Bill: I enjoyed your vicious anti-Mormon rant. Just kidding. I understand what you're saying. You better hope you're never traveling through Utah and your car breaks down and you walk into the nearest town and ask for help and they check with the Dept. of Homeland Security or whatever agency it is that's been spying on us, and they pull up your post about Utah, and you're screwed...
But my real reason for being here is to say that I listened to the rest of the CD, starting at track 20, and it's ironic that I chose that point to stop at before, because it's right there that the tide turns, the alcohol starts to take effect, and Bukowski starts to lose it. Now, when he makes some small error, muffs a word or can't find the next page of a poem, he gets pissed off at himself, disgusted (with himself as a reader? as a poet? with poetry? at even language itself?) and says "f***" this, let's go on to the next poem. And this happens with most or all of the remaining poems. He reads the first few lines, stumbles or gets bored, and throws it away. Amazingly, he doesn't lose the crowd doing this. They seem to understand that a drunk Bukowski is a different element than a sober Bukowski, and they're okay with it. At one point he says something like "Well, you came to see Bukowski lose it, so you got your money's worth" and it's a comic line, not a stunner. This later part of the reading, so different in tone, is still very interesting and likeable, maybe because it's easy to identify with his self-disgust and his decision to abandon each poem rather than struggle against it. He starts off each one quite seriously, but the tongue can't quite pull it off, and the brain is lagging, and the soul has a shadow over it. Fascinating shit. A good, friendly crowd there; they do not turn on him, and he still isn't heckled and doesn't take out his frustration on them -- it's all inner directed. Maybe if it had gone on another 20 minutes, he would have been hurling insults and obscenities at them -- we'll never know. The after party must have been a hell of a ride. Has anyone seen any reports on it? Now that I know the full arc this reading takes, I want to listen again, to see if I can detect the negativity of the ending looming ahead in the beginning. Two Bukowski's are at war here: the careful, fiercely intelligent man of letters who strives above all for clarity and honesty and purity in art, and the angry, self-defeating drunk who rages aganist his inner demons. Great CD. Thank you Mr. Potts for publishing it.
