Ever asking the question, “What is this mystery, this you and I,” Ira Cohen was a giant frump with a full fuzzy beard, a shaman, a guru, a poet/ photographer/ filmmaker. Long a fixture of downtown New York, he was beloved by many. At the Bowery Poetry Club, he was celebrated by surrealist art impresario Timothy Baum and Romanian poet Valery Oisteanu, and Moroccan restaurateur and master chef Hamid Idrissi. At the Bunker, Penny Arcade emceed, ushering onstage poets and well-wishers for yet a new collection of Ira verses. Many told wild stories of encounters with him, in Europe and Africa, in Paris and Tangier.
Most affecting were the words of his daughter Lakshmi Cohen, now grown up with orange hair and tattoos, who spoke of her fondest memories of her dad as she and her brother lay on the never-vacuumed matted green rug in a room infused with the aroma of pot and incense as their dad motor-mouthed on the phone to friends in Amsterdam and Katmandu, in the days of land lines when phone bills went through the roof.
The smartest man, said Arcade of Cohen, she used him as people now google. A graduate of the Horace Mann School and Cornell, he knew everything. Baum had also attended Horace Mann, and when the two met they talked through the night, a memory shared by the poets and scenesters at both venues. I for one have the memory of Cohen screening religious figures swinging their pierced penises at the Ganges, images that I cannot unsee.
A word about the Bunker, erstwhile home of William Burroughs, and later John Giorno. A former YMCA, the building on the Bowery now houses Lynda Benglis and other artists. Back in the day, the area was so menacing that Burroughs always carried mace as a defense. Nevertheless, he was routinely mugged. The people surrounding him could not protect him from street violence, but put off Ira Cohen on many an occasion, so it seems fitting that Cohen be celebrated in this space.
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