Charles Bukowski

A poetry reading? Yeah.

Yeah, I went and saw Charles Bukowski read when I was a kid.

No, I know Charles Bukowski.

Oh, you do? Yes.

Why? Because I've heard you talk about

I still love it, and I know it's become kind of a beloved thing for a lot of fans that they listen to every year.

But that song, that core of it, the idea, the inspiration from this Bukowski poem, there's a mood and a feeling that the poem got across that I wanted to merge with the feeling of specifically that similar feeling, but at the holidays.

And I just never felt like it was like totally there, partially from like production value, partially from the arrangement.

Pushing it into a swing feel on this record, a different time signature, lets the vocals breathe a lot more.

I

really like the Charles Bukowski-esque poetry at the beginning of the book.

Oh, we will get to that.

Let's go through this list of visuals first.

And it's one of the complaints that you've seen from a lot of authors.

where entire catalogs have been hoovered up by large language models and put to use so that when you go to your AI and say, hey, I want my staff bio rewritten in the style of Hunter Thompson or Charles Bukowski, you get something that, more or less, it's a broad impression of their writing style.

It's only able to do that because it was trained on their writing.

The news that you get, the scientific answers that you get, it's all coming from knowledge that was effectively stolen.

But during the course of the conversation, he was quoting different poems.

And then about an hour into the conversation, he says, do you know Charles Bukowski on writing? Bukowski's piece on writing.

Now, what he didn't know was that I just happened to have Bukowski's book on the shelf in front of me.

And I opened it as he was talking and I quoted.

That's ancient and about times gone by that no one can relate to.

And, you know, nobody's been introduced to like John Cooper Clarke, who's a total punk rocker or Pat Inglesby or Bukowski, I suppose, who's as miserable as sin and quite a dodgy character or, you know, the most beautiful poets around.

Young guys like Dara Fleming.

There's incredible poets, incredible poets and beautiful writing.

i know i'm gonna go brush my hair because he's like fucking

I went on a date with a guy to Bukowski's.

This was like 20 years ago, maybe.

He spent the whole date talking about his recent bipolar diagnosis and then going over his meds until I excused myself to go to the bathroom and then left.