Who would want to be such an asshole?

I know I'm not alone in the fact that Charles Bukowski is one of the few writers I consider a hero: it's probably the fact that I'm male, white, and go through long bouts of self-doubt, hatred of other people, and I'm pretty unromantic about everything. Two well-done films have actually come out of Bukowski work, which follows his fictional doppleganger named Henry Chinaski.

Barfly (1987)


Bukowski penned the screenplay of this cult classic, in which Mickey Rourke perfectly channels the Bukowski persona: a dark, brooding, shallow drunk who's completely void of the self-conscious, civilized manner that makes people "nice." The thing I love about this film is that it perfectly captures the details of drinking to no end. My favorite scene is when Chinaski grabs the sandwich from some overweight guy in a suit, for the reason that he needs the nutrients to win a fight against some butch bartender.

Barfly by night, classical music-listening writer by day - this is Rourke's finest moment. Another reason to check out the film is for a sighting of the fine actor and David Lynch favorite Jack Nance.

Now onto my next favorite,
Factotum (2005)


This one I actually got to see in the theaters, and enjoyed greatly. I remember my girlfriend saying that it was too bleak, but I didn't really agree. Yes, Bukowski is a dark road, but at the same time, there's no pretensions or face-fronting: he's showing how the other half-lives.

Matt Dillion is great, and actually looks more like Bukowski than I would have expected. He's got good looks, but at the same time his sexuality is a throw back to the beat generation. Overall, I prefer Barfly to this for a number of reasons. Barfly was a conglomeration of the Chinaski charachter from all the books; Factotum is an actual adaptation of a single Bukowski books. It's faithful, but the style that director Bent Hamer uses reflects a Jim Jarmusch aesthetic: let the camera roll, no flashy stuff. This seems like a perfect match, but it's too dry and lacks the quirky humor. Parts of the novel are toned down, like when Chinaski supposedly kills a man at the horse races; the book being told in first person by Chinaski, we see more of his guilt. Here, Dillion plays it cool.

The best scene from the film is when Chinaski wakes up and vomits, then decides it's time to move on. A great long take; someone else apparently agrees and has it up at youtube:



When ever I feel like shit, or an underachiever, or like the world doesn't give a damn whether I live or die, or like I'm a lazy no good unprofessional bum, I pick up some Bukowski and at least find the comfort that someone else took the breaks and the blues just as hard.

For those wanting to hear the man recite his poetry, check out this cd:


Bukowksi Reads His Poetry to an audience on September 14, 1972 in San Francisco. AllMusic.com doesn't rate this one highly, but during the summer I spent many a night on the back lawn drinking a beer listening to Bukowski rant and get heckled by a fiesty crowd. Get it here.

So this ad was asking me, "Want to fly to CANNES with Spike Lee?"  And I was like, do I have to sit with him?  I mean, I'm sure he's a nice guy, but that's a really long flight to take with Spike Lee. What are we going to talk about?  I mean, does he really want to hear about how my sister's doing, or about my worries of finding a job in the future, not to mention my concern about that mole on my back?

No, all we're going to talk about is all of the amazing movies he's made, and how amazing that scene is from such and such a movie, and what's it like to work with Denzel?  He's a normal guy? Really!!?

 

So, you see, shouldn't the real question be: 

Mad blunts? Hmmm.... Yes, that I might do - at least then I might be able to connect that mole on my back to some question of gender and race identity in a supposedly post-race America.

Peace.

Boredom is a self-inflicted disease

For anyone that has every made something that, at the time, seemed clever, witty, original, whatever; for anyone that has created only to realize the next day, or week, or month, that what they made was actually pretty stupid, embarasing, waste of time: it is for they that I present this document:

My first foray into the You Tube world of silly shorts resulted in this lackluster snooze fest.  So what have I learned?  Well, that being funny probably requires a little more thought before jumping into creation.  Also, that my room is a real shit pigpen.

Do I see any value?  I would like to do more work that makes fun of myself.  It seems to have an edifying effect: I now take showers more often (joke or reality?  You decide.)

Dylan on my Mind

So I play guitar. I don't write music, I play a wooden microphone with six strings, and I play it like I hate the goddamn thing. My real motivation for playing guitar: I hate punching things. Punching walls, punching pillows, punching bags. Stupid, stupid, stupid, nothing good comes out of it. But pick up a guitar, and all of a sudden, boom, the arm goes wild, the sounds are violent, the banging, the mess. Disgusting sounds, sounds unearthly.

Truth is, I just recently stopped caring what other people think of my work. Certainly, I am willing to admit that an idea I originally thought had value, is really complete garbage. So, with music, I might write lyrics - except, I never write lyrics. I hate lyrics, actually to be honest. Clarification: I hate reading lyrics. It's like when people perform poetry as though each line is suppose to be read like a period. The thing needs to flow, but without those chord, it's shit.

Here's a way to get to the core of something - create epic battles between two artists who represents two sides of the same side of a line.

Bob Dylan Vs. Leonard Cohen

Cohen wins for me. That probably identifies me with the hipster crowd. But I actually like Phil Ochs more than either, for personal reasons. Back to Cohen vs. Dylan: Both are indulgent, ego-centric, wild drug addicts and junkies for words. Why do I return to Cohen with more interest than Dylan?

The simple answer would be that Cohen is more obscure, but that's a cop-out really. I think Cohen never gained the kind of popularity of Dylan because the latter could really write a meaningless pop song that seemed to mean something. Take Rolling Stone, a song that makes me jump out of my skin, like I just want to start banging shit together and run in circles. It's got the best rock structure, because you're waiting for that moment when the things going to explode. And BANG! BANG! BANG! - boom there it is, the organism hits and we're floating for a little bit.

But the lyrics I could take or leave. Sure, there's craft, but I think it's all rhythm, Dylan's delivery. Cohen's different. He's a black-and-white film, but his words carry more. I have mediated on the song Suzanne for hours, thinking about oranges from China and the mind-body divide. What's it about - a ghost, a spirit, an intangible notion of love that's all peace, all tenderness, like those moments in a Fassbinder film where the characters are genuinely happy.

But happiness is not always fun, and Cohen is not nearly as much fun as Dylan. Dylan's a folk comedian who really can't stand being taken seriously, beyond a performer. I think that Cohen knows that those lines, a performer versus an artist or politician, someone that should really be listened to and celebrated, are all really just imaginary. Watch the press conference with Dylan: it's a joke on the society that wants to take meaning from his silly songs that are just vocal images for emotional effect. Songwriters are all about emotion - the highs, the lows, the in-between that really has no name, and so on.

But Cohen has a different quality. His images are cropped. Except maybe Dress Rehearsal Rag, which I love, but you could fault it for Cohen letting his morbid side get the best of him.

"Just relax man, take a chill pill. It's not that serious." Or maybe it really is that serious.

Too quote a Replacement song that I love:

I think big once in a while. - Thinking big to me is a Cohen song, while Dylan is more of the man himself - the character of Bob Dylan, mystery apostle, saint, idol, a man beyond a single man, a transcendent figure that pushes the boundaries of a single body. There is the flesh of Dylan, and that spirit of Dylan, and the two are not the same thing.

May 6th, 2008 - Todd Haynes fittingly all-over-the-map bio pic of Dylan drops on DVD. This post did have a purpose after all.

The Pee-wee Herman Show

When I was a kid, I did the Pee-wee Herman dance. I bent my legs, spread them apart at strange angles, and put my hands stiffly towards my back. And then did this in and out. It's hard to describe:

'

Perhaps the greatest musical episode in film? I don't know. It probably means more to me than most, just because Pee-wee was an obsessive part of my early childhood (I still have my Pee-wee's Playhouse sheets, and they are pretty rad: kid friendly abstract expressionism.)

So every kid who grew up in the late eighties, early ninties is familiar with Pee Wee, probably through either the Saturday morning show Pee Wee's Playhouse, and maybe also from the cult classic film, Pee Wee Herman's Big Adventure. But the Pee Wee character has a long history before that, and something more attuned to performance art than simply silly comedy.

Not going to go into this history now, but I am going to provide some context. There are two seminal points for the Pee Wee character that are available to wide audiences: the Roxy Theatre performance that was taped for HBO in the early eighties, and then the series of appearances he did on David Letterman The Late Night Show, which in my opinion was the avant-garde of late night shows in the eighties. Letterman had guests like Harvey Pekar, Andy Kaufman, and Crispin Glover - mostly to make fun of them, but they really owe him for their popular success. It's a strange contradiction probably, with a late night show poking fun at his eccentric guests to get laughs, but still, I sense that Letterman understood what they were up to and appreciated it, but at the same time he had to play the straight, ego-centric man.

Which brings me back to this whole notion of performance - the seventies really pushed the boundaries of stand-up to a level outside the realm of punch lines and straight jokes. Source it to Lenny Bruce, but Kaufman and Paul Reubens were radical in the sense that the joke never ended. The realm between the real and the joke, the imaginary-playful thing and the reality where people's feelings get hurt, were completely disregarded. Kaufman could be the sweetest, or he could a real asshole, wrestling women.

But Pee Wee, when it began, was similar. Check out this clip:



Very very naughty boy, that Pee Wee. But the whole thing is that, at the end of the show, they follow that woman out into the streets. Pee Wee wanted people to think that she was actually hypnotized: he was in a sense taking on the role of the magician. And there really is some supernatural performance about this Pee Wee creation being live, that you would go to a comedy club and see something as ingenious as this in a real, living setting.

Anyone wanting to rent it or buy this Pee Wee classic, look up:
The Pee-Wee Herman Show - Live at the Roxy Theater (1982)
or click on it to buy it at amazon.

The Films of Chris Farley: Or How I am Inarticulate

A poem for Chris Farley

Remember that film
you did
about the ninja.

That was awesome.

Remember that scene
with Gary Busey
He's an assassin.
Or something.

That was awesome too.

End of poem


If you read old reviews of Chris Farley's film in the NY Times, it's apparent that he was not valued for his comic gift. Stupid, stupid, stupid is pretty much the idea behind their reviews, which I can completely understand. The most immediate response to a Chris Farley movie would have to be, "It's pretty dumb." But at the same time, Farley is dead, and like Andy Kaufman (the cult/terrible Heartbeeps being the only real example of his film work), seeing him in his movies is to revisit a human being. I'm writing this with the idea that I watch a Farley flick like some people watch experimental theater. I'm less interested in the plot mechanics or subtle characterization or notions of pacing. I watch a Farley film to see Farley move, to see him fall, to see his spastic frame lumber and explode, and for his dead-pan delivery. And I would never want to see any of this in the ciniplex, because Farley is really a tv actor. His over-the-top antics works well on the small screen, because he dominates the space.

A few months ago I revisited some documents that I almost wished were destroyed. They are recordings of musical plays I did in junior high; the real angle is that I did these musicals at my church. They are youth group church plays, terribly written, and some of the most horrid music you will every hear. The only good part is the dancing, which has us doing a kind of vamped-up square dance with random hand gestures. Anyway, in one of these plays, I had a part as a chunky loser who eats too much but loves god. And I totally mimicked Farley, exploding at random like I lived in a van down by the river. And I realized that Farley was an iconic means of communication for me. I wanted to convey to the audience, in my limited acting vocab, that this is who the part really should be played by. So, in a sense, Farley wasn't merely a comic; he was a medium of expression. A way to connect.

There's something else though. There are emotions, generic things like laughter, and sadness, and so on. But then there's these ideas I can't say, and something in Farley, besides, "Oh year, hilarious." It's like some form of stupidity that is so good, and better than a lot of the intellectual pretensions and hypocrisies and pure cynicism that we have to face.

Farley never really made a good film, but I argue like Pauline Kael: this is trash not meant to be art, and sometimes that the greatest relief of all.

Peter Grimes Lives in My Basement

So I spent my spring break mildly depressed and sleep depraved. But beyond these silly suicidal theatrics, I managed to score free tickets to a live high definition broadcast of a Met Opera. I'm a loser of the squared degree, but I was well tuned for the occasion, and blown away by an opera that my tiny mind can only partially compute.

Walking out of Peter Grimes, I was struck at how desperate and bleak a thing I'd just seen. The darkness of the opera had swallowed me, and the brightness of the food court was like coming to the surface too quickly. All of the noise and people were too much; I wanted to scream, and for Benjamin Britten's piercing score to pour out my mouth, shaking the souls of the people eating their fast food. But alas, the only way out is down: for me, the escalators, but for Grimes, a death that plunged him into the deep giant abyss that surrounds our lives. And there is no hope, only the fatal delusion that we can change it.

Maybe I'm being a bit too grim for my own good, because the fatalism of Grime's libretto is offset by a score that is as alive as the sea, rising, breaking, and shattering the nerves like the worse case of sea-sickness. It almost acts as a substitute for that very object that can't ever be recreated, only represented through metaphors, but none so mystically as the music that Britten has given us. The way the chorals collide, climaxing at frantic nail-bitting peaks, and somewhere in between the thing becomes so stark that the shades of light that make it through the blinds are a welcomed relief. And Britten has given those moments, those visions and dreams of love, prosperity. No matter that Grimes is lost from the start, because we ourselves are lost in that great bottomless mystery, struggling to surface the truths that might save or destroy us.


The work of Dickens and Poe, Melville's Moby Dick, and Crane's the Open Boat all are evoked by the nihilism of Grimes, but I am never one to mistake darkness with absurdity. Somewhere at the root of Grimes is a mirror reflecting the heart of madness, the dark soul, a product of a society that has lost it's community. Perhaps Britten's Grimes is most frightening because it reflects our sex-obsessed, hypocritical age. Torn by ideals lost, ravaged by hatred, we live on the threads of a better future, but are meanwhile so reckless in our actions that all may be lost. When there is no longer a core, a vision for the future, society may drift recklessly till it's upended by the tides of a perilous age.


As for the broadcast itself, I think it's peculiar that this is perhaps the most exciting thing going on in theaters today. While the audience was mostly the elderly, there was a vibrancy in the theater that cannot be mistaken for some slick Hollywood machine. There was actually discussion going on during the fifteen minute intermissions, people trying to formulate and articulate their feelings for this archaic art form. And to be as close to the flutist, and to see the sweat drip off of the maestro's face, these are visions that echo the dramatic qualities of the music itself.