to Tuli’s channel on YouTube. Here is yet another clip from Coca Crystal’s terrific cable-access show of the 1980s-90s. Coca’s own channel (with a great Tuli clip) can be found here. Tuli seems to be pretty somber here, but he’s in his prime singing “Where is My Wandering Jew?”:



An invaluable video link is below: the entirety of a show at the Bowery Poetry Club held to raise money for Tuli’s medical costs is up on Vimeo. I attended the show, which was called “A Little More Nothing” and was an awesomely humble little event (none of the heavy star power of the Willner show, but incredibly heartfelt and filled with local talent):

Tuli Kupferberg Tribute A Little More Nothing Part 1 from Thelma Blitz on Vimeo.

In case, you don’t want to watch the whole show, a few highlights are on YT. Here is a great moment, wherein the latest incarnation of John S. Hall’s awesome King Missile combo perform Tuli’s “The Ten Commandments” in a very Fugs-like style:



And one of Tuli’s colleagues, a former Fug himself, the legendary Peter Stampfel, performed one of his own tunes, an intense acoustic ditty called “Stick Your Ass in the Air” that showed that he, like Tuli, has not mellowed with age. Check out that voice!



Tuli’s final vids for YouTube were not “perverbs” (as he called his aphorism one-liners), but they were, each and every one of them, terrific. Here is a tape shot for Tuli’s MNN show, Revolting News, in which he performs his classic “Slum Goddess of the Lower East Side” in a few different versions (the “minor poet” one is pretty fuckin’ brilliant). When asked about what he thought of his first trip to NYC, Iggy Pop noted he was just looking for “that Slum Goddess of the Lower East Side that the Fugs sang about.”



I believe this is Tuli’s final video for YT. He talks about and performs the Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam. Tuli’s colleague Thelma Blitz notes on the video “this is the song Tuli would like to be remembered by” (which is interesting, in light of his beautiful “Morning, Morning”):



Tuli supplied this brief but pungent closing video for the St. Ann’s night. Heed his words, kats and kitties!



And a very touching way to end this tribute, Tuli singing “Summer is A-Coming In,” a very early English poem:



And since like any good poet, Tuli dealt very beautifully with the specter of death, here is the Fugs song he created from that poem, the haunting “Carpe Diem,” which substitutes the Reaper for summer. The thing about Fugs recordings like this one is that they are so blissfully “out of tune” and yet the song sounds just fucking perfect. “You can’t out-sing the Angel of Death/Sing, cuckoo, sing!”



NYC is a lot poorer without Tuli.

A Many-Splendored Thing: the late-night jousts of D.A. Harvey Pekar

I only have two collections of American Splendor comics. I found Harvey Pekar’s writing to be absolutely beyond-authentic, and perhaps that is what has kept me at a distance from becoming addicted to his work over the years: for the past two decades I have had both feet planted firmly in the tedious-office sphere which he depicted brilliantly, so reading his work always seemed too familiar and genuine an experience to me.

That said, he remains a very singular figure in the comic book pantheon: a writer who didn’t draw and who, unlike arguably the greatest modern genius of comics, Alan Moore, chose to explore his inner landscape and immediate surroundings rather than imagined alternate worlds. In terms of his non-comic persona, he was of course wonderfully depicted by Paul Giamatti in the American Splendor movie, and made eight extremely memorable appearances on the David Letterman show, which I link to below.

What interested me the most in rewatching these appearances is that, in the most confrontational appearance, Harvey accuses Letterman of being a “sell-out.” I find this interesting, as it betrays the same disappointment Bill Hicks felt in Letterman when his monologue was pulled from the show. Hicks and Pekar both somehow seemed to think Letterman was a hip nonconformist, rather than a jovial, sarcastic standup whose snarky attitude seemed to define Eighties TV comedy, but didn’t indicate any sort of rebellion whatsoever, from anything, at any time. Letterman followed in the wake of Carson and Steve Allen in having some incredibly gifted comedians on his show, but unlike those gentlemen (and Dick Cavett), he was never willing to be a cooperative straight man for those performers (I remember the word “jerk” being used when Pee-Wee, Jerry Lewis, and I think Bobcat Goldthwait came on). Unless the standup was one of Dave’s old cronies from the circuit (like the non-filmmaker George Miller — remember him?), Dave seemed to want to endlessly needle comic characters who came on his show (with Chris Elliott, it was part of the bit; with Brother Theodore, Andy Kaufman, and many others, it seemed like Dave wanted to show that he was “tolerating” what was transpiring in the guest chair).

So on came Harvey Pekar, a truly independent comic creator who needled Dave right back (in fact, the single best moments of the Letterman show at that time consisted of comedians who dished it right back at Letterman after he’d been particularly obnoxious to them). The contentious appearance that found Dave telling Harvey he’d never appear on the show again also finds Letterman calling American Splendor your “Mickey Mouse newsletter,” which is as genuine a moment as you will find on the Letterman show from that time. Letterman is an older, mellower soul these days, but his sarcasm and extreme crankiness (I’m always fascinated when people perceive him as homespun and friendly) has always seemingly been boiling just below the surface. Back in the Eighties, it appeared a number of times, and Pekar seemed determined to draw it out of him.

Here is Pekar’s first appearance on the show:



And a later bizarre appearance where Harvey joins wacky Dave doin’ a wacky stunt, wherein he visits the set of Live at Five (then hosted by current cranky cable host Jack Cafferty, who actually could’ve matched Letterman’s snotty barbs if he’d been genuinely pissed):



Here Harvey is allowed to do a full segment, but there is still tension in the air:



And here is the confrontational, truncated segment I mentioned above, where Harvey won’t let up on General Electric, and Letterman mocks his comic:



This has been billed as Pekar’s final appearance, so evidently he was allowed back one final time on the Letterman program, but he wasn’t on in the final 15-plus years of his life. I guess he didn’t fit into the hyper-slick plug-and-you’re-out guest segments that have been the bulwark of the CBS late-night show:



And, just so I don’t link entirely to agitated interviews with Pekar, here is a quieter, more considered chat, done for PBS: