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| THE PERSONAL WEBLOG OF ME |
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10. 19. 09 (Entry follows photo)
Reading Bukowski Is Not The Same As Having A Personality |
This essay originally appeared in the L.A. Innuendo in September of 2003.
If you’re over twenty-two years of age, you really shouldn’t like the work of Charles Bukowski anymore. I don’t mean you should stop telling people you like his work, I mean, literally, you shouldn’t like it anymore.
Why? Because Charles Bukowski was nothing more than a tremendously unpleasant old drunk who wrote and rewrote the same book about forty times. If you’re a budding pretentious jerk-off in your late teens, get yourself any Bukowski book and hang on to it. You needn’t buy any of the others. Just read that one forty times. You’ve got to trust me on this. And by all means, avoid his “poetry”. First of all, poetry is an embarrassing art form and is only really done well once every hundred years or so, and Bukowski was no cummings. Essentially, his “poetry” was just one of his self-consciously squalid, repetitive short “stories” chopped up to look like “poetry”. It’s no “good”.
See, it’s just not for adults. It’s okay for those crucial years when you are trying to form what you think is a cool personality. Bukowski will not let you down then. Talking about him lends you some whiff of non-suburbanity, which I know you desperately want and need at this point in your still-formative years. This is the time to drink off-brand bourbon and discover Tom Waits’ early catalogue, when he was singing in a phony Louie Armstrong voice and was pretty much just as pretentious as you now aspire to be. These early Waits songs are all about things that would happen in a Bukowski story! Fantastic! But as forced as those songs are, they’re still a thousand times better-written than any single sentence of Bukowski’s. Early Waits and any Bukowski will stand you in good stead with aspiring white bluesmen and any girls at your local “bohemian” bar who are really into getting drunk all day every day.
(Also, my future New Beverly fixture, don’t bother with clove cigarettes. I guarantee you won’t like them and it’s not worth trying to get used to them because you never will and they smell like perfume you would buy in a hospital gift shop.)
What’s so weird about the Tom Waits/Charles Bukowski connection is that Waits clearly didn’t experience any of the retro “Nighthawks at the Diner” horseshit he was shoveling out, but Bukowski lived all of his own miserable work. So why is it so goddamned terrible? Perhaps because Bukowski was merely reporting the things that went on in his life, without any real effort to make these experiences into literature. This is the beauty of pretension. It takes a huge asshole to write about his fights, his wine hangovers, and his frequenting of prostitutes, but it takes an even bigger asshole to encourage him to do so.
Unfortunately, Bukowski lived and wrote here and is associated closely with Los Angeles. In certain circles, anyway. A little while ago some old ghost of mine from back east came out here for a week-long visit that I can only describe as excruciating. This is a guy who has a soul patch, wears vintage bowling shirts, and says “dig” because he thinks it makes him interesting. This fellow is in his mid-forties. How awkward! Needless to say, he was thrilled to be walking the same streets as one of his heroes, Charles Bukowski. I let him do this on his own, going so far as to pretend I had a job to go to every day so I could avoid this goon.
One afternoon, he came back to my apartment after having been roaming around Hollywood all day. He told me he’d gone and had a couple of pops at a bar called The Ski Room at Sunset and Bronson. Sadly, I know the Ski Room all too well, having been forced by my circumstances to drink there almost exclusively when I first came to town and didn’t really have any of what you’d call money. By the way, it’s not called the Ski Room anymore; its current name is Raji’s, and by all appearances it is a thinly-veiled Vietnamese brothel.
“Went to The Ski Room today, man,” the goon said. “I really dig that place.”
I angrily bit the inside of my cheek until I tasted copper and replied, “Oh, yeah?”
With a huge smile on his face, the goon told me that he was informed that Bukowski used to drink there.
What I did not tell him was that this is hardly singular news. Bukowski was a hideous alcoholic and most likely drank in every bar in Los Angeles. If there is a bus stop bench on your corner, odds are he drank there, too. There probably isn’t a plaque, but try to enjoy it anyway.
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