00:13I am an exceptionally good writer, after Lawrence, Celine and Dostoevsky, I am probably
00:22The fourth most famous writer of the century. I'm a simple person, I don't do anything.
00:35exceptional. I drink and type, the same thing every night. I drink and type.
00:48Nothing special, my friends, nothing special. I enjoy doing it and I'm not ashamed of it.
01:22Charles Bukowski, born in Germany but raised in Los Angeles, is one of the American writers
01:28best-known contemporaries in Europe. His now famous book, Stories of Ordinary
01:34madness, recently inspired Marco Ferreri to make a highly successful, albeit controversial, film.
01:45After twenty books and 50 years of hunger, bronze and brutality, Dukowski has made it.
01:51to leave the seedy neighborhood of lower Hollywood, where he lived a dark existence
01:57and it's difficult, moving from a fridge full of beers to the toilet where you vomit your soul
02:02to the typewriter.
02:10Old Hank, as his friends call him, is now in his 60s. He's quite a man.
02:17rich, reasonably famous and much talked about in European literary circles. Now, however,
02:24He no longer lives in Hollywood, but in San Pedro, across the bridge that crosses the harbor.
02:28of Los Angeles. And so, the visit to the old liquor store where he usually served
02:35and where they called him Mr. Heineken, with a not too hidden reference to the two doctrines
02:41of beer cans that he used to buy every day, is a visit in the recent past
02:46accomplished with a sort of sincere nostalgia.
03:02A night with Bukowski means having a great ability to resist the dream and above all
03:09the awareness of having to listen to him as he drinks freely and talks without interruption,
03:15sometimes until the morning. Listening to it, one wonders what the relationship is between vengazzarra
03:21Ferreri's smooth and he, old Hank, and this face of his, lined and marked
03:28of scars that date back a long time. I'm a simple person, very simple.
03:39Maybe this is what people want to find out, but I don't write these words for them.
03:45Maybe I don't even write them for myself, when I'm drunk. They come out quite true to me and I like them.
03:55to people. However, I am still myself, the same person who wrote those words,
04:08Right? And I have the right to be left alone.
04:20I don't know what drives me to write, but I do it. I think I write interesting stories,
04:28Interesting poems. I should probably feel guilty because people like them.
04:39This is what I do. I drink and I type. It's about time you left me alone,
04:47so I can type and drink, without the camera in my face.
04:59There are those who see in Bukowski the ghosts of Jack Kerouac, Hemingway and Henry Miller.
05:05But Bukowski loves to compare himself to Dostoevsky, to Selin, even when he says that his poems
05:11can be understood by both a Kansas City whore and a literary critic.
05:17Be simple, write short, crude, and easy. This is the stylistic ideal of this pessimist.
05:24misanthrope and dirty old man, as he likes to define himself. A writer also on the road, that
05:31of human misery, which crosses Los Angeles and stops in the strictly neighborhoods
05:36under police surveillance. Bukowski says, my father always talked about money. Because I hated him,
05:44I began to admire those who had no money and did not work and so I became a vagabond. But
05:50I was disappointed. He discovered that tramps, after all, were not heroes.
05:56They were these great rebels who rejected society. They were all like my father. They wanted
06:02arrive but society had thrown them away. Here I didn't find heroes. I found again
06:09the shadow of my father. Now our hero of ordinary madness, the great Bukowski, as
06:16he likes to define himself a little boldly, he is no longer the drifting man of a time without
06:21goalless and aimless. He found an end and a point of arrival, childhood. And through
06:28childhood, the rereading of his past, the search for the roots of his pain. The past
06:33The next of his stories gives way to the past tense. The novel he is working on
06:39Bukowski currently talks about when he was a child. He talks about the wounds of his childhood.
06:46from where his pain but also his poetry comes.
06:56I was already an adult at six years old. The other children were playing ball or doing other stupid things.
07:05childish. I thought, what the fuck are they doing? No, no, not what the fuck, but I thought they were
07:13stupid. They should do something else, even if I didn't know what. If we want to use
07:21the term genius, which is a bad word, maybe I was a little too precocious. I was there
07:28I looked at it and thought, "They're stupid to jump rope. It's just a waste of time, they should
07:37do something else. I didn't know what. And so, while they were playing, I was just
07:46scattered to watch.
07:53What remains on my face began when boils the size of corks began
08:01appearing all over my body. I wasn't very good looking. I couldn't go out on the street
08:08without someone screaming at me in horror, what's wrong? I think this also made me
08:15helped me write. I don't think so, guys. But something strange happened to me once.
08:26I was going somewhere on a plane and you see someone who had more scars than me.
08:35You want to know what I found? I should hate these scars, right?
08:41And I was jealous. I was sitting with Linda King. It pissed me off. That man was really handsome.
08:54I like what's on my face. It's me. I think I'm very handsome.
09:02But he was more handsome than me.
09:29You said you started drinking when you were very young.
09:33Yes.
09:35And that your father kicked you out of the house. Why did he kick you out of the house?
09:40He found what he should never have found.
09:44He opened my drawers and found a stack of papers with the stories I wrote and he didn't like them.
09:53He said, how can our son write such things about us and others?
10:01How can you write such bad things about us?
10:05You are not worthy of living in this house.
10:10Was your father jealous that you wrote?
10:13No, he wasn't jealous of my papers.
10:17At times he didn't know who I was.
10:20He was just pissed off because I wasn't obeying him.
10:24He beat me and then gave me orders.
10:27And I didn't obey.
10:30He always ordered me around.
10:31Do this. Do that.
10:34Since then I have not wanted to take orders anymore.
10:38What was the last order your father gave you?
10:42Ah, I don't remember.
10:45The only thing I remember is him, lying on the ground.
10:50I punched him in the stomach and he collapsed, like a dead fish.
10:57I'm the biggest son of a bitch in town.
11:01Never give me an order.
11:04You will be able to kill yourself.
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