facinating

mickey made a great comeback.

Drowning in a sea of booze, 100 things you did not know about Bukowski.

1.Henry Charles Bukowski Jr. was born on August 16, 1920, in Andernach, Germany.
2.Charles Bukowski claimed a great affinity with the hobos who rode the rails during the ’30s and ’40s, but he never rode a boxcar nor hitchhiked in his life.
3.Shortly after his first chapbook, Flower, Fist and Bestial Wail, was published in 1960, Bukowski attempted suicide by gassing himself in his room, but quickly changed his mind.
4.According to friends, Bukowski suffered from one of the world’s worst cases of hemorrhoids, evident by the tubes of Preparation-H always visible in his waste basket.
5.Bukowski refused to admit he was an alcoholic since, on occasion, he could refrain from drinking for up to a day.
6.The first word Bukowski’s daughter, Marina, learned to read was "liquor" since Hank spent so much of his leisure time in a drunken stupor.
7.Bukowski often denounced the ’60s drug culture, but friends remember him smoking marijuana, taking uppers and downers, and on one occasion, dropping acid.
8.In his weekly column in the periodical Open City, "Notes from a Dirty Old Man," Bukowski often spread untruths about acquaintances that he felt had betrayed him, in the process trashing a number of close friendships.
9.After a young poet Bukowski had befriended drank himself to death, Hank tried to seduce his grieving widow.
10.Bukowski was known as the “poet laureate of the gutter,” but he never lived a day in Los Angeles' skid-row district.
11.Although Bukowski wrote about being “down and out,” he actually held a job with the U.S. Postal Service for about 12 years.
12.Stories of Bukowski's drinking bouts are legendary, but some of his closest friends claim to have caught him “nursing” beers.
13.The great love of Bukowski's life, Jane Cooney Baker, was a widowed alcoholic 11 years his senior with an immense beer belly. She served as the model for “Wanda” in the 1987 Bukowski-scripted film Barfly.
14.Although Bukowski often boasted of his sexual prowess, there were long stretches of his life when he couldn't get laid “in a morgue.”
15.The self-proclaimed “barfly” lived out his later years in a ranch-style house in San Pedro, California, with an attractive young wife 24 years his junior, expensive German wines on the rack and a BMW in the driveway.
16.Before devoting himself entirely to writing, Bukowski worked various dead-end jobs, including as a laborer in a dog biscuit factory, a parking lot attendant, stock boy, warehouseman, red cross orderly, elevator operator, poster hanger in New York City subways, shipping clerk, postal clerk and postal carrier.
17.Bukowski had a beer with Neal Cassady, the hero of Jack Kerouac’s novel On the Road, just weeks before Cassady died in Mexico of a drug overdose.
18.During one of their almost daily fights, Bukowski accused his girlfriend, Linda King, of having sex with a blind priest.
19.Bukowski once confronted Allen Ginsberg at a poetry reading and told him “[E]verybody knows that after ‘Howl’ you never wrote anything worth a shit.”
20.At the age of 23, Bukowski finally lost his virginity to an overweight whore in Philadelphia.
21.The screenplay for Barfly [1987] was originally called The Rats of Thirst.
22.Other films based on Bukowski’s work include Tales of Ordinary Madness (1983 - Italian), Love is a Dog from Hell (1987 - Belgium) and Walls in the City (1995).
23.Bukowski once described his father as “[A] cruel shiny bastard with bad breath . . .”
24.Love is a Dog from Hell (1987), was adapted from several Bukowski short stories, mainly "The Copulating Mermaid of Venice, California."
25.Bukowski listed the following movies as his favorites: Eraserhead, One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest, The Elephant Man, Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? and All Quiet on the Western Front.
26.Some of Bukowski’s most original poem titles include “the night I fucked my alarm clock,” “i have shit stains in my underwear too,” “a 340 dollar horse and a hundred dollar whore,“ “note to a lady who expected rupert brooke,” “the history of a tough motherfucker,” “ass but no class,” “ants crawl my drunken arms,” “to the whore who took my poems,” “eating my senior citizen’s dinner at the Sizzler” and “i taste the ashes of your death.”
27.Bukowski often plied a derelict friend of his known as “Red Strange” or “Kid Red” with beer and encouraged him to relate his wildest stories, many of which ended up in Bukowski’s own poems and short stories.
28.On Personal Hygiene: “Nothing is worse than to finish a good shit, then reach over and find the toilet paper container empty. Even the most horrible human being on earth deserves to wipe his ass.” —Factotum, Black Sparrow Press, 1975
29.Bukowski’s first wife, Barbara Frye, suffered a physical deformity - two vertebrae were missing from her neck, giving the impression that “she was permanently hunching her shoulders.” After a little over two years of marriage in the late 1950s, she filed for divorce, accusing him of “mental cruelty.”
30.In his novel, Hollywood, Bukowski refers to the movie Barfly as The Dance of Jim Beam.
31.On Little Magazines: “Little magazines are useless perpetuators of useless talent. Back in the ’20s and ’30s there was not an abundance of littles. A little magazine was an event, not a calamity.” --Small Press Review, May 1973
32.Bukowski’s first published short story, "Aftermath of a Lengthy Rejection Slip," appeared in the March-April issue of Story magazine, 1944.
33.On Work: “It was true that I didn’t have much ambition, but there ought to be a place for people without ambition, I mean a better place than the one usually reserved. How in the hell could a man enjoy being awakened at 6:30 a.m. by an alarm clock, leap out of bed, dress, force-feed, shit, piss, brush teeth and hair, and fight traffic to get to a place where essentially you made lots of money for somebody else and were asked to be grateful for the opportunity to do so?” --Factotum, Black Sparrow Press, 1975 34.Bukowski made a habit of compulsively taking four or five baths every day.
35.“The school idiot always gravitated to me. Ya know, the fucked up guy who was cross-eyed and wore the wrong kind of clothes and was always going around stepping in dog shit. If there was a pile of dog shit within ten miles, this guy would manage to step in it. So I sort of disdained him but somehow he’d wind up being my buddy. We’d sit around eating our pitiful peanut-butter sandwiches and watching the other kids play their games.” —quoted in Rolling Stone, June 17, 1976
36.Bukowski smoked Indian cigarettes called Mangalore Ganeesh Beedies.
37.In its obituary of the “poet laureate of skid row,” the Los Angeles Times ( or was it The New York Post?) used a photo of Mickey Rourke as Henry Chinaski in Barfly instead of a photo of Bukowski.
38.Bukowski’s literary influences included Conrad Aiken, Sherwood Anderson (Winesburg, Ohio), Louis Ferdinand Celine, Catullus, Fyodor Dostoevsky (Notes from the Underground), John Fante (Ask the Dust), Knut Hamsun (Hunger), Ernest Hemingway (early writings), Robinson Jeffers (long poems), Ezra Pound and James Thurber.
39.On The Beat Generation: “Now, the original Beats, as much as they were knocked, had the Idea. But they were flanked and overwhelmed by fakes, guys with nicely clipped beards, lonely-hearts looking for free ass, limelighters, rhyming poets, homosexuals, bums, sightseers - the same thing that killed the Village. Art can’t operate in Crowds. Art does not belong at parties, nor does it belong at Inauguration Speeches.” —letter to Jon Webb, 1962, in Screams from the Balcony, Black Sparrow Press, 1993
40.Black Sparrow Press publisher John Martin was best man at Bukowski’s wedding to Linda Lee Beighle.
41.On Henry Miller: “He's okay when he's writing about fucking, but when he gets philosophical, I fall asleep.” —interview by Fernanda Pivano, Charles Bukowski: Laughing With the Gods, Sun Dog Press, 2000
42.One of Bukowski’s favorite cars was a blue ’67 Volkswagen.
43.On Skid Row: “Those guys down there [in skid row] had no problems with women, income tax, landlords, burial expenses, dentists, time payments, car repairs, or with climbing into a voting booth and pulling the curtain closed.” [Factotum, 1975]
44.Barbet Schroeder first read Bukowski while directing Koko the Talking Gorilla.
45.Bukowski once called Celine’s Journey to the End of the Night the greatest book ever written.
46.On Rejection Slips: “And rejections are no hazard; they are better than gold. Just think what type of miserable cancer you would be today if all your works had been accepted.” [Letter to Jory Sherman, April 1, 1960, included in Screams from the Balcony, 1993]
47.Bukowski’s second wife, Linda Lee Beighle, once owned a health food restaurant called the Dewdrop Inn.
48.Paul Peditto’s play, Buk: The Life and Times of Charles Bukowski, premiered in the fall of 1991 at the Live Bait Theater in Chicago.
49.On Short Stories: “I do not believe in writing a short story unless it crawls out of the walls. I watch the walls daily but very little happens.” [Letter to Ann Bauman, May 21, 1962, in Screams from the Balcony, 1993]
50.“The first movie that had an impact on me, that made me cry, was All Quiet on the Western Front. The scene with the butterfly got me.” —Film Comment interview, 1987
51.On Hemingway: “Hem had style and genius that went with it, for a little while, then he tottered, rotted, but was man enough, finally, and had style enough, finally.” [Letter to Neeli Cherry, 1962, in Screams from the Balcony, 1993]
52.Bukowski once published an extremely short-lived little magazine called Laugh Literary and Man the Humping Guns.
53.On Drinking: “Frankly, I was horrified by life, at what a man had to do simply in order to eat, sleep, and keep himself clothed. So I stayed in bed and drank. When you drank the world was still out there, but for the moment it didn’t have you by the throat.” [Factotum, 1975]
54.Director Barbet Schroeder taped a 4-hour compilation of interviews with Bukowski in preparation for the filming of Barfly. In The Bukowski Tapes (1987), Bukowski pontificates on such topics as growing up with his tyrannical father, Philadelphia bars, East Hollywood, drugs vs. alcohol, talk shows, Elizabeth Taylor, zoot suiters, Red Strange, racetracks, Henry Miller and menial factory jobs.
55.On Movies: “Want me to name [my favorite films]? One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest, Elephant Man, Eraserhead, Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? - that’s a classic. [Akira] Kurosawa and those great battle scenes. And all those great samurai films where guys are chopping heads off.” (Film Comment interview, 1987)
56.Bukowski’s only child, Marina Louise, was raised by her mother, Frances Dean Smith, who went by the pretentious pen name of “FrancEye.”
57.On Barfly: “Mickey Rourke is a real human guy, on and off the set. And in Barfly he really came through with the acting. I felt his enjoyment and inventiveness. Faye Dunaway just can’t match his talent or his humanness but she filled her role.” [Film Threat interview, 1987]
58.“The ideal conditions [for writing] are between 10 PM and 2 AM. Bottle of wine, smokes, radio on to classical music. I write 2 or 3 nights a week. It’s the best show in town.” —Transit interview, 1994
59.As a teenager, Bukowski suffered from one of the worst cases of acne vulgaris that his doctors had ever seen.
60.On Television: “We got cable TV here, and the first thing we switched on happened to be Eraserhead. I said, ‘Oh, this cable TV has opened up a whole new world. We’re gonna be sitting in front of this thing for centuries. What next?’ So starting with Eraserhead we sit here, click, click, click - nothing.” (Film Comment interview, 1987)
61.In a 1987 Los Angeles Times Magazine article, writer Paul Ciotti described Bukowski as having “a sandblasted face, warts on his eyelids and a dominating nose that looks like it was assembled in a junkyard from Studebaker hoods and Buick fenders.”
62.Bukowski’s collection of poetry, Dangling in the Tournefortia, is dedicated to John Fante.
63.On Solitude: “I was a man who thrived on solitude; without it I was like another man without food or water. Each day without solitude weakened me. I took no pride in my solitude; but I was dependent on it. The darkness of the room was like sunlight to me.” [Factotum, 1975]
64.It’s estimated that nearly 2 million of Bukowski’s books have been sold worldwide.
65.Bukowski’s first novel, Post Office, is “dedicated to nobody.”
66.On The Bukowski Tapes: “I liked them the first time I saw them. Second time, it was just an old drunk talking away. It’s very hard to see them all at once. It’s like reading a book of poetry straight through. It’s jarring.”
67.“I guess a twisted childhood has fucked me up.” —Film Comment interview, 1987
68.On Ben Gazzara’s Performance as “Charles Serking” in Tales of Ordinary Madness: “He had appealing eyes like a constipated man sitting on the pot straining to crap. I liked the eyes. But take that away and he was too comfortable. Nice macho guy, but self-pleased, not insane at all. Probably a great variety of ass had cooled him out.”
69.Bukowski called Neeli Cherkovski’s biography, Hank, “virtually unreadable,” “dull” and “inept.”
70.“There’s too much bad poetry being written today. People just don’t know how to write down a simple easy line. It’s difficult for them: it’s like trying to keep a hard-on while drowning - not many can do it. Bad poetry is caused by people who sit down and think, Now I am going to write a Poem. And it comes out the way they think a poem should be.” —New York Quarterly interview, 1985
71.John Martin, Black Sparrow Press publisher, on Jim Christy’s The Buk Book, which includes some vintage footage of Bukowski fondling a stripper: “It is all just so stupid and crass. Bottom of the barrel stuff. Scum and shit . . . So far as I’m concerned, you are the dregs of the earth.”
72.Mickey Rourke (as Henry Chinaski) quotes a portion of the poem “2 p.m. beer” in the bathroom of Wanda’s apartment in Barfly: “nothing but the dripping sink,/the empty bottle,/euphoria . . .”
73.Bukowski’s favorite composers included Bach, Beethoven, Brahms, Mahler, Mozart, Shostakovich and Wagner.
74.Mickey Rourke on Bukowski: “I’m not a Bukowski devotee, through there’s a lot of people that live and die by what the guy says. I respect him enough to hang his picture in my office, but it isn’t like somebody mentions Bukowski and I flip out.”
75.The private detective who tracks Chinaski down in Barfly is none other than Jack (Eraserhead) Nance!
76.Sean Penn offered to play the Chinaski role in Barfly for $1 only if Dennis Hopper directed the film.
77.Bukowski once published an article in Ole (March 1965) called “A Rambling Essay on Poetics and the Bleeding Life Written While Drinking a Six-pack (Tall).”
78.On Taking a Beer Shit: “There was nothing really as glorious as a good beer shit - I mean after drinking twenty or twenty-five beers the night before. The odor of a beer shit like that spread all around and stayed for a good hour-and-a-half. It made you realize that you were really alive.” --Ham on Rye 79.In 1990, Bukowski narrated an HBO documentary called The Best Hotel on Skid Row.
80.Alternative Reel’s favorite tribute to Bukowski’s life and work can be found at Anti-Hero Art's website - www.anti-heroart.com/buk.html.
81.On O’Neill’s The Iceman Cometh: “Yeah, I read that. Now there’s a philosophical bar. But it’s grim and dank and near the edges of hell. These old farts, man, they’re awful people. It’s grimy, dull.”
82.Bukowski quit his job at the post office after Black Sparrow Press publisher John Martin offered him $100 a month for the rest of his life to write fulltime.
83.After a decade-long drinking binge, Bukowski ended up at the Los Angeles County Hospital Charity Ward with a bleeding ulcer that almost killed him.
84.The video Bukowski at Bellevue documents Bukowski’s poetry reading at Bellevue College in Seattle, Washington, in the spring of 1970 to an audience of what mostly appears to be bored, drug-addled and rather unreceptive college students.
85.Bukowski had a habit of puking in the parking lot before each and every poetry reading.
86.Barbet Schroeder on Mickey Rourke’s career since Barfly: “I think he’s a genius actor. I have no idea why he has made the choices he has made - one bad one after another. But I predict he will do a comeback that will astonish everybody.” 87.Only one known photograph of Bukowski’s first love, Jane Cooney Baker, exists (from her high school yearbook) and it can be found in Howard Sounes’ biography, Locked in the Arms of a Crazy Life.
88.Baker spent the last days of her life working as a maid in a cheap hotel before dying of a massive hemorrhage in 1962.
89.Bukowski’s novel Hollywood describes his sordid experience with Tinsel Town, complete with thinly disguised characterizations, during the production of Barfly.
90.The title of Bukowski’s poetry collection, It Catches Its Heart in My Hands, came from a line in a poem from one of Bukowski’s early inspirations, Robinson Jeffers.
91.The opening lines of “the tragedy of the leaves” are as powerful as T.S. Eliot’s “The Wasteland” without the bullshit and footnotes: “I awakened to dryness and the ferns were dead,/The potted plants yellow as corn;/my woman was gone/and the empty bottles like bled corpses/surrounded me with their uselessness . . .”
92.Bukowski studied journalism at LA City College from 1939-41.
93.“Getting drunk was good. I decided that I would always like getting drunk. It took away the obvious and maybe if you could get away from the obvious often enough, you wouldn’t become obvious yourself.” —Ham on Rye
94.On Cats: “Having a bunch of cats around is good. If you’re feeling bad, you just look at the cats, you’ll feel better, because they know that everything is, just as it is. There’s nothing to get excited about. They just know. They’re saviors. The more cats you have, the longer you live.”
95.After giving a rambling, incoherent tribute to Frank Sinatra, Bono of U2 admitted the speech was influenced by none other than Charles Bukowski: “There was a similar substance involved - alcohol,” said Bono.
96.Some of the chapters from >Women [Black Sparrow Press, 1978] originally appeared in Hustler magazine.
97.“I’ll tell the women that the face is my experience and the hands are my soul - anything to get those panties down.” —Rolling Stone, June 17, 1976
98.Bukowski died of leukemia on March 9, 1994, at the age of 73 and is buried in Green Hills Memorial Park, Palos Verdes, California. His epitaph? “Don’t Try.”
99.Buddhist monks performed Bukowski’s funeral rites.
100.“And as my hands drop the last desperate pen, in some cheap room, they will find me there and never know my name, my meaning, nor the treasure of my escape . . .” --------------------------------------------------------------------------------