For some reason the fall always seems like the most poetic season — the best season for writing and reading verse. I think it has something to do with darkness. I think it has something to do with the cold and the damp that begins to creep into the coming Southern winter. I think it has something to do with the academic calendar and that sense of something that might begin as the natural cycle begins to end. It has something to do with harvest and holidays and a sense of summing up the year gone by.

Here’s a quadrilogy of Charles Bukowski poems curated by Open Culture. Find credits through their link. Here’s a bit from their recent post…

The poetry of Charles Bukowski deeply inspires many of its readers. Sometimes it just inspires them to lead the dissolute lifestyle they think they see glorified in it, but other times it leads them to create something compelling of their own. The quality and variety of the Bukowski-inspired animation now available on the internet, for instance, has certainly surprised me.

I made a playlist of the videos that I’m hosting on my YouTube channel…

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I like to think of Factotum as Charles Bukowski’s war novel, but Bukowski’s alter ego, Henry Chinaski, is rejected from the draft and spends WWII at home. Here’s the wiki…

Set in 1944, the plot follows Henry Chinaski, Bukowski’s perpetually unemployed, alcoholic alter ego, who has been rejected from the World War II draft and makes his way from one menial job to the next (hence a factotum). Chinaski drifts through the seedy city streets of lower-class Los Angeles in search of a job that will not come between him and his first love: writing. He is consistently rejected by the only publishing house he respects, but is driven to continue by the knowledge that he could do better than the authors they publish. Chinaski begins sleeping with fellow barfly Jan, a kindred spirit he meets while drowning his sorrows at a bar. When a brief stint as a bookie finds him abandoned by the only woman with whom he is able to relate, a fling with gold-digging floozie Laura finds him once again falling into a morose state of perpetual drunkenness and unemployment.

Every novel is a war novel. Every soul is a soldier. Celebrating the book’s 40th anniversary, here’s the 2005 adaptation of the novel…

Stay Awake!

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I try to do all of my writing during the week. Songs I’ll write anytime. Poems anytime. But everything else gets pushed away at least once a week. It seems I’m always editing something or getting a blog post together by Sunday evening, but mostly, during the weekends, words are for reading.

Nowadays that means reading the articles I’ve streamlined into my Flipboard feed. I’ve got a pretty big ass phone at this point and it doubles as a very readable little tablet.

This weekend I came across some news that a new Charles Bukowski book was going to be released. On Writing illuminates the author’s wordcraft with the help of a hitherto undiscovered cache of Buk’s letters.

Here’s some advice from the man himself that I found in The Telegraph…

Yes to D.H. Lawrence, No to William Falkner

“DH Lawrence was solid all the way through but Henry Miller was more modern, less artsy, until he got into his Star-Trek babbling . . . with William Faulkner, the public has swallowed him with one big gulp – but a lot of Faulkner’s pure sh-t, but it’s clever sh-t, cleverly dressed.”

On Poets, Young and Old

“Most poets are young simply because they have not been caught up. Show me an old poet and I’ll show you, more often than not, either a madman or a master . . . it’s when you begin to lie to yourself in a poem in order simply to make a poem, that you fail. That is why I do not rework poems.”

Writing is a Hustle

“Don’t get me wrong. When I say that basically writing is a hard hustle, I don’t mean that it is a bad life, if one can get away with it. It’s the miracle of miracles to make a living by the typer.”

Sucky Writers

And some writers are just no good
“When I worked on a magazine I learned that there are many, many writers writing that can’t write at all; and they keep on writing all the cliches and bromides and 1890 plots, and poems about Spring and poems about Love, and poems they think are modern because they are done in slang or staccato style, or written with all the ‘i’s’ small.”

I’m celebrating this good news watching Taylor Hackford’s eponymous doc about the author from 1973…

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Got a lot of action on my Bukowski post last week, so I wanted to share another video I found. This time it’s an out-of-print BBC documentary that has some pretty unique, early footage of the man himself — stuff that I don’t think even Born Into This included.

Here’s The Ordinary Madness of Charles Bukowski…

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Continuing to remember the 20th anniversary of the death of Charles Bukowski in 1994, here is a video of the poet’s last reading in 1980. While he continued to write for the last 14 years of his life, he never read his work in public again. Here’s the story behind this document from the Wiki…

In March 1980, Takoma Records was about to re-release an audio recording on vinyl of a Charles Bukowski live poetry reading given in San Francisco years earlier. As part of the promotion of the album release, Bukowski agreed to give a new live reading, even though he hated doing them. Jon Monday, then General Manager of Takoma Records, video taped the event.[1]
But by later that year Bukowski’s book royalties and movie advances provided him enough of a living that he no longer had to do readings.

The Redondo Beach reading turned out to be the very last poetry reading Bukowski ever gave. The video recording of that night stayed in an archive until 2008 when mondayMEDIA entered into an agreement with Bukowski’s widow Linda to release it on DVD.

Bukowski’s readings were known for their riotous back and forth with the audience and this recording shows this in full color. Each poem is set between a tense dialog – with Bukowski giving and taking insults and threats with members of the audience. It ends with the prophetic words “This reading is over”.

Here’s the flick…

Stay Awake!

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25 years ago Charles Bukowski published Hollywood — the poet’s fictional account of adapting the screenplay of his novel Barfly for film.

This all gets a little meta, but Buk wrote a screenplay adaptation of his novel and then adapted his experience of making the Barbet Schroeder film — featuring Mickey Rourke and Faye Dunaway — into a book.

Hollywood tells the hilarious story of Bukowski’s trying to navigate the machinations of the star system of La La Land in a voice that could only be his own. Here’s the Wiki…

The novel is a Roman à clef, in which Bukowski uses the following names as pseudonyms for the fictionalized versions of people with whom he worked on the movie Barfly:
Mickey Rourke, the lead actor in the film, is named Jack Bledsoe.
Faye Dunaway, the lead actress in the film, is named Francine Bowers.
Barbet Schroeder, the director of the film, is named Jon Pinchot.
He also references people he met in Hollywood during his time working on the movie:
Jean-Luc Godard is named Jon-Luc Modard.
Steve Baës is named Francois Racine
Dennis Hopper is named Mack Austin
Sean Penn is named Tom Pell
Norman Mailer is named Victor Norman
David Lynch is named Manz Loeb
Isabella Rossellini is named Rosalind Bonelli
Werner Herzog is named Wenner Zergog
Taylor Hackford is Hector Blackford

Here is a short documentary about the making of Barfly…

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Film director Barbet Schroeder’s nearly four hours of interviews with the late poet Charles Bukowski have taken on an air of legend since their initial release on VHS in 1987. Various segments from the captured conversations have appeared on YouTube in the past, but this is the first time I’ve found the entire interview available as one streaming video, connected by the somber piano score that accompanied the original — the music was the sign-off tune for the German television station that aired the footage in 52 separate segments.

Schroeder shot the interviews over three years leading up to the filming of Bukowski’s autobiographical screenplay Barfly, which was also released in 1987. This version was culled from a reported 64 hours of footage, and it finds Schroeder and Bukowski talking about alcohol, violence, writing and women, and even includes a tour of Buk’s childhood home. Some of this footage ended up in the excellent documentary Born into This including the infamous scene of Bukowski kicking and chasing after his future wife Linda.

The Charles Bukowski Tapes has become a cult classic and it’s a real thrill to share these with you here:

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Wallace Berman was born in Staten Island, New York in 1926. While he was still a child, he correctly predicted that he would die on his 50th birthday. He was hit by a car in 1976.

During those five decades, Berman became a pioneering assemblage artist as well as one of the cornerstones of the post WWII California art scene. Berman became associated with the Beats and his self-published magazine Semina combined his own collage imagery with writing by luminaries like Michael McClure, Philip Lamantia, David Meltzer, Charles Bukowski, William S. Burroughs, Allen Ginsberg, Jean Cocteau. In addition to his groundbreaking, multimedia assemblages, Berman made the short film Aleph. The artist’s only experiment with moving pictures,Aleph reveals both Berman’s love of collage as well as his interest in the Kabbalah.

Here is what www.jewishmuseum.org has to say about the film:

Aleph is an artist’s meditation on life, death, mysticism, politics, and pop culture. In an eight-minute loop of film, Wallace Berman uses Hebrew letters to frame a hypnotic, rapid-fire montage that captures the go-go energy of the 1960s. Aleph includes stills of collages created using a Verifax machine, Eastman Kodak’s precursor to the photocopier. These collages depict a hand-held radio that seems to broadcast or receive popular and esoteric icons. Signs, symbols, and diverse mass-media images (e.g., Flash Gordon, John F. Kennedy, Mick Jagger) flow like a deck of tarot cards, infinitely shuffled in order that the viewer may construct his or her own set of personal interpretations. The transistor radio, the most ubiquitous portable form of mass communication in the 1960s, exemplifies the democratic potential of electronic culture and serves as a metaphor for Jewish mysticism. The Hebrew term kabbalah translates as “reception” for knowledge, enlightenment, and divinity.

Check out Joe Nolan’s Insomnia to find out more about another West Coast artist with an eye for the surreal.

Stay awake!

J