I would love to have had a drink with late legendary old dipsomaniac Chuck Buck, just to see what the crack was. His drink-drowned musings really connected with me when I was in my late teens/very early 20s, 15 or so years ago. Even though I am now older and slightly wiser and have moved away from what I was into wordwork-wise back then to a degree, I still like some of his stuff and still think it would have been cool to sit down and have a bevvy with the cynical mistrustful truthful old misanthrope. And I know many people share this view, as Bukowski's reputation continues to spread and he continues to inspire generation after degeneration of wannabe-alcoholics and poetry writers. Which, of course, is not entirely a good thing, but, well, why shoot the messenger for the quality of the work of the annoying clinging-to-the-bar-and-his-words adherents of the man's?

As we all know, none of us is ever going to get the chance to buy the man a pint now, as he died in 1994. But to give us a taste of what it would have been like as the booze and conversation flowed with the LA lowlife wordslinger we still have ‘The Bukowski Tapes.’ Around the start of the 80s French director Barbet Schroeder went out to Hollywood intent on making a film of a Bukowski script. The result was the 1987 Mickey Rourke movie 'Barfly,' whose strange chaotic adventurous journey to the silver screen would be immortalized by the writer in his excellent 1989 novel 'Hollywood,' where stars like Sean Penn, Dennis Hopper, David Lynch and more parade past Bukowski's unflinchingly, unsparingly honest eyes and pen, modesties spared only by the slight changing of their names in the text.

Whilst researching the movie, Schroeder spent endless evenings drinking with Bukowski. Eventually he said he “couldn't bear” to let the time he spent with the irreverent bitter painfully shy old bastard go undocumented and turned on a camera. The result can be viewed here in ‘The Bukowski Tapes,’ which consist of four hours split into 52 segments where the poet mostly monologues on every subject under the sun (some of the segments being a couple of clips edited together as they encompass the same subject), with occasional prompting interview interjections by Schroeder and appearances by the woman Bukowski married who would be his last wife, Linda Lee (whom he drunkenly kicks off a couch in one clip, threatening to have her evicted as she is “out every night” and, when she replies that she isn't, he replies “You lied right to their faces, you cunt.” Very subtle, but absolutely real, stuff).

I would imagine this thing is still available somewhere online (got a copy sent to me from a Canadian friend - thanks Blaine), but I suppose its name should be changed to ‘The Bukowski DVDs’ now. The legendary drunk sits with a sucked-on bottle stuck into his scarred craggy face in most clips (often Beck's, appropriate for a man born in Germany) and tells story after story (all the Bukowski staples are present and politically incorrect: women, booze, the racetrack, etc) of varying lengths and impacts, many of which will be very familiar to knowledgeable readers of his work.

Nevertheless, it's interesting to see him walking around places like his childhood home where he was beaten by his father overcome by emotion, voice quiet and direct as he relates the horrible physical abuse he underwent. We see him being driven round his favourite Hollywood haunts, musing brightly on hookers and pimps and crazy street people, clearly in love with the streets. We also see him doing a poetry reading or two from a book or typed page. Personally, I never liked most of his poetry too much, thinking it just got pumped out endlessly regardless of quality when he knew he had an audience who would buy it and a publisher who would put it out in John Martin with Black Sparrow Press, but, well, you might get a kick out of it, who knows.

As I said, the vast majority of stuff presented here will be instantly recognizable to those who have read the red wine raconteur's many books, and thus is a bit too familiar to be entirely interesting. But occasional stories, like Bukowski riffing on being an isolated, hatefilled youth during WWII and getting off on Mexican gangs who attacked American sailors, are not quite so recognizable as him talking about starving in a shack to write or whatnot. It's interesting to see him talk still-bitterly and somewhat creepily of being alienated from the rest of the country during the war, completely out of patriotic (goose) step, and for somebody of German birth that's hardly surprising.

I have to confess these days I find Bukowski's gruff throaty rumblings about 'whores' and whatnot to be a bit staged and false and tedious. Reading his epistolary text 'Beerspit Night And Cursing' (and watching some of the clips here), the book of letters he wrote to long-term correspondent Sheri Martinelli, you realize he was obviously a much more cultured and intelligent person than he presented himself as being, and it's obvious he was presenting a well-constructed destructive image of himself as drunk and misogynist when there was clearly more going on in him than he was letting on.

Some of Bukowski's well-thought-through musings during the running time about stuff like religion and humanity are, quite simply, genius. It's funny that there are no clips talking about his daughter Marina Louise, because the stories he wrote about her in 'Tales of Ordinary Madness' encompass some of the most beautiful, tender, sensitive writing he ever did. But maybe he just wanted to keep that stuff private, who knows.

Genuine emotional omissions aside, this is definitely worth watching, and I got myself a few cans as I watched and drank along, raising a toast in agreement with certain agreeable points, which is fun to do because after a while your memories of things get hazy and you can watch the thing again and get twice the value out of it, which is also a benefit of reading drunk(ish) too. Upon watching, I think you would find yourself raising a glass or two to a man who, despite his faults and hermetic misanthropy, would have been a deeply stimulating, inspirational, thought-provoking drinking companion. So, in closing, I'll leave you with a few random musings from the 'Tapes' to be going on with until you can find it yourself:

On nature: ‘Nature doesn't give a fuck, man! I give a fuck!’

On people: ‘Most human beings just aren't worth a shit.’

On female groupies/girlfriends: ‘All of them have come to see me and they try to change me. They wanna show me the happy life, they want to - But you see, I didn't ask them to come by. They're trying to save me. They're interested in the evilness in my writing, if I can use that term, of the difference, and that's what attracts them. The moment they meet me they try to change me into them, which is not evil or interesting or anything at all. So I resent that and try to revolt to it and I make it an unhappiness. But I don't come to them, they come to me. So then, we have problems.’

On the end of 'The Bukowski Tapes': ‘Now I gotta piss’,

And then the poet
gets up and
the screen
fades to a
bleak
black
blank
as he
disappears
forever
never
to come back to
buy another
round.

Graham Rae is a Scottish scribbler from the cheery charming picture-postcard-perfect post-industrial up-and-coming internationally renowned tourist destination of Falkirk, now resident in the US. He has been writing for as long as he can remember (started at any early age, carving graffiti into womb walls) and am halfway through my first novel (well, third, but the other mishmash misfires don’t count),’ Weekend Warriors.’ He has been writing about film for various electronic and print publications for 18 years now, and you can see a sporadically entertaining eclectic selection of his ramble/rantings at www.filmthreat.com

© 2006 Laura Hird All rights reserved.