Last week Laine and I went to see Factotum, a movie based on Charles Bukowski's novel. The makers are Finnish, but the movie's main actors are American. Matt Dillion plays the lead, sort of a chunked up, burned out, older, alcoholic version of the character he was in Drugstore Cowboy, also without the sweetness. Lili Taylor and Marisa Tomei are also in it, both very good, very different from how I usually think of them.
I don't like Charles Bukowski's work. What I don't like about Bukowski is a lot of what I didn't like about the movie - the portrait of the self-involved artist, the misogyny. But I do like the way that the movie (and I guess Bukowski) showed that people who live on the borders of work, who don't have a lot of money, who don't have a lot of plans, who make bad choices, or just do fucked up things, have these complex lives. There's no valorization and there's no preachiness. This is also what's happening on John Doe's new album Forever Hasn't Happened Yet. But Doe is much better than Bukowski.
Maybe it's because there's not a lot of room in a rock song. Most of the songs are less than three minutes long and there are whole worlds there. My current favorites are "Hwy 5" with Neko Case, "There's a Black Horse" with Smokey Hormell, and "Ready" with Kristin Hersh. The first and last ones have some disaster or other going on. In "Hwy 5" someone is calling from jail, something bad has happened, the place where they're living is beat out, but the song jumps and soars. They sing, "Lights on the horizon/ Take me away." It's so American, driving away to that dream that's a tank of gas away. It's what made Chapman's "Fast Car" such a hit. In a just world, "Hwy 5" would make as much cash and get as much play, but it's too bleak, even as it's hopeful, for that.
"Ready" is about a dead junkie, but it's also about love and about friendship and about being young. Amazon.com (trying to be helpful, I guess) calls it a cautionary song. They're optimistic. No one ever stopped doing drugs because someone died in a rock song. Kristin Hersh sings backup on this. A couple of reviews have compared the Case duet to Doe's work with Exene, but for me, Hersh is much more like Exene, her harmony sounds like it could etch glass.
Ok, "Twin Brother" is great too. A poor, completely dysfunctional family, all captured in the conversation of a smallish boy who loves his brother. But this sort material is not that new for Doe or for X for that matter. What's on my mind about this music and this movie is how rare it is in most media for anyone except the middle-class or the wealthy to have full lives or be fully realized. Even though most people are too sensitive (or wary) to write about welfare queens, there's more than enough written or spoken about the black underclass or white trailer trash. But this stuff is always caricature, either for humor or moral instruction. There's no sense that the people written about are in any way as real as the writers or commentators. I think that's also why I liked "Hustle and Flow" so much, aside from Terrence Howard. The dreams of the poor are real.
Rarely are people completely hopeless or dreamless, no matter what their lives are like. I started out thinking about writing about this because I wondered why I like Doe's work better than Bukowski's (and I was going to throw something in about these graphic novels that I've been reading called "100 Bullets"), but it just occurred to me that I'm also probably writing about this because it's the anniversary of Hurricane Katrina. Bush is swanning around down there again and all the media are having these anniversary stories. Most of them are feel good, some are feel (sorta) bad. But I am furious that reporters have only been bothering themselves about what happened and has been happening in Louisiana and Mississippi because the anniversary has swung around. Where are the ongoing investigations of what FEMA has not been doing, about the recovery or not of New Orleans, about the riverside communities in Mississippi, about the fact that half of the population of NOLA left, but that that only meant a third of the workers? What about that look we had into the abyss? It's because poor people, no matter what color, simply are not real people, except in the odd piece of art.
*I have absolutely no idea what's going on in "There's a Black Horse". There's a photograph of a black horse. There might be a hanging. But it doesn't seem to matter, there's something going on and it feels like it's happening as the sun goes up on the high plains somewhere.
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