September 19, 2022

Why did the NYT send a reporter to some obscure part of France to interview R. Crumb?

And why did this article published on September 15th only become apparent to me days later — when I'm always keeping an eye out for articles about R. Crumb? And why am I reading through paragraphs and paragraphs of the article — "R. Crumb Means Some Offense Even from his refuge in France, the comics artist still makes America’s pulse race" — without finding anything new or barely anything that I don't know from the 1995 documentary "Crumb"?

There's something odd here!

Here's the answer. It's way down at the end of the article. He's got a new comic, “The Crumb Family Covid Exposé” — that's reason to cover him — but it's not what people carrying the official message want us to read — even though they trekked to France find out about:
Crumb caught Covid-19 last fall but, well before that, he’d developed extreme conspiracy theories about the pandemic. He calls himself “resolutely anti-vax.” In conversation...

Maybe if we go to France and talk to him, he'll clarify himself back into the community of good-thinkers....

... he is fixated on his distrust of the medical community....

Oh, no!!! 

... though in his work, he doesn’t present this worldview as correct, or even necessarily valid.

Come on. Tease this out. He's a character in his comics, but that's not really him, right? He's making fun of that guy, the him that's not him, and he really must — in some important way worth going to France for — trust the experts who tell us to get vaccinated.

He seems to be dissecting a contrarian impulse in himself the same way he used to look at his twisted sexual fantasies.

Yeah. That's it! His distorted thoughts about the vaccine happened in a mind that generated intense and weird sexual fantasies!

His wife, a cancer survivor, is vaccinated and, at one point in the comic, believing the shot has made her arm magnetic, he tries to see if a spoon will stick to her. “Is this a crazy person?” he asks of himself, drawing himself very much like a crazy person.

So his doubts about the vaccine were portrayed — by the artist himself — as crazy. 

He’s still willing, in other words, to make himself ugly and unlikable in his work.

Ugly and unlikable? Do we hate anti-vaxxers? 

There’s a question that recurs in a lot of Crumb’s art, which I found myself wondering about as he dismissed the Covid vaccines to me as merely a way to enrich Big Pharma.

Wait a minute now. You're revealing the conversation that you went all the way to France to have but not telling us much about his ideas. You want to use him, but you don't want his actual opinions to break through. I would like to have a conversation with him about what he thinks about what the NYT did with the access he gave. 

It’s some variation of “What’s wrong with this guy?” In one comic, called “Anal Antics” (1971), the byline is “R. ‘What-Does-It-All-Mean?’ Crumb,” and the plot features Snoid living inside a woman’s posterior. In the first panel, there’s a subtitle: “More sick humor which serves no purpose.”

So questioning the vaccine is — you're supposed to see — on a level with living inside a woman's ass. Idle nonsense (except to the extent the drawings are detailed and fascinating). 

“I guess the question,” I say to him, “is ‘what is the purpose?’”

Nice of the Times — M.H. Miller— to offer the great artist an opportunity to step away from his heresy.

“That’s a question that I often imagine being asked of me by the tribunal that I’m in front of,” he says, “up there on their dais high above me. And I just have to stand there like this.” He shrugs exaggeratedly. 

God is my judge. 

36 comments:

Mike (MJB Wolf) said...

Hmmm. A deliciously Stoic response from R at the end. You just never know where the DNC Media will trip over a hero and bring them to our attention, reluctantly.

Carol said...

Sounds like he's struck a rich vein for comedy. I can't wait to see it!

Joe Smith said...

"So questioning the vaccine is — you're supposed to see — on a level with living inside a woman's ass."

Is that like the King of England wanting to be a tampon?

I didn't know Crumb was still alive...

Achilles said...

The Myocarditis epidemic comes.

Hopefully this breaks Big Pharma for good.

Owen said...

Is it too banal to comment that at the outer bound of conventional thought there is a tough compressed shell of inviolable beliefs and expectations; and there are characters like R Crumb, peck-peck-pecking away at it. Where is the dividing line between "meta" and "crazy"?

I always liked Crumb's outrageousness but I couldn't live there.

Pass the popcorn.

Carol said...

So you can't even buy it at Amazon. It's artwork. La-de-da.

Yeah Joe Blow was gross and very shocking, and I preferred other characters like Flakey Foont, Schumann the Human and Hippie Chick.

Schumann spends his life searching for God, but when he funds Him his head shrinks and he runs away.

Lol.

Lloyd W. Robertson said...

Swift uses a character called Gulliver. Not exactly Swift. In a way the real Swift can say I'm better than that guy. What that guy regards as dogmatically true (the Houyhnhnms or rational horses are simply superior, we should all try to emulate them) I can say I regard as thought-provoking, a way to get ourselves to a place that might be both intellectually and morally superior. But Swift never joins the mob that says Gulliver is simply crazy.

ccscientist said...

You have to be really stoned to appreciate Crumb. Maybe even tripping.

tim in vermont said...

He does the best drawings of women of anybody, imho. It’s plain he really loves women from them.

Lurker21 said...

The extreme conspiracy theories weren't wrong, but they weren't telling the whole truth. Blindly following the public health bureaucracy may be as much a threat to the public health as entirely ignoring them would be.

The documentary left an ugly impression. I felt that in a way Crumb had abandoned his brother and let him die. Over the years, I've learned that people and families are more complicated than that, but still, I can't like the guy, and his stupid cartoons don't make it any easier.

Keep on truckin' anyway.

Robert Cook said...

Crumb is great and he has always been compelled to vomit up his own beliefs, feelings, and experiences of the world with rare, even self-damaging honesty. He also has always acknowledged that he cannot assume others will see the world the same as he does, and that he may just be a crank. Here is my homage to/copy of Crumb's cover to ZAP Comix # 0. (Scroll to bottom of the page.)

bobby said...

They love to think of themselves as transgressive and edgy, but they really hate transgression and edginess. They're the mainstream now, but their self-image hasn't caught up with them.

Robert Cook said...

"You have to be really stoned to appreciate Crumb. Maybe even tripping."

Not in the least.

Temujin said...

At this point one has to ask, Who doesn't question the vaccine? At least on some level. I mean...it's not a vaccine. It prevents nothing. We know that now. At best its a therapeutic and even of that we don't have enough evidence. We have strong believers telling us that, Yes, I got the virus, but it would have been so much better if I had NOT been vaccinated. Yeah? How exactly do you know that?

And if you do follow the science, you'd do as many European countries are now doing and not allowing it for kids. They've seen enough of their young men and women fall dead or end up in the hospital with enlarged hearts or other weird new maladies for young people. So they determined that, if it's not an actual vaccine, and the side effects can and have been deadly to younger people especially, why would we put them into our kids? (Our betters here haven't yet stumbled over the facts.)

So my question is, how embarrassingly numb-headed to you have to be to, at this point, be denigrating anyone who questions the 'vaccine'? At this point it seems the sane reaction.

Robert Cook said...

"I felt that in a way Crumb had abandoned his brother and let him die."

How so? His brother was an adult, was living with their mother, and had been on psych meds for years. Crumb had his own life--elsewhere--and he had moved to France when his brother committed suicide. What should he have done? What could he have done? Do you assume the siblings or family members of all suicides have likewise "abandoned" their self-deceased sons, daughters, parents, or spouses, etc.?

Lem the artificially intelligent said...

Crumb: Just when I thought I was out… they pull me back in.

Howard said...

Not my thing, Crumb. I believe he is brilliant and am glad we live in a world where a guy like him can be so successful.

John henry said...

The fascist did everything possible not to credit pdjt withe the vaccine.

In a little bit they are going to start blaming him for all the problems caused by it.

This is prep work

John stop fascism vote republican Henry

PJW Gent said...

Re: "God is my judge."
Truer words never spoken.

SDaly said...

Now I am thinking about full-body flossing again. That one small part of the movie, not even about Crumb himself, destroyed Crumb for me.

Unknown said...

Thank you Ann, I had no idea that R Crumb was on youtube but thats where I will be for a while if anyone is looking for me. The hippie era was the best time of my life

Narr said...

Angelfood McSpade, where you at?

What reclusive artist will be tracked down and pinned to the NYT's display board next?

Whatever his family situation was, no outsider can understand. We all know this unless we are complete fatheads, or very young.



Kay said...

Looks like R Crumb is not a fan of the Donald’s operation warp speed vaccines.

walter said...

I thought he would end up in Brazil.

Lurker21 said...

Do you assume the siblings or family members of all suicides have likewise "abandoned" their self-deceased sons, daughters, parents, or spouses, etc.?

I felt that Crumb had let his brother down when I saw the film a quarter century ago. As I said, I've come to understand that people and families are more complicated than I knew back then. But the reason I was repelled was a conviction that one shouldn't expose and exploit one's dysfunctional family to make a movie. If one does go public with how fucked up one's family is one does incur greater responsibilities towards them, which is a big reason why people don't usually participate is such films.

I don't blame Jacqueline Kennedy for how her Bouvier cousins were living at Grey Gardens. If she had a role in making the documentary about them, though, I would think a lot less of her. I understand that some people just can't be helped, but you don't appear in a documentary about your messed up relatives, and then take off to France. If socialism is about ducking our responsibilities towards people rather than trying to do something about them, it does explain some things.

Jupiter said...

Is dis a system?

Jupiter said...

"So my question is, how embarrassingly numb-headed to you have to be to, at this point, be denigrating anyone who questions the 'vaccine'? At this point it seems the sane reaction."

You're behind the curve, my friend. At THIS point, the sane reaction is to say, "Why did they suppress hydroxychloroquine and ivermectin as early treatments, and instead tell sick people to go home, do nothing, and come back to the hospital when they were dying?". And the answer is, that if there were an effective treatment, it would not have been legally possible to issue an "emergency use authorization" for the "vaccine". So they lied about the effective early treatments, and millions died. And Pharma made billions, and so did the hospitals. That's who is running the federal "health" agencies. That's who is running the hospitals. The people who did that.

Robert Cook said...

"But the reason I was repelled was a conviction that one shouldn't expose and exploit one's dysfunctional family to make a movie. If one does go public with how fucked up one's family is one does incur greater responsibilities towards them, which is a big reason why people don't usually participate is such films."

Well, it wasn't Crumb's idea to make the movie, and he resisted it when his friend Terry Zwigoff began trying to convince Crumb to let him (Zwigoff) make a documentary about him and his family. Zwigoff had made a well-received independent film and he thought this would make him a player in Hollywood. (It did...he later directed GHOST WORLD, ART SCHOOL CONFIDENTIAL, and BAD SANTA.) Crumb did finally give in to Zwigoff's entreaties. However, you'll notice Crumb's two sisters are nowhere to be found in the movie...they declined to participate. Crumb's brothers, mother, wife and son agreed to be involved.

wildswan said...

RC Cook
You might like the Ink Black Heart by JK Rowling. I thought the book's premise of a person becoming wealthy and successful by drawing bones and hearts and ghosts in Highgate Cemetery as a Youtube show was a bit over the top but now I see it was merely catching up to the Nineties.

Quaestor said...

Arrrr... Who this side of Davy Jones' Locker gives two doubloons about that scurvy lubber?

Quaestor said...

R. Cook writes, "Not in the least."

How about, You have to be really stoned to appreciate Crumb. Maybe even tripping, or possessed of no degree of civilized taste.

Inclusive enough for ye?


Mikey NTH said...

If Althouse didn't mention R. Crumb I would forget about him. Late 1960s early 1970s counterculture, Keep on Truckin' and that's it.

Born in the mid-1960s he was always something for my older cousins that I didn't quite get. And now I still don't really get it. Detailed but ugly cartoons about things people and events.

Especially the ugly, everything was ugly. Maybe it was a mesh of him and the time that there was a click?

Static Ping said...

There's little question that the vaccines enriched Big Pharma big time. There's also little question that the hostility to any alternative forms of treatment was as illogical as it was fanatical. When people are acting bizarrely for no purpose, a conspiracy theory is pretty much the best case scenario. The worst case is they are doing this because they believe their own insanity, or they are simply cruel.

Saint Croix said...

At this point one has to ask, Who doesn't question the vaccine? At least on some level. I mean...it's not a vaccine. It prevents nothing. We know that now.

You know this, I don't know this.

I'm vaccinated. I'm also a (really happy) Novavax shareholder. Bought shares at $6 and $4. Stock ran all the way up to $330.

The insane politicalization of the vaccines by the Democrats was really awful. When Trump was president (and funding vaccine research via OWS), nobody on the left trusted the vaccines! They all said how suspicious they were!

When Biden took over, he took credit for all the vaccines, and then mocked anybody who didn't take a vaccine.

The vaccine programs that Trump funded!

I think the Democrats were despicable for politicizing COVID-19. It was basically the main event that caused Trump to lose support.

I always felt -- and I still feel -- that Trump's dramatic funding of vaccine research was critically important. He should have gotten credit for this. And if Biden and Harris were decent people (and really wanted to unify the country) they would have (and should have) credited Trump for OWS and vaccine research. Then a lot of Republicans would have vaccinated.

Biden and Harris don't give a shit about Republicans who aren't vaccinated. They have no interest in protecting our lives.

I loathe them. You want to unify the country (as you claim?). Find one nice thing to say about Trump, you lying motherfuckers.

You want Republicans to vaccinate? (They don't give a shit). But if you really want Republicans to vaccinate, the fucking media should point out that Donald Trump is responsible for OWS. Not the fuckers who ultimately took credit for it.

Robert Cook said...

”How about, You have to be really stoned to appreciate Crumb. Maybe even tripping, or possessed of no degree of civilized taste.

“Inclusive enough for ye?”


None of that is true at all.

Narayanan said...

September 19, 2022
Why did the NYT send a reporter to some obscure part of France to interview R. Crumb?
=============
Q: are there more such resourceful reporters at NYT who can scam their editors into paying for vacations - I say good on yer nates

from Professora analysis most of the article could have been written even before leaving for France with codicil paragraph on France revelations