RealityStudio.org

Ira Cohen, the poet and friend of Burroughs, is not especially well and has undergone a financial reversal that his friends are attempting to ameliorate. The following note is going around. There is a Facebook page about it too:

http://www.facebook.com/event.php?eid=1 ... 503&ref=mf

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IRA COHEN for those of you who do not know who he is...his artistic reach is far and wide. I suggest you click this link before going further:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ira_Cohen

Ira is holed up in a UWS tiny hotel since last tuesday ($1000 a week and thats cheap NYC) while his creme de la creme archives are being removed from his apt premises for the exorbitant cost of $9000 to insure the corporate landlord that his apartment i...s properly fumigated on monday 26th against bedbugs which we all know are rampant in urban centers across the U.S. though the landlord is holding Ira responsible for the whole building should they move anywhere else anytime soon.

PLEASE help, any amount of donation is appreciated. We need help to make sure we can pay this and make sure Ira can return to his home in peace and his archives are treated and returned in good condition. He at this point is completely broke.

We were able to get the "poets in need artist grant" by special efforts of Michael Rothenberg (Big Bridge) in the amount of $3500 and we have raised about $1000 amongst his artist friends. So that is positive but we are no where near a halfway point.

Please help if you can, if you will. No act of kindness or generosity is overlooked. Please pass this on through your networks to literary and artist friends who may know of him or his work.

I may also post some artworks/services for auction on this site if anyone cannot give money. I will accept such offers on the behalf of IRA. There is no end til we reach our goal. Please send images details and reserve amount to my email below.

if you want to pay by credit card, I suggest paypal choose "personal" and they do not take a percentage: artegiano@earthlink.net

to send a check by snail mail:

The check should be made out to JANICE HONIG, Ira's sister who is handling a bank acct for him. You can send it direct to her as well:

Janice Honig
45 East 89th street #22e
NY, NY 10128

or to me:

Ondi McMaster
52 Bank street #5
NYC, NY 10014

Please email me at omfineart@gmail.com for more info.

$1,000.00 a week!!! That's a bit much even for NYC

I'm a little confused. He isn't being evicted if I read that right, they're just fumigating the place, which I assume would take... 2 weeks to a month maybe tops? So if money is such an issue why not go to a hotel further down in Brooklyn or maybe Jersey? I'm sure you could do better than $1000. Failing that why not put his possessions into storage and sleep at a hostel for a while? The hostels in the city are pretty cheap, maybe $50 a night tops, some of them have a limit of how long you can stay there (I think about 2 weeks) but still, better than $1000 a week.

I'm trying to be discreet but there is more to the story.

First, $1000 per week is not expensive for a Manhattan hotel. What's more, Mr Cohen isn't especially well and that figures into the logistics.

Second, it is not just his apartment but also his archives that need to be fumigated in a special way so as to preserve negatives, prints, and so forth.

I have every reason to believe the people assisting him are making a selfless effort to help a man of letters overcome a personal catastrophe. If that doesn't move you, just imagine what a loss it would be if his archives were ruined. The guy was in Tangiers with Burroughs in the 1960s. He has good stuff. We were going to interview him for RealityStudio -- and I did invite him to the NY portion of NL@50 -- but in both cases health issues intervened.