Evening with Bukowski sorely needed right now
The drunken, womanizing, raucously incorrect world of Charles Bukowski may seem out of touch with contemporary sensibilities. Yet, most of us in these quarantine times can learn how an uncensored night at home could be well spent from “You Never Had It — An Evening With Charles Bukowski,” coming to Kino Marquee virtual cinemas in the Bay Area starting Friday, Aug. 7.
Less than an hour long, this conversational documentary with the prurient poet of Los Angeles’ lower depths is remarkably rich with insights into the writing craft and business, sex and love, humanity’s lack of humanity, and more.
Unlike at his often rowdy and combative public readings, Bukowski comes off as a gently growling, even cordial host here. He’s funny as hell, knows it and is pleased to prove it. All while consuming copious amounts of wine and skinny, Indian bidi cigarettes.
Compiled from old UMatic (¾inch) videocassette recordings of a 1981 night Italian journalist Silvia Bizio spent talking with Bukowski at his home in San Pedro, a seaside community within the city of Los Angeles, the film has a bleary visual quality that might easily be considered appropriate for its subject. Yet, the author of such prose as “Post Office” and “Notes of a Dirty Old Man” and verse collections including “War All the Time” and “The Roominghouse Madrigals” expresses his thoughts with precise, provocative clarity. That makes the presentation seem as much counterpoint as complementary.
Among many gems that came out of Bukowski’s mouth that January evening:
“Writers are very despicable people; plumbers are better people,” following a revelation that he declined an invitation to meet JeanPaul Sartre while on a book tour in Paris. “I’m a writer.”
“Why is everything sex?” during a stretch of playful, if morbid, backandforth on their creamcolored couch with his future wife, Linda Lee Beighle. “Can’t I ride a bicycle down the street without thinking about sex?”
“Take all these people in the world,” he says at one point, chillingly foreshadowing what a lot of us have just come to realize in the last several years. “They’re more full of hate than they are love. This is our society. Let’s go with the flow, let’s not kid ourselves.”
Director Matteo Borgardt, who is Bizio’s son, intersperses new, 16mm shots of L.A. sites that one might imagine Bukowski, who died in 1994, haunting: grubby Venice Beach, the lake at Echo Park, downtown homeless encampments. Though the fuzzy footage could be considered padding in an already short film, you certainly don’t come away from “You Never Had It” feeling at all shortchanged of Bukowski’s wisdom, wit and alcoholic hospitality.
It wouldn’t be healthy for all of our nights at home to be like this. But a few may be downright therapeutic at this point.