{"product_id":"open-city-no-45-mar-8-14-1968-bukowski-on-his-parents-chicano-walkouts-quicksilver-messenger-service-steppenwolf","title":"OPEN CITY No. 45, Mar. 8–14, 1968 — Bukowski on His Parents, Chicano Walkouts, Quicksilver Messenger Service, Steppenwolf","description":"\u003cp\u003eAn issue of the Los Angeles underground weekly in the full broadsheet format, featuring Charles Bukowski's \"Notes of a Dirty Old Man.\" The column opens with a meditation on the Frozen Man Stance — that condition of immobility, lack of wonder, and increasing numbness afflicting poets and men everywhere — before arriving at its true subject: his father. A cowardly, vicious brute who beat him regularly with a long leather razor strop in the bathroom, calling the mother in to witness, she shaming the boy with \"YOU MISSED ONE,\" the father screaming him back in to begin again. Bukowski reflects that he felt no love, fear, or anger — only a cold mathematic disgust. At seventeen he begins drinking with older boys, roaming gas stations and liquor stores. One night drunk he shoulders his parents' door off its hinges, confronts his father, who presses his face toward a lake of vomit on the Tree of Life rug — Bukowski swings up from the heels and catches him full on the chin. The continuation on page 10 picks up with his mother clawing his face, the father bleeding, and then a second thread: joining the ROTC at Los Angeles High School around 1937, Frozen among the grapefruit-balled boys in uniform, watching a boy named Jimmy — cared for by many, fucked up by the Army — throw his competition medal down a sewer drain outside a drugstore. Jimmy was later shot down over the English Channel. The column closes with a letter from a poet friend in London describing his own Frozen Man existence in a fishbowl, and Bukowski sitting with two people left — himself and his buddy Jimmy — tra la la la, la la la.\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp class=\"MsoNormal\"\u003eThe front cover leads with on-the-ground coverage of the East Los Angeles high school walkouts, in which 5,000 Chicano students staged one of the largest student protests in LA history to that point. Interior includes an advertisement for the first Los Angeles appearance of Quicksilver Messenger Service, alongside Steppenwolf and Kaleidoscope at the Cheetah in Venice. The back cover features Liza Williams' \"In the City\" column. Large tabloid format, 17\" x 11\", black and white throughout.\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp class=\"MsoNormal\"\u003eProvenance: Mailing label on front cover addressed to John Bryan Sr., father of Open City editor John Bryan, and a newspaper man himself.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eSlightly uneven fold leading to page edges sticking out a bit with small tears and folds. Some toning to the pages and a bit of browning here and there.\u003c\/p\u003e","brand":"The Buk Shop","offers":[{"title":"Default Title","offer_id":47898062356645,"sku":null,"price":40.0,"currency_code":"USD","in_stock":true}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0638\/9288\/1573\/files\/20250809_141223_-_Copy.jpg?v=1781010485","url":"https:\/\/thebukshop.com\/products\/open-city-no-45-mar-8-14-1968-bukowski-on-his-parents-chicano-walkouts-quicksilver-messenger-service-steppenwolf","provider":"The Buk Shop","version":"1.0","type":"link"}