Will Dockery
2004-07-26 06:05:27 UTC
The Following review was writen by ROGER EBERT and appeared in the Chicago
Sun-Times 16 July 2004
Bukowski was blessed, as if to compensate for everything else, with the most
beautiful smile. It was, as more than one woman probably told him, his best
feature. When he was not smiling he was craggy at best; when he was angry he
was unlovely. His early years, punctuated by regular beatings from his
father, were scarred by acne so disfiguring, it left him with a face pitted
like the surface of the moon. He told a friend about standing outside his
school prom -- he didn't dare to ask a girl to be his date -- with his
pimply face wrapped in toilet paper, holes cut for the eyes, blood seeping
through.
He was 24 when he had sex for the first time. She was a 300-pound
prostitute. He remembers her name. As he tells the story, he does an
extraordinary thing. He blushes. Here was a man who made a living and became
a legend by being hard-boiled, and he blushes, and in that moment we glimpse
the lonely, wounded little boy inside.
John Dullaghan's "Bukowski: Born Into This" is a documentary about the poet
and novelist who died in 1994. It draws from many interviews, from footage
of poetry readings, and from the testimony of his friends, who include Sean
Penn, Harry Dean Stanton, Bono and the publisher John Martin, who started
the Black Sparrow Press specifically to publish his work. There are also the
memories of his wife, Linda Lee Bukowski, who loved him and cared for him,
despite scenes like one in the film where he kicks her and curses at her.
That was the booze talking, you could say, except when precisely was
Bukowski sober? He drank with dedication and abandon for most of his adult
years, slowed only by illness toward the end. And he chain-smoked little
cigarettes named Mangalore Ganeesh Beedies. "You can get them in any Indian
or Pakistani store," he told me in 1987. "They're what the poor, poor people
smoke in India. I like them because they contain no chemicals and no
nicotine, and they go very well with red wine."
Linda Lee Bukowski, it must be said, possessed extraordinary patience to put
up with him, but then she understood him, and his life was often as simple
as that: A plea for understanding. I sense from his work and from a long day
spent with him that even when he was drunk and angry, obscene and hurtful,
he was not the aggressor; he was fighting back.
The movie opens with Bukowski on a stage for a reading, very drunk,
threatening to come down into the audience and kick some ass. There is
another reading where, backstage, he asks the organizer, "You got a little
pot on the stage I can vomit in?" He drank most every day, red wine for
preference, and his routine usually included a visit to the track, a return
home, and long hours at his typewriter with classical music on the radio.
For all of his boozing, he was, like the prodigious Thomas Wolfe, amazingly
productive.
He wrote poems as if the words were bricks to be laid. He cut through the
labyrinthine indulgent difficulty of much modern verse, and wrote poems
anyone could understand. Yet they were poems, real poems, and the film
director Taylor Hackford remembers the first time he head him reading; he
was presented by Lawrence Ferlinghetti, one of the founding Beats, at
Ferlinghetti's City Lights Bookstore in San Francisco -- where to this day
you can find a shelf of Bukowski, most of it with the bold Black Sparrow
lettering on the spine.
John Martin, the publisher, says he offered Bukowski a monthly stipend to
live on, with the condition that he quit his job at the post office. One of
his first novels was Post Office, a snarl at the daily torture of hard work
under stupid bureaucrats. It snarled, yes, but it also sang, and was
romantic and funny. It came directly from Bukowski's life, as did such
autobiographical novels as Women and Hollywood.
The Hollywood book was inspired by his experiences when his Barfly was
adapted into a movie starring Mickey Rourke and Faye Dunaway. He didn't like
the movie much -- he thought Rourke was a "showoff." I thought it was a good
movie and wondered if part of his dislike was because he was played by a
handsome man who had never suffered the agonies of being Charles Bukowski.
It is probably also true that in his barfly days he was rarely fortunate
enough to be the lover of a woman who looked like Faye Dunaway.
On the set one day, Dunaway turned up to question him, doing research on the
character she would play.
"This woman," she asked him "What would she put under her pillow?"
"A rosary."
"What sort of perfume did she wear?"
He looked at her incredulously.
"Perfume?"
I can testify to the way his life became his fiction, because the day I
spent on the set of the movie became part Hollywood, and the movie critic in
the book is a fair enough portrait of me. Central to his fiction and poetry
was his lifelong love-hate relationship with women; by the time his fame
began to attract groupies, he complains, "it was too late."
The movie is valuable because it provides a face and a voice to go with the
work. Ten years have passed since Bukowski's death, and he seems likely to
last, if not forever, then longer than many of his contemporaries. He
outsells Kerouac and Kesey, and his poems, it almost goes with saying,
outsell any other modern poet on the shelf.
How much was legend, how much was pose, how much was real? I think it was
all real, and the documentary suggests as much. There were no shields
separating the real Bukowski, the public Bukowski and the autobiographical
hero of his work. They were all the same man. Maybe that's why his work
remains so immediate and affecting: The wounded man is the man who writes,
and the wounds he writes about are his own.
Copyright © Chicago Sun-Times Inc.
----------------------------------------------------------------------------
-----
"Some people never go crazy, what truly horrible lives they must lead."
Check out: http://www.runwiththehunted.com
----------------------------------------------------------------------------
--------------------------------------------------
Sun-Times 16 July 2004
Bukowski was blessed, as if to compensate for everything else, with the most
beautiful smile. It was, as more than one woman probably told him, his best
feature. When he was not smiling he was craggy at best; when he was angry he
was unlovely. His early years, punctuated by regular beatings from his
father, were scarred by acne so disfiguring, it left him with a face pitted
like the surface of the moon. He told a friend about standing outside his
school prom -- he didn't dare to ask a girl to be his date -- with his
pimply face wrapped in toilet paper, holes cut for the eyes, blood seeping
through.
He was 24 when he had sex for the first time. She was a 300-pound
prostitute. He remembers her name. As he tells the story, he does an
extraordinary thing. He blushes. Here was a man who made a living and became
a legend by being hard-boiled, and he blushes, and in that moment we glimpse
the lonely, wounded little boy inside.
John Dullaghan's "Bukowski: Born Into This" is a documentary about the poet
and novelist who died in 1994. It draws from many interviews, from footage
of poetry readings, and from the testimony of his friends, who include Sean
Penn, Harry Dean Stanton, Bono and the publisher John Martin, who started
the Black Sparrow Press specifically to publish his work. There are also the
memories of his wife, Linda Lee Bukowski, who loved him and cared for him,
despite scenes like one in the film where he kicks her and curses at her.
That was the booze talking, you could say, except when precisely was
Bukowski sober? He drank with dedication and abandon for most of his adult
years, slowed only by illness toward the end. And he chain-smoked little
cigarettes named Mangalore Ganeesh Beedies. "You can get them in any Indian
or Pakistani store," he told me in 1987. "They're what the poor, poor people
smoke in India. I like them because they contain no chemicals and no
nicotine, and they go very well with red wine."
Linda Lee Bukowski, it must be said, possessed extraordinary patience to put
up with him, but then she understood him, and his life was often as simple
as that: A plea for understanding. I sense from his work and from a long day
spent with him that even when he was drunk and angry, obscene and hurtful,
he was not the aggressor; he was fighting back.
The movie opens with Bukowski on a stage for a reading, very drunk,
threatening to come down into the audience and kick some ass. There is
another reading where, backstage, he asks the organizer, "You got a little
pot on the stage I can vomit in?" He drank most every day, red wine for
preference, and his routine usually included a visit to the track, a return
home, and long hours at his typewriter with classical music on the radio.
For all of his boozing, he was, like the prodigious Thomas Wolfe, amazingly
productive.
He wrote poems as if the words were bricks to be laid. He cut through the
labyrinthine indulgent difficulty of much modern verse, and wrote poems
anyone could understand. Yet they were poems, real poems, and the film
director Taylor Hackford remembers the first time he head him reading; he
was presented by Lawrence Ferlinghetti, one of the founding Beats, at
Ferlinghetti's City Lights Bookstore in San Francisco -- where to this day
you can find a shelf of Bukowski, most of it with the bold Black Sparrow
lettering on the spine.
John Martin, the publisher, says he offered Bukowski a monthly stipend to
live on, with the condition that he quit his job at the post office. One of
his first novels was Post Office, a snarl at the daily torture of hard work
under stupid bureaucrats. It snarled, yes, but it also sang, and was
romantic and funny. It came directly from Bukowski's life, as did such
autobiographical novels as Women and Hollywood.
The Hollywood book was inspired by his experiences when his Barfly was
adapted into a movie starring Mickey Rourke and Faye Dunaway. He didn't like
the movie much -- he thought Rourke was a "showoff." I thought it was a good
movie and wondered if part of his dislike was because he was played by a
handsome man who had never suffered the agonies of being Charles Bukowski.
It is probably also true that in his barfly days he was rarely fortunate
enough to be the lover of a woman who looked like Faye Dunaway.
On the set one day, Dunaway turned up to question him, doing research on the
character she would play.
"This woman," she asked him "What would she put under her pillow?"
"A rosary."
"What sort of perfume did she wear?"
He looked at her incredulously.
"Perfume?"
I can testify to the way his life became his fiction, because the day I
spent on the set of the movie became part Hollywood, and the movie critic in
the book is a fair enough portrait of me. Central to his fiction and poetry
was his lifelong love-hate relationship with women; by the time his fame
began to attract groupies, he complains, "it was too late."
The movie is valuable because it provides a face and a voice to go with the
work. Ten years have passed since Bukowski's death, and he seems likely to
last, if not forever, then longer than many of his contemporaries. He
outsells Kerouac and Kesey, and his poems, it almost goes with saying,
outsell any other modern poet on the shelf.
How much was legend, how much was pose, how much was real? I think it was
all real, and the documentary suggests as much. There were no shields
separating the real Bukowski, the public Bukowski and the autobiographical
hero of his work. They were all the same man. Maybe that's why his work
remains so immediate and affecting: The wounded man is the man who writes,
and the wounds he writes about are his own.
Copyright © Chicago Sun-Times Inc.
----------------------------------------------------------------------------
-----
"Some people never go crazy, what truly horrible lives they must lead."
Check out: http://www.runwiththehunted.com
----------------------------------------------------------------------------
--------------------------------------------------