“This is probably a poem that you may not like…anyhow…”
If you’re too broke or cheap to see the new Charles Bukowski biopic, Born Into This, at your local arthouse theater, you can check out a rarely-seen reading by the late L.A. poet of the lowlife on this no-frills DVD from Eclectic. Bukowski isn’t at the notorious asylum (though it probably wouldn’t be much of a surprise if he were), but rather at Bellevue Community College in Washington state circa 1970; the hour-long reading was videotaped by students and apparently had gone MIA for about twenty years. Dressed in a work shirt and black slacks and looking like the postal worker he was for so long, Bukowski reads a dozen poems in a droning, drowsy voice that amusingly springs to life when he’s giving voice to the hard-scrabble characters that populate his poems, like a dippy hippie chick he wants to ball (“Soup, Cosmos and Tears”) or a short-fused lesbian (in “The Lesbian,” natch). Bellevue isn’t riveting entertainment; in addition to Bukowski’s tone, the camera is largely locked on him for long, static takes, and the grainy image appears to freeze on numerous occasions, so only the most diehard Bukowski fans will consider this disc a must-have. But for the curious and the patient, it’s a rare opportunity to see this larger-than-life figure reading his own work, which naturally touches on the subjects and themes that ran throughout his massive body of writing: love, sex, loneliness, art, the absurdity of everyday life, and the rare snatches of beauty that can be glimpsed if one waits and watches for long enough, preferably from the comfort of a favorite barstool. Bukowski also throws out a few choice off-the-cuff comments in between poems (“You can do without a woman, but you can’t do without a typewriter”; “I’m no more anti-lesbian than I’m anti-shoe…or anti-whiskey”), all of which will ring like pennies from heaven in the ears of hardcore CB devotees. Again, Bukowski at Bellevue is more archival footage than entertainment, but for hard-boiled lit-heads, there’s a deep and frosty cup of comfort in the hard-scrabble words recorded here.
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