Before Charles Bukowski was a famous poet, novelist, screenwriter and columnist in the underground press, he was a real life barfly, drinking hard and running wild, getting thrown out of apartments and fired from jobs, delighting in torturing himself and everyone around him.
Bukowski’s lowlife experiences in the 1940s and ‘50s would provide the rich subject matter for his mature writing. His home during much of this pivotal time was a series of cheap rooms in the Westlake District of Los Angeles, and his companion was the hard drinking older woman Jane Cooney Baker, who would be the muse and love of his life. And he would return to Westlake decades later, when Barfly director Barbet Schroeder chose the Royal Palms as the exterior and the Bryson for the interior of Wanda’s (Jane’s) apartment.
Join us for a walking tour that celebrates a lost world of day time drinking and all night carousing, featuring real places that figure in the life and legend of Charles Bukowski, and some of the colorful characters who inhabit his fiction. From Barfly locations to the site of the toughest love poem in Los Angeles letters, gritty SROs and elegantly aging landmarks, it’s a side of the city that will surprise and inspire you.
Tour hosts Kim Cooper and Richard Schave have dedicated themselves to preserving Bukowski’s Los Angeles, through their work helping to landmark Bukowski Court in East Hollywood, the Downtown to East Hollywood bus tour Haunts of a Dirty Old Man, advocacy to protect the SRO hotels and rent controlled apartments where creative people can afford to screw around, and through their acclaimed second audio track on the recent Blu-Ray reissue of Barfly (imprint, 2022).
This walking tour is illustrated with rare photos you can view on your smartphone.
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- This month, 31st May, 10:30 am, Evergreen Cemetery, 1877 walking tour in Los Angeles
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