Television – ‘1880 Or So’ from ‘Television’ 1992

‘Walking half-drunk in a strange pad, making it out to the cool grey San Francisco dawn – white gulls over white houses, fog down the bay, Tamalpais a fresh green hill in the new sun, driving across the bridge in a beat old car to work’…North Beach Alba by Gary Snyder. Photograph copyright John Rose

The Lily’s 7″ single from Better ‘Can’t Make Your Like Better’

Charles Bukowski – Splash

Charles Bukowski 1920 -1994), American poet and novelist, born in Andernach, Germany and moved to Los Angeles, California three years later. He lived there much of his life.  His writing was influenced by the social, cultural, and economic ambience of his home city of Los Angeles.  His work addresses the ordinary lives of poor Americans, the act of writing, drinking, relationships with women, and the drudgery of work. Bukowski wrote thousands of poems, hundreds of short stories and six novels, eventually publishing over sixty books. The F.B.I. kept a file on him as a result of his column ‘Notes Of A Dirty Old Man’ in the LA underground newspaper Open City. In 1986 Time magazine called Bukowski a “laureate of American lowlife” and one critic described Bukowski’s fiction as a “detailed depiction of a certain taboo male fantasy: the uninhibited bachelor, slobby, anti-social, and utterly free.”

Mazzy Star – Fade Into You from Later 1994