... Adam and Eve were stupid and so was that deal (because there's a lot more in Genesis than the vivid tale of Adam and Eve... and he's not really happy with the way he decided to draw God). Nice little video with a view into his work space (in France (not the one in the great old documentary
)). Not really safe for work, of course, Adam and Eve being naked (until they realized they were naked). Here's the book in case you don't already have it.
AND: There's an interview here. Excerpt:
"The hippie culture of Haight-Ashbury, where it all started for me, was full of men doing nothing all day and expecting women to bring them food. The ‘chick’ had to provide a home for them, cook meals for them, even pay the rent. It was still very much ingrained from the earlier patriarchal mentality of our fathers, except that our fathers, generally, were providers. Free love meant free sex and food for men. Sure, women enjoyed it, too, and had a lot of sex, but then they served men. Even among left-wing political groups, women were always relegated to secretarial, menial jobs. We were all on LSD, so it took a few years for the smoke to dissipate and for women to realize what a raw deal they were getting with the ne’er-do-well hippie male. Men who acquired preeminence at the time were all frauds, fake gurus who were paying lip service to peace and love, charismatic cons who just wanted to fuck all their adoring disciples. Timothy Leary was like that. A big phony."ADDED: I was interested that Crumb drew a cover for The New Yorker on the subject of gay marriage that the magazine never published. I'd like to see it! And: "The America that I missed died in about 1935... In the U.S [in the 1920s] there were thousands and thousands of bands, dance halls, ballrooms in hotels, restaurants had dance floors, school auditoriums, clubs in small towns. A small town of 10,000 would have a least a hundred bands. In the mid 30’s radio spread very fast in America and the depression killed a lot of the venues where live music was performed. You could go to the movies for 10 cents. Then in the 50’s TV finished it all off. Mass media makes you stay home, passive. In the 20’s there was live music everywhere in the States.... The current pop music in the Western world is just plain god-awful. America is long gone. The ’80s killed it for me. The Reagan era, AIDS. It was an awful decade."
MORE: You can see The New Yorker cover here, and it's pretty obvious that it's not at the right taste level.
"[New Yorker editor David] Remnick would not give the reason for rejecting the cover, either to the cover editor, or to me. For this reason I refuse to do any more work for the New Yorker. I felt insulted, not so much by the rejection as for the lack of any reason given. I can't work for a publication that won't give you any guidelines or criterion for accepting or rejecting a work submitted. Does the editor want to keep you guessing or what? I think part of the problem is the enormous power vested in the position of chief editor of the New Yorker. He has been ‘spoiled' by the power that he wields. So many artists are so eager to do covers for the New Yorker that they are devalued in the eyes of David Remnick. They are mere pawns. He is not compelled to take pains to show them any respect. Any artist is easily replaced by another. Fortunately for me, I do not feel that I need the New Yorker badly enough to put up with such brusque treatment at the hands of its editor-in-chief. The heck with him!"Crumb said that back in 2011. In the new interview, he's still pissed off at Remnick.
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40 comments:
Men and women are equal, but complementary for self-evident reasons. Unqualified progress is yielding to conservation of moral and natural imperatives.
Not just a comic artist!
R. Crumb & his Cheap Suit Serenaders - My Girl's Pussy
The original
Crumb is a philosopher that deserves to be paid more than a welder.
Crumb's description of the 60's counterculture as an oppression of women is dead accurate, and I blame their oppression on that damn Johnson and the War!
America is a wonderful country, the only place in the world and in all of human history where people like Crumb could exist, flourish, and thrive.
I don't expect people like Crumb to realize this. They (almost) never do.
Crumb is one of my artistic heroes. I met him once at an opening of a show of his drawings, and he (silently) signed my copy of the book of drawings from the show.
Forget example, WWID (What Would ISIS Do) with people like Crumb. What would the Nazis, the Bolsheviks, the Maoists do? What would Bill Ayers and the protesting students at Mizzou and Yale do?
"America is a wonderful country, the only place in the world and in all of human history where people like Crumb could exist, flourish, and thrive.
"I don't expect people like Crumb to realize this. They (almost) never do."
Yup! America is the only country in the world where brilliant, eccentric artists ever appear and sustain working careers!
It's easy to be a weirdo creep in America. In most other places in the world--not so easy. Impossible, even. And dangerous.
I know people like Crumb. I knew lots of people like Crumb in Boulder, Colorado in the late 60s and 70s when I lived there. Boulder was swarming with them. I found them tiresome then, I find them tiresome now.
I have mixed feelings about Crumb. I don't deny his brilliant talent. He is a genius. But clearly he got hung-up on sex to the point where it became unhealthy.
Nonetheless, he writes about the hippies and the 60s that:
Free love meant free sex and food for men. Sure, women enjoyed it, too, and had a lot of sex, but then they served men
He is absolutely, 100% correct.
All that left-wing politics was more of a cheap scam, to con women into putting out for nerdy-Beta males of the era (like Crumb). The existing paradigm -- the high school QB gets the head cheerleader -- was seen as too macho and hierarchical.
I was just a tot in the 60s/early 70s, but even as a child back then, I thought the Hippies were bullshit artists and mooches. Why some of these women fell for scruffy, drug-addled, Leftists, spitting on the kids returning from Vietnam, I have no idea. I stayed away from them.
Some counter cultural writer, I sadly don't remember who, said about the 60's: "You know, we were really mean to an awful lot of women."
Bay Area Guy:
Precisely, spot on. You may have been too young to experience the hippie phenomenon, but speaking as one was old enough and who saw it close-up (but did not participate in it, I was not a hippie), I can say that your understanding of it is perfect. The whole counterculture phenomenon was a monstrous scam. It was mostly bullshit. Not surprisingly, it was a fundamentally leftist phenomenon.
It was still very much ingrained from the earlier patriarchal mentality of our fathers, except that our fathers, generally, were providers.
So the WWII Dad's were honorable men who supported their families, and the hippies were a bunch of lazy stoner sexist pricks.
You know the whole "provider" aspect seems to get overlooked and erased with all this talk about whiteness.
You know, we were really mean to an awful lot of women."
True. But here's the thing. Women went along with the cultural changes of the 60s. They propelled them and fueled them and enabled them. They were the ones that gave the green light to having lots of sex. Women are and have been throughout history the gatekeepers of sex. In the 60s they opened the gates.
Guys couldn't hardly believe what was happening. We couldn't believe our good fortune. When I went to college as a freshman it was well-nigh impossible to get laid. Heck, it was difficult just to cop a feel, just to get to first base. Then, suddenly, and I mean that literally, SUDDENLY, the pill became widely available, and almost LITERALLY overnight it all changed.
Here's how it changed for me: in the autumn quarter of my freshman year at Michigan State University women could only visit men's dorms on one night of the week, for a period of three hours, and if they were in your room the door had to be open the width of a book. THAT WAS THE RULE, I SHIT YOU NOT. And guys were absolutely forbidden at all times from entering the women's dorms.
Second/winter quarter it all changed and changed radically: guy and girls could visit each other's dorm rooms and there were no rules governing visits. They could stay as long as they wanted. Goodbye in loco parentis! As a result girls and guys started shacking up with each other in dorm rooms. As a result one of my roommates got his girlfriend pregnant; he dropped out of college, took a job in the Rouge River auto plant, got drafted, and sent to Vietnam.
Curiously, perhaps not coincidentally, this change coincided with my HS classmate and acquaintance Claudia Jennings featured as the Playmate centerfold (and subsequent Playmate of the Year) with her pubic hair on full display. She was the first Playmate centerfold with public hair. A a true revolution had taken place.
Please pardon typos in my previous post. Typing fast, stream-of-consciousness writing. Everything I wrote is true. Cross my heart.
Roughcoat said...
America is a wonderful country, the only place in the world and in all of human history where people like Crumb could exist, flourish, and thrive.
He moved to France 24 years ago.
@RoughCoat
Hah -- great story about MSU! Please don't hold it against me, but I was born at University of Michigan Hospital -- Dad was going to grad school there in mid-60s. Wolverines!
By the way, Hillary is one of these ex-hippie chicks from the 60s, but not one of the good looking ones like Claudia Jennings:)
I suspect Crumb moved to France to keep from being dismembered by today's feminists. IIRC every story showed that lumberjack woman being leapt upon by some wimpy guy. Back then Lumberjill would just trash the poor sod if she were not interested. That is NOT the way we deal with such things today.
"Claudia Jennings featured as the Playmate centerfold (and subsequent Playmate of the Year) with her pubic hair on full display. She was the first Playmate centerfold with public hair. A a true revolution had taken place."
Interesting. I do recall Ms. Jennings (yowza). But I'd have guessed the full frontal came later. I do agree there was a sea change in the playmates around that time.
He moved to France 24 years ago.
Yes. But he made his name, and the fortune that his fame and talents generated, in America. He was able move to France and live a haute bourgeois lifestyle because of what he had accomplished in America. And what he accomplished in America was, I would argue, only possible in America. He arrived in France fully established. Had he started out in France he would gotten nowhere. The hippies, the counterculture, LSD, the ability to live on the cheap and enjoy a reasonably lavish unproductive drug-addled libertine hedonistic promiscuous cynical lifestyle would not have been possible in France or anywhere else when Crumb was coming of age. America's prosperity which was due to the hard work and productiveness of the majority of Americans made it possible for slacker assholes like Crumb to live like parasites off the fat of the land.
Aside from all that . . . .
Why would anyone want a comic book version of the Book Of Genesis except to mock the faith of millions of people?
Thanks for the trigger warning. The word stupid is so very unsettling.
Why would anyone want a comic book version of the Book Of Genesis except to mock the faith of millions of people?
Yep. It's easy to mock the Judeo-Christian tradition because Jews and Christians will not try to kill you.
I'm sure there's a good reason why that smirking asshole Crumb doesn't put out a comic book version of the Koran. Give me some time, I may think of it.
Crumb at least has the intellectual honesty to call bullshit on his own side when it's warranted, but some of his work is essentially a study in how Freud, who was disastrously wrong about most psychology about sex, got men like Crumb to a T. Example: Crumb's cartoon about Philip K. Dick's initial encounter with VALIS. Crumb being Crumb, he draws Dick staring at the girl from the pharmacy's impressive breasts rather than her icthys necklace, because there's no conceivable way Philip Kindred Dick, an idiosyncratic Episcopalian, could actually have been struck by an honest public expression of Christian faith.
Pathetic.
The parts of Crumb's version of Genesis that I have seen, is not mocking. You can tell it's his drawing style but there is nothing disrespectful of the text in it.
The Crumb documentary is one the best films in any genre in the last 25 years. There’s another documentary by the BBC that is nowhere near as good but still has its moments
@ken in tx: I'll have to take your word that there's nothing in the Crumb comic book that mocks the scripture, because I'm certainly not going to pay $20+ for it (although the picture of Adam with a hard on, which is shown on the Althouse post, suggests otherwise). But if it's not intended as mockery, what is its intended purpose? To make the Judeao/Christian scriptures accessible to a broader audience? You could buy the whole Bible (on Amazon, through the Althouse portal) for a quarter to a half of that price.
You can get in more trouble for drawing an unflattering picture of a gay couple than for drawing an unflattering picture of Yahweh.
Crumb did GENESIS because a friend suggested he do it and could probably get paid well to do it. It is not in he least mocking.
Crumb moved to France because his wife wanted to do so. He had no personal impulse to move there.
Philip K. Dick is my other artistic hero. Crumb's depiction of Philip K. Dick's "valis" experience is depicted as Dick related the story. One cannot notice a pendent on a woman's necklace without looking in the direction of her bosom. (Dick was into women, so he may well have been staring at her cleavage.) Sheesh!
The whole religion of global warming is a re-interpretation of Genesis. We are still a Christian society, even if a lot, maybe most, of us are Christian Atheists.
"We've got to get ourselves back to the garardann.." - Joni Mitchell, Woodstock
"it's pretty obvious that it's not at the right taste level."
Ha! Good one, Althouse.
What's obvious is that it's ambiguous, as in, not laudatory enough. Can't have that.
Honest to god.
I thought the guy was dead.
"By the way, Hillary is one of these ex-hippie chicks from the 60s...."
Hillary was NEVER a hippie chick.
"I know people like Crumb. I knew lots of people like Crumb in Boulder, Colorado in the late 60s and 70s when I lived there. Boulder was swarming with them. I found them tiresome then, I find them tiresome now."
I doubt very much you knew swarms of people like Crumb, now or then. Your statement shows you know very little about him.
"I'll have to take your word that there's nothing in the Crumb comic book that mocks the scripture, because I'm certainly not going to pay $20+ for it (although the picture of Adam with a hard on, which is shown on the Althouse post, suggests otherwise)."
That's not from GENESIS. That's from an earlier short story he did about Adam and Eve. It was more humorous. Crumb says when he read through all of GENESIS in the Bible he decided a straight depiction of it would better convey its deep weirdness than a humorous take on it.
Dick rejected the idea of objective reality. Somehow I have no trouble imaging he is one of Comrade Cookies favorites.
In the 20’s there was live music everywhere in the States.... The current pop music in the Western world is just plain god-awful.
So, Crumb is a bitter old man, lamenting the music he prefers to the "current pop music" he doesn't like.
Every city in America has "live music every night" - if small towns don't always [more do than he thinks, I suspect], that's not meaningful to most of the US, since it's rather more urban than in the 20s.
Jesus. We live in a world where for the cost of the internet connection they already have, everyone in America can listen to essentially any music they want at any time, and he's complaining "but it's not the live music of the 20s!".
He might as well be complaining that people interact via the Internet rather than by phone calls, or know people who live more than two miles away from them, unlike in The Olden Days. Different things are bad and scary!
Why do people listen to him? He wasn't that good in the 60s, and he hasn't improved.
(Important? Influential? Yes.
Good? No.)
@Sigvald:
Yes, Crumb would laughlingly (but seriously) refer to himself as a "bitter old man," as he was a self-described "bitter young man." So?
Crumb's point is that there was a time when ordinary people all over the country played instruments and made their own music. They were active participants with other people in a social and creative endeavor. People bought sheet music they way they today buy (or download for free) records, as they took the sheet music home and played the popular songs themselves on their pianos and other personal instruments. He contrasts this with today, where fewer ordinary people play instruments or perform with their family members or neighbors in musical get-togethers, as they passively consume the music produced by others. He's making a point--agree with him or not--about social behavior and creation of one's own entertainment, not about how available music was to listen to then compared to
now.
"He might as well be complaining that people interact via the Internet rather than by phone calls...."
A more apt analogy would be that complaining that people interact via the internet rather than in person.
What makes you think people, in general, listen to Crumb? Most are completely unaware of who he is. Those who are aware and who are interested in him may listen to what he has to say...this doesn't mean they all agree with his all or any of his opinions.
"Dick rejected the idea of objective reality."
He did not. In fact, he said, "Reality is that which, when you stop believing in it, doesn't go away."
Rather, he explored how difficult objective reality could be to discern, given that every person walks around in his or her own personal reality, and groups of people had their own collective realities, and these multiple internal and collective realities were constantly colliding with each other and with the surrounding external reality. He explored how these various realities bled into each other, distorted each other, how individual or collective realities could overpower other individual and collective realities, or even affect the external reality.
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