Vashti Bunyan - Live in Berlin - A Concert Review

Dear Vashti,

thank you for being at the Volksbühne a few days ago and having allowed me an insight into your life. Your appereance was labelled as a concert with a documentary, I mean, I payed for it, so it was a kind of a commercial meeting. The film made me understood that it shows an important part of your life during the sixties: you and a young man were together on a long journey through England and finally, both of you arrive on an island in Scotland. It seemed to be a hard time for you, you had not a lot of money but you decided to do this kind of life. The doc also described, that you met some friendly people on your quaint road to the north. I have come to know that you wrote during this time a lot of songs, which were more or less never be published or wellknown in public at this time.
During your concert, which followed the film, you told to most of the songs you presented, that you wrote them during the journey with the horse, the wagon and the man in the sixties. Three of this songs you dedicated to one special man who was one of your true love, as you said. Especially this is, what I remember, because you announced it like you wanted to intensify the meaning this man had for your life. The whole concert had an atmosphere of privatness and I was a bit surprised about you, telling us scenes from your life in such a broken and fragile voice. On one side I would have liked to hear more about, what had happened and if this man is still with you and the father of your three children. On the other side I felt having picked up to much of a persons life which I don't like to get in in this commercial surrounding, there it is not intended to talk, only to listen and to clap.
The next day I read two articles about your concert in Berlin newspapers. This two journalists were absolutely overjoyed from you. It was not so much that they described the concert and the doc as a milestone for the history of music, they described you as a woman, who is so lovely, fragile and special, that every man on earth will shelter her. There was nothing to read about you as an artist, who played a great concert, there was all about you as a woman, who is adored and fits into the flowery brains of male structures.
I hope, you don't suffer in your real life as much as you appeared at the concert, but let it be part of your show, the audience likes it.
Kisses, Jenny

Tuli Kupferberg of the Fugs needs help!

I just found some disturbing news on the Fugs' website:

Tuli Kupferberg, co-founder of the Fugs, suffered a stroke a few months ago at his home in New York City, which has left him severely visually impaired, and in need of regular nursing care.

You can make a secure donation to Tuli's care by entering their their site.

After treatment at a hospital in New York, followed by convalescence at a nursing home, Kupferberg now is back home, during which time his eyesight was improving. Unfortunately Tuli had a second stroke in September, a smaller stroke apparently, which affected his speech area slightly. He has continued to improve, but is still basically blind, and in need of 24 hour care.
For the last several years, the band he co-founded 45 years ago, has been in the studio completing a new CD, entitled "Be Free", which features 5 of Tuli Kupferberg’s new tunes, including the magnificent anthem, “Backward Jewish Soldiers,” and a setting of his famous poem, “Greenwich Village of My Dreams.”
Tuli Kupferberg, who has just turned 86!!!, is an American treasure, a National wonder, a Gaian glory, a genius in the footsteps of Stephen Foster and other major tunesmiths, for songs such as “Nothing,” “Morning Morning, “ “Carpe Diem,” “Kill for Peace,” “The Ten Commandments,” “When the Mode of the Music Changes,” and, of course, “CIA Man,” which was featured on the recent Coen Brothers movie, "Burn After Reading".

Beginning in the late 1950s and early ’60s, Kupferberg became a leading Beat era poet and underground publisher, with periodicals such as "Birth", "Swing", and then nine issues of the magazine "Yeah", from 1961-64.
His famous "1001 Ways to Beat the Draft" was published by Grove Press in 1967; and "1001 Ways to Make Love", also published by Grove, in ’69.
He was arrested at the historic Exorcism of the Pentagon in October of 1967.
His poems and songs with the Fugs made him an integral part of the social revolutions of the 1960s and ’70s
One of his memorable books is the 1973, "Listen to the Mockingbird", satiric poem-songs to known tunes.
He became a noted political cartoonist beginning around the late 1970s, and has a long running bi-weekly television show on public access in New York City.