The Charles Bukowski Tapes

It was writers like Burroughs and Bukowski that saved me from my dead end path of juvenile delinquency, of my teenage riot against my nerdy childhood, the precocious dreams that turned into a refusal, years of kicking holes in the drywall room reality of the future that was laid out for me, terrifying in it’s blandness and normalcy, which of course, it still is.

The Charles Bukowski Tapes. Number 2.

Finally at University, a minor miracle in itself after failing out of high school, simply because I didn’t give a fuck, I discovered in the library the lives and works of writers like Buk, and that’s when I realized being a writer didn’t have to be a boring professor with a dusty sweater ideas office life sex and fun another pointless combination and recombination of words that no one gave a fuck about or some mass market shit horror writer pumping out bloated slabs of crap for white trash to read in order to feel superior that they were smart and weren’t solely TV zombies like their meth pipe rocking cousins. There were writers who drank, fought, fucked and took strange drugs and had terrifying and beatific visions, so overfilled with experiences that they had no choice but to pound them onto the page in a mad delirium, brains aflame, the black iron prison of the everyday forced to relinquish its grip, the pen a knife, the act of writing climaxing in an “oh shit” moment from which – for better or for worse – everything is going to change, so suck it the fuck up.

There was a reason.

“I accept anything that happens.” says Bukowski in the film,
The Charles Bukowski Tapes, 52 short interviews with Buk, filmed in 1989, 4 hours long, mostly just a camera on Hank, open shirted, drinking beers and smoking, talking about writing, fame, writers, skid rows, race tracks, women, money, a rootless loner rejection of the prefab reality ordained for each of us at birth. It’s about as close you are going to get to killing an afternoon with Chinaski, making your way through the beer in record time, maybe there’s a bottle of wine in the cupboard, shit, who wants to run to the liquor store, can you grab me a pack of smokes, why don’t you give your buddy a call?

Now that that’s over …

Write what you know, you shitbag punks. Yeah, I’m talking to you, you stoned bastard, on the fence because your life and experiences and want you want to write about don’t jive with the writing program shaved monkey tricks of David Foster Eggers McSweeny. And if you don’t have anything to write about, cancel your fucking WoW account and get some sun, you’re looking a little pale, it’s June already, and go experience some material to write about. Or if you’re going to write something removed from your immediate reality at least rip it from your soul and make the story an externalization of your turbulence, your evolution, your Godhood, your pissed pants.

Please, in this world where writing has become a logical career choice like accounting or wiping the asses of dying bodies, give me a reason to read more than the half-dozen or so fiction writers alive that I actually like and don’t use as sleep aids when I’m out of booze and drugs. I’m sick of staring blankly at the walls of mundanity at the book store and hey, the spirits of your shamanic storytelling ancestors are watching you, and they’re fucking pissed.

Anyway, the wanna-be yuppie pub that I thought would be a good dark place to have a couple pints and hammer this out is beginning to piss me off and the lady sitting across from me with a weird facial tic is freaking me out, I’m outta here, I have an afternoon to kill …

Watch the doc here.