The harbor has always been a place where the local and the global run into each other. Now it has a podcast to match.
San Pedro Today is proud to announce its partnership on Soundings, a new long-form interview show hosted and produced by SPT writer Aaron McKenzie. The premise is simple yet ambitious: use this little corner of Los Angeles as a lens to look outward at commerce, culture, art, and history. Every container ship leaving the Port of Los Angeles carries a story about global supply chains. Every street corner holds a history of labor, immigration, and reinvention. Soundings takes that idea and runs with it: every place is a crossroads, and every person carries a piece of the larger world.
In the inaugural episode, McKenzie sits down with British journalist and biographer Howard Sounes to explore the life of a figure who knew this stretch of coastline well: Charles Bukowski.
The conversation digs into the gap between the real man and his famous literary alter ego, Henry Chinaski. Sounes—author of the definitive biography Charles Bukowski: Locked in the Arms of a Crazy Life—spent years uncovering the truth, reviewing public records, walking the streets of Los Angeles, and interviewing the people Bukowski turned into characters on the page. What emerges is a portrait of discipline and vulnerability behind a poet too often dismissed as a mere outcast drunk.
Among the threads they pull:
- The myth vs. the reality. How Bukowski embellished his own biography and why the “chaos-driven” persona masked a man who managed his post office job with more calculation than the legend lets on.
- A brutal childhood. His early years in Los Angeles, an abusive father, and how severe acne helped shape his identity as a solitary outsider.
- The blue-collar writer. Why his view from low-wage factory and postal work made him a singular voice for ordinary people.
- Late-stage fame at the harbor. The turning point when publisher John Martin subsidized Bukowski’s exit from the post office, leading to global success, Barfly, and a financially secure life by the L.A. Harbor.
- The perspective of the exes. Why his former girlfriends offered the most honest and funniest read on who he really was.
- Alcohol and “Don’t Try.” A candid look at his drinking, his late-life discovery that he could write sober, and the real meaning behind that boxing-inspired tombstone epitaph.
Sounes also reflects on what the book cost him personally—he quit a stable newspaper job and gambled his financial security in pursuit of the story.
Soundings is produced in partnership with San Pedro Today. The debut episode is available below, or click here to use your preferred podcast platform. spt
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