Upcoming: Love is a Dog from Hell
hi friends and strangers! my next show will be a small cosy affair celebrating famed author CHARLES BUKOWSKI, a “laureate of American lowlife” (quoted by Time magazine, 1986).
super honored to be part of this alongside local street artist SpeakCryptic!
i’ll be showing a couple of new drawings and some old works custom made for Bukowski in the lo-fi space…
for those unfamiliar with Bukowski, here’s an archive of his works. amazing stuff, i think if you like my art, you would love him!
it’s on TODAY, 28th of September, 8.30pm at 15 Minutes Cafe over at LaSalle College of the Arts. (facebook event page)
i’ll be there for a little while, so if you got a bit of time, come on down to revel in the Bukowski and say hi!
an almost made up poem
I see you drinking at a fountain with tiny blue hands, no, your hands are not tiny they are small, and the fountain is in France where you wrote me that last letter and I answered and never heard from you again. you used to write insane poems about ANGELS AND GOD, all in upper case, and you knew famous artists and most of them were your lovers, and I wrote back, it’ all right, go ahead, enter their lives, I’ not jealous because we’ never met. we got close once in New Orleans, one half block, but never met, never touched. so you went with the famous and wrote about the famous, and, of course, what you found out is that the famous are worried about their fame –– not the beautiful young girl in bed with them, who gives them that, and then awakens in the morning to write upper case poems about ANGELS AND GOD. we know God is dead, they’ told us, but listening to you I wasn’ sure. maybe it was the upper case. you were one of the best female poets and I told the publishers, editors, “ her, print her, she’ mad but she’ magic. there’ no lie in her fire.” I loved you like a man loves a woman he never touches, only writes to, keeps little photographs of. I would have loved you more if I had sat in a small room rolling a cigarette and listened to you piss in the bathroom, but that didn’ happen. your letters got sadder. your lovers betrayed you. kid, I wrote back, all lovers betray. it didn’ help. you said you had a crying bench and it was by a bridge and the bridge was over a river and you sat on the crying bench every night and wept for the lovers who had hurt and forgotten you. I wrote back but never heard again. a friend wrote me of your suicide 3 or 4 months after it happened. if I had met you I would probably have been unfair to you or you to me. it was best like this.
one thirty-six a.m.
I laugh sometimes when I think about say Celine at a typewriter or Dostoevsky... or Hamsun... ordinary men with feet, ears, eyes, ordinary men with hair on their heads sitting there typing words while having difficulties with life while being puzzled almost to madness. Dostoevsky gets up he leaves the machine to piss, comes back drinks a glass of milk and thinks about the casino and the roulette wheel. Celine stops, gets up, walks to the window, looks out, thinks, my last patient died today, I won't have to make any more visits there. when I saw him last he paid his doctor bill; it's those who don't pay their bills, they live on and on. Celine walks back, sits down at the machine is still for a good two minutes then begins to type. Hamsun stands over his machine thinking, I wonder if they are going to believe all these things I write? he sits down, begins to type. he doesn't know what a writer's block is: he's a prolific son-of-a-bitch damn near as magnificent as the sun. he types away. and I laugh not out loud but all up and down these walls, these dirty yellow and blue walls my white cat asleep on the table hiding his eyes from the light. he's not alone tonight and neither am I.
those girls we followed home
in junior high the two prettiest girls were Irene and Louise, they were sisters; Irene was a year older, a little taller but it was difficult to choose between them; they were not only pretty but they were astonishingly beautiful so beautiful that the boys stayed away from them; they were terrified of Irene and Louise who weren't aloof at all; even friendlier than most but who seemed to dress a bit differently than the other girls; they always wore high heels' silk stockings, blouses, skirts, new outfits each day; and' one afternoon my buddy, Baldy, and i followed them home from school; you see, we were kind of the bad guys on the grounds so it was more or less expected, and it was soomething: walking along ten or twelve feet behind them; we didnt say anything we just followed watching their voultuous swaying, the balance of the haunches. we liked it so much that we followed them home from school every day. when they'd go into their house we'd stand outside on the sidewalk smoking cigarettes and talking. "someday". I told Baldy. "they are going to invite us inside their house and they are going to fuck us." "you really think so?" "sure." now 50 years later I can tell you they never did -never mind all the stories we told the guys; yes, it's a dream that keepds you going then and now.
source: bukowski.org.ua (go there for more bukowski goodness!)