I'll never forget how nine months before my PhD was due, I had to tell my supervisor that I'd not written a single line that could be kept, and that I'd come to the point of feeling 24/7 like R Crumb's "little guy that lives inside my brain" really was inside my brain.
Check out R. Crumb’s “illustrated Book of Genesis”. I thought for sure it was going to be a spoof or parody. Nope, he plays it straight and it’s even creepier than his other work! I love it!
His illustrations make it enjoyable to read 30 men who beget each other in turn, or what look like endless log statements of various valuables, like 50 oxen, 30 gold ingots, 50 calfs, &cetera
As I recall, he started out intending to satirize it, then decided that no, this is just so grand and alien that it was better to just let it speak for itself.
It's a good match for Crumb. There's a lot of naked Id in Genesis, and of course a lot of shapely women and intense bearded men.
The thing he did on Kafka, and the one on Philip K. Dick, were good in the same way. Crumb is well placed to understand those guys in ways most of us (fortunately, really) aren't.
He was like, yeah, so I'm not going to lengthen the misery by giving you an extension. Start writing.
I managed to get the thing in, writing till the day of submission itself. Doing it this way at least kept it cohesive, and I passed my viva without corrections (bar numerous spelling mistakes!) Not recommended for the mental health though.
I love Crumb. I have several t shirts from the official KOT site
https://www.kotapparel.com including the 'quest into the unknown' shirt that I wore a lot at the height of the pandemic, his genesis book and various other bits and pieces. The saddest thing for me is the whole 'just passing through' hippie/transient/hobo style hasn't aged well in an era of massive street living overwhelmingly caused by substance abuse and serious mental illness.
I'd love to see him address what he to some extent begat in the US before pushing off to live in rural, romantic France...
I am a Crumb fan and enjoyed this piece, although I guess I'm not surprised at some of his world views. The 1994 movie "Crumb" referenced in this article is really, really interesting. Fun fact: I've been through Winters, California many times on the way to Napa and had no idea he used to live there.
I'm not a Crumb fan but I highly recommend the "Crumb" documentary that you mention. It was very interesting hearing that he and his brothers were creating their own comic books, and there are some other useful insights to the creative process.
+1 for the film. I went to a showing in Atlanta where the director was doing a Q&A afterward. The ticket was free and I didn't have much interest in Crumb.
The documentary is absolutely fascinating, if just for the window into his family's life, if not for his work. Highly recommend.
Besides the movie, there was a musical stage play biography of Crumb and his characters about 40 years ago. The night it opened, he played in the orchestra whilst someone else played him on stage.
The article mentions Crumb living in France. He moved there right when he was being filmed for his biographical documentary "Crumb" (1994). It's considered one of the best documentaries ever made.
The film chronicles Crumbs rise to fame. As the film tries to understand Crumb's obsession with obscenities, it dives deeper through interviews with him and family members. There, we see a painful portrait of an American family; a temperamental father in the Marines traumatized from war, but conforming to the "pleasant" social decorum in 1950s American suburbia; a mother who becomes unstable after taking amphetamine for dieting. His brothers appear in the film, one of which take a cocktail of anti-depressants. (He committed suicide before the film completed.)
The NYT article touches upon his estrangement in France: "Crumb’s followed in the long line of artists and writers who have exiled themselves from America." Perhaps his emigration overseas is a way to distance himself from the place of painful memories.
> The article mentions Crumb living in France. He moved there right when he was being filmed for his biographical documentary "Crumb" (1994). It's considered one of the best documentaries ever made.
Yep, obligatory recomendation for that movie (which was re-surfaced to the wide public by Jordan Peterson BTW, as a great opportunity for an in-depth look into certain psychopathologies, exhibited by members of the Crumb family). It's one of my favorite movies, documentary or not. His life story is more interesting than most fiction screenplays.
I like how there's a degree of "too old to cancel" and R. Crumb is in there. I don't think people who bring up how messed up a dude he is can get much social currency from cancelling him, so he just kinda persists.
To be cancelled you have to first be part of acceptable society and want to remain there, which Crumb never was and never wanted to be. He's a creep who likes to make interesting cartoons, even if they are filled with misogyny and bitterness. He comes from a creepy family, which the film "Crumb" makes clear with Crumb's blessing. He's doing alright considering.
But it's funny. And how is it misogynistic? Misogyny means "hatred of women". As far as I can tell, he loves them, in his own strange way. Objectifying someone's physical attributes can go two ways. It can come from a place of hate, but it can also come from a place of obsessive love.
I think people see their own worst selves when they look at Crumb. His only crime is being honest enough to draw the dirty jokes that go through his mind. But this isn't a commentary on women, let alone a statement of hate. He's observing himself, from a distance, and unafraid to write and draw what he sees, regardless of how people think it reflects on him. He's always displayed a total rejection of ego... and it's just ego and hypocrisy which drives his critics.
Agreed. That diagram was downright wholesome. Appreciation for a woman’s body that doesn’t conform to typical beauty norms is, like, the opposite of misogyny.
I think this is the crux many people fail to understand: obsessive love is bad, too, if it is non-consensual. I think it's not entirely fair to describe Crumb's work as misogynist as it's intentionally so broadly obscene that singling out his portrayal of women feels incomplete and reductive.
Crumb is misogynist in that he clearly sees women as an "other" and objectifies them by obsessing about features he finds arousing and grotesquely stylizing those he dislikes. But unless you're specifically trying to write an academic paper on his portrayal of women, I don't think pointing out that his view on women is problematic is very insightful or helpful.
It's like pointing out the shoddy insulation of a house that's already completely engulfed in flames. Yes, the insulation is bad and maybe you can reclaim some of the rent from your landlord or sue the builders, but the entire house is burning down so who cares.
Crumb's work is a trash fire. The only question is what merit it has once you can get past the noxious fumes.
Obsessive love is bad if it leads to bad outcomes, but Crumb himself has been happily married for decades. It seems very judgmental to pile on criticism of the style of someone's obsession - when most of his own work is devoted to disentangling those obsessions. It's also unkind to pronounce his work a "trash fire". Surrounded by hypocrites who don't have the self-reflection, intellectual honesty, or skill to reveal their inner dichotomies and turmoil, who are we to criticize someone for trying to download their inner mess to the rest of us? Sure, he's an easy target, but it's obnoxiously priggish to deride the one guy who puts it in print while you and your neighbors have the same or worse obsessions that cannot be spoken or named.
I don't see a difference between me calling it a trash fire and you calling it his "inner mess". His work is intentionally jarring and offensive.
I think the more important aspect of my metaphor is that while these "noxious fumes" clearly create a barrier for his work, that doesn't mean there's nothing valuable within. It just means that it's harder to find out.
Phoebe Gloeckner, the author of the graphic novel “The Diary of a Teenage Girl” (2002) and an associate professor at the University of Michigan, was accused of “curriculum-based trauma” by students in a comics course, in part because she showed them Crumb’s work
As a society, we need to come together and move past things like curriculum-based trauma. Not good for anyone.
Broadly, I agree. I don't think removing a seminal artist like Crumb from a curriculum because some students are offended is at all good or appropriate.
However, when you read into the Gloeckner case it seems like the students weren't the only ones acting insufferable. The thing is if you're going to be teaching Crumb in an academic environment you have to be able to speak to the more challenging aspects of his work on an intellectual level. If even half of the allegations were true, Gloeckner wasn't justifying her curriculum academically, and she also wasn't behaving appropriately in and out of class for her position.
Usually means trying to disrupt someones employment or have them removed from being able to publish on the internet. These days it's powerful enough if a popular streamer is after you, they can have your domain name provider, email host, phone number provider, and infrastructure hosts shut you down which at that point you are gone.
I still don't get it. Would Serge Gainsborough have disappeared if Twitter were around in his time or would he have just told Twitter to foutre le camp and kept releasing albums?
As the other posters are implying, if you would continue doing what you were doing regardless of the rest of society's acceptance of your behavior, you are relatively immune to being cancelled. It only really works on people who require everyone else around them to help facilitate their actions
Cancelling only works if you depend on gatekeepers to reach an audience. E.g. Kevin Spacey is only cancelled insofar as he will not be hired for any major studio production - but he can still make his own independent movies for his own money.
Gatekeepers will only cancel an artist if they are more dependent on public opinion (i.e. advertising money and partnership) than on the income generated by the artist.
It is difficult to cancel an independent comic book artist because he is not depending on gatekeepers who are sensitive to public opinion.
It depends; the gatekeepers aren't just cultural. If someone gets you thrown off platforms and payment processors that you need in order to establish your independence and run a business, you get cancelled that way.
Only the already-big can become immune to this. If you're no one, small, or medium, you suddenly lose all ability to escape a network of other "problematics", so it becomes your only audience and limits your growth.
The question is would Serge's record company continue to release albums when placed under pressure. Would French TV continue to allow him to perform there? Would French radio continue to play his albums? Would he appear in French magazines and newspapers.
In those days when Serge was the enfant terrible the answer was clearly yes, they all would and they did. Today, I still strongly suspect they all would, at least in France. But what do I know of it?
How about the "next Serge" if such a phrase can have meaning. The person trying to get noticed with their work using youtube, soundcloud, myspace, their own domain etc. How would it play out if they released something as unsettling as "Lemon Incest" in duet with their under-aged daughter? [1].
Accusation is also a hell of a powerful thing. The prevailing zeitgeist of "believe the accuser" is understandable given historical context but seems to be equally capable of damage to the innocent. It seems someone would accuse something to supercharge the outrage machine and that accusation could even be true. And it sticks impacting that persons' access to something as basic as the financial system even when it seems pretty unlikely that it is true, eg Julian Assange. I guess some people still believe he's a rapist but the accusation has massively impacted his life and work even if it came from someone who literally wrote about the need to take revenge on former lovers. [2] Among a series of other pieces of information that seemed to strongly undermine her accusations. Being "likable" like Matt Lauer and Katie Couric seems to be more important in such things - which whatever one thinks of their relative merits as humans or even as "the accused" it just doesn't quite seem like justice according to law. [3]
So, I think we can only speculate about what would happen in France. As we can if the "next Serge" were born and raised in the USA.
Full disclosure: I think I'd cross the road to avoid all of Gainsbourg, Assange, Lauer and Couric. I can't imagine liking any of them at all. The cancelling business bothers me. Law reform seems to me to be the correct place to address shortcomings in the rule of law. The endrun around it will be abused by the powerful against the less so. The importance of the rule of law is that the strongest might not always get their way. As corruption rages, the agents of the strongest aren't your friends the way they claim to be by standing against those who are the objects of the current edition of "the hate" be it 2 minutes or more.
Assange the person can make my skin crawl while I still acknowledge the ideas - he really was more right about the Afghanistan war than what I was reading in the NYT, WJS, WaPo, ToL, Guardian etc. And it really did greatly annoy a lot of people with power and/or money fueled vested interest in a quite different view of that war than the one he was publicizing - and we now know how it all turned out.
I am a Gainsbourg fan. When he pushed the boundaries he was both clever and artistic about it. The rest of the people you mention have no artistic integrity? I don't care anything about them, really.
I don't know, I am on the fence about Woody Allen so I'm probably hypocritical. I grew up liking his stuff and so find it hard to despise him now. "Manhattan" might (now) be his most cringey film but it has one of the best closing lines of any film ("You gotta have a little faith in people.").
Canceling is when a person with power experiences social consequences from their actions similar to the consequences a person without power is likely to experience from a similar action.
Canceling happens more often to people with no power, for all sorts of unjustified reasons, and often based on unfounded accusation leveled by people with more power than they have. You just don't read about it, so don't perceive it that way until someone makes up a totally false story about you or someone you know, and tries to get people to stop working with you. The problem with cancelling people had nothing to do with whether or not it's justified; it has to do with setting a pattern where anyone can ruin someone else's life by making up anything, and encouraging people to believe it without checking for themselves.
I think it's totally possible today, because if you take away peoples' access to payment processors (Paypal, Venmo, Stripe, Mastercard, Visa) and platforms to grow (Instagram, Patreon, Kickstarter, etc) you keep them from getting to a point of gaining legacy, tenure, etc. Crumb can survive as self-employed because he has a name and value that supercedes canceling attempts.
An artist or creator that doesn't have that already is just as vulnerable because they have no weight to throw around. Independence or being underground doesn't matter when you need the same infrastructure as everyone else to survive.
There's little value in cancelling Crumb, because he's not influencing modern media or the impressionable youth, and he's not influencing neo facists. The whole point of cancel culture seems to be hitting the biggest problematic targets and avoiding the whole "don't meet your heroes" dilemma before fans naturally come to that crossroads. It's also a practicing example of "sunlight sanitizes" low ideologies.
Or that's my opinion of it. Good or bad it's here to stay for at least a few more years.
If you've ever read Crumb's comic books, he was fully cancelable in the 1970s. He has always existed outside the mainstream and thus has never relied on mainstream distribution or publicity. If anything, he's a little more acceptable to the mainstream now because hardcore pornography is more widespread and grudgingly accepted these days.
To be sure, I am not questioning the "pornographic" aspect of some of Crumb's work.
Hard-core pornography is "accepted" by society today? Is that true?
Because hard-core pornography is accepted by society today, we now appreciate Robert Crumb more?
I'm not seeing it.
Robert Crumb was accepted (by some) back in the 60's, 70's, etc. long before the internet and PornHub.
Robert Crumb is rejected (by some) even today.
If he is more popular today than he was 5 decades ago it's because he is an elder statesman of sorts with a rich (storied) and wide body of work. He is an icon of an era and a movement both culturally and artistically. He is an amazing artist with an identifiable and unique style.
It's not about age. It's about whether you piss off the people paying your bills and/or gatekeepers who can restrict your ability to reach the people who pay your bills. I'll hazard a guess that Crumb fans aren't overly invested in ideological purity.
That said, I think “canceling” has more meaning behind it than you might think.
Bill Cosby was an inauthentic and visible symbol of the black middle class and “canceled” among media types because his messy real life persona clashed with his clean cut image. Age didn’t factor in. I think many also had an ax to grind.
These days, to be “canceled”, I think you have to be profoundly inauthentic and ultimately accept the blame when the Twitter mob comes. Plenty of media figures have woven their careers to even embrace the image of fighting the Twitter moral police.
Yeah, hard to imagine people like R. Crumb (or Ed "Big Daddy" Roth, others) worrying what the hell Twitter thought. Some artists (lets add Frank Zappa?) would probably have relished the publicity.
What is your point? Twitter isn't the government and doesn't carry a gun and doesn't get qualified immunity when they shoot people. But you knew that, right? Or are you one of those lovely people who thinks Twitter removing Qanon/Russian propaganda violates the first amendment?
The twitterati may not carry guns but they can certainly have a huge impact on people's lives and livelihoods, and while they don't explicitly have qualified immunity they often benefit from selective enforcement.
"canceling" means getting kicked off of social media platforms and fired. if you're not on social media platforms and self-employed then you can't really be "cancelled" at all.
It apparently can also include losing your email hosting, website hosting, domain name registration, payment processor, or book deal, and having your independent business spammed with negative reviews. But, yeah, if you don't use the internet and do not have income (and don't associate with anyone who does... because they might be targeted as well) you really can't be canceled at all.
There are several cases of people having their email and phone number through google and having them both shut down at the same time. Effectively locking them out of everything including personal banking and government services.
It's not at all a marketing slogan. The woke people have a problem though. To cancel someone properly they have to possess a desire to stay in the social strata they are in. For example, a developer makes a Python joke and loses their job over it. Those developers had a desire to stay in their industry and thus canceling worked on them. "Cancel culture" is the term for the phenomenon of people actively looking for opportunities to cancel someone. I've seen it at two companies now where people seem to be deliberately offended at something no matter how mundane. This is the "culture" part of "cancel culture".
Crumb doesn't care what social strata he is in. There are plenty of people like him who don't care. These types of people are impossible to cancel because no matter what social mechanism you use to bully them it will not work. It is far easier to cancel someone who needs some social status to eat than it is to cancel someone who couldn't care how he eats.
I don't know what happens on other planes of existence, but here on earth, humans think with a brain made of flesh. We want that fleshy brain to find and use good facts to make good decisions. We live in an information age. It feels like we have access to good information and we can use that information to do good things. But we're stuck with humans with brains made of flesh.
Humans think in narratives. Narratives can have facts and opinions. They can come from people we trust or people we hate. When someone else has a narrative that you find disgusting, just remember they have a brain made of meat.
“Know then that that race of the Galaxy originated in a manner as mysterious as it was obscene, for it resulted from the general pollution of a certain heavenly body. There arose noxious exhalations and putrid excrescences, and out of these was spawned the species known as paleface — though not all at once. First, they were creeping molds that slithered forth from the ocean onto land, and lived by devouring one another, and the more they devoured themselves, the more of them there were, and then they stood upright, supporting their globby substance by means of calcareous scaffolding” … “Whereupon the sage took a blob of oily filth, dust, crud and rancid grease obtained from the innards of the most decrepit mechanisms, and with this he befouled the prince’s vaulted chest, vilely caked his gleaming face and iridescent brow, and worked till all the limbs no longer moved with a musical sound, but gurgled like a stagnant bog. And then the sage took chalk and ground it, mixed in powdered rubies and yellow oil, and made a paste; with this he coated Ferrix from head to toe, giving an abominable dampness to the eyes, making the torso cushiony, the cheeks blastular, adding various fringes and flaps of the chalk patty here and there, and finally he fastened to the top of the knightly head a clump of poisonous rust. Then he brought him before a silver mirror and said: “Behold!” Ferrix peered into the mirror and shuddered, for he saw there not himself, but a hideous monster, the very spit and image of a paleface with an aspect as moist as an old spider-web soaked in the rain, flaccid, drooping, doughy—altogether nauseating.” from an English translation of Stanisław Lem’s The Cyberiad - Prince Ferrix and the Princess Crystal https://fb2.top/the-cyberiad-294133/read/part-7
The problem with human thought (whether it were based on meat or matrices) is the path dependencies. Our logic, facts, functions, and emotions come from our history, and we are yet poor at correcting flaws within ourself and our society.
A thing that modern, typically liberal people and journals don’t understand about people like Crumb is they come from a background of not trusting authority. And they conflate 1960s counter culture of not trusting Nixon and the mainstream conservative culture with trusting liberal authority. And for some, sure. But for many it’s about not trusting authority regardless of which side wields it.
So his Covid paranoia is totally consistent with a worldview of not trusting authority ever and never assuming that there’s a group of “good guys”. It’s difficult for The NY Times editor to understand because they are in fact part of the authority and want a particular side of it to be it.
When I was perusing Robert Crumb I assumed he was part of a movement called "Underground Comics". It was about breaking the norms of what Disney would publish. The "normal" in those days was Nixon and Vietnam war. Pot-smoking was a terrible unpatriotic crime.
There wasn't really much other comics for adults. I don't mean sexually explicit but just something serious which wouldn't appeal to kids. But there was some sex which was refreshing. Still it was always (?) not about being pornographic but being thought-provoking, questioning the sexual mores of the post-war puritan America. Even questioning the misogynic world-view I would say. Crumb put a spotlight on it, not promote it.
It’s about sacred cows, not policy or w/e you or I may agree with. I should be able to and even feel obliged to question and criticize whatever is considered conventional or the company line regardless of which group or organization it’s coming from.
Power is power and needs lights shines on it constantly.
I get it fine in the sense that it's a consistent and easy to understand viewpoint.
I don't get it in the sense that I think it's a terribly stupid way to approach the world, with an excess of dogmatism to the point it cripples your own ability to function like a normal person. We live in a society, trust is absolutely a requirement. If you can't trust any authority, either something is wrong with you, or you live in a really badly broken place and should consider moving at the earliest opportunity.
And sure, conspiracies exist, but you need to run some sort of analysis and try and figure out whether a conspiracy in the given situation would be at all viable. Eg, covid19 would be an absolutely terrible way of doing a world-wide conspiracy. Eg, if medical companies wanted to make lots of cash there are far easier and less noticeable ways of doing it.
I don’t know why you’re suddenly suggesting that being skeptical of any and all power is to be a subscriber of conspiracy theories. I can totally agree with a point of view or policy of authority but that doesn’t mean I just trust everything or anything without sufficient evidence and criticism.
We love to talk about “critical thinking” but when the critical eye puts its gaze upon what todays authority deems sacred, it’s dismissed as not trusting “the science” or some other such midwit platitude.
With you up until the anti-intellectualism. Science is basically one and the same with critical thinking, a key feature of it is being assailable by itself. Casting doubt on "the science" speaks to me of unwillingness to accept scientific conclusions or to do the work necessary to question those conclusions with the same due diligence they were formed under.
“The Science” is hardly ever it though. It’s an appeal to authority much like appeals to “The Scripture” when most often what claims to be “science” is not actually. And as if Science itself is a guarantee of anything or that it’s even a thing but rather a process to discover truth, or at least what isn’t.
No one in possession of actual truth and fact from the scientific process ever had to make a claim simply that their science was evidence enough.
And I’ll add the entire field of science is eager to have anything that claims itself as knowledge and truth to be challenged and poked and prodded. For the truth knows no false kings!
"Science is basically one and the same with critical thinking, a key feature of it is being assailable by itself."
Why was the science behind investigating a possible lab-leak hypothesis of the origins of COVID suppressed? Why did the purportedly evidence-based medical community decide that mass public gatherings to protest racism was safe, while closing schools and beaches was not?
The problem is the applied political interpretation of Science by appointed bureaucrats and Big Pharma. Like the idea of "social distance" which has no scientific grounds whatsoever, but was dicatated from above by Scott Gottlieb at the FDA. In truth he admitted "nobody knows where it came from". It just sounded nice, and they went with it.[1]
But when I question the utility of plexiglass screens at check-out counters (which I would and _still_ just need to crane my neck around so I can actually hear what the clerk is saying), I'm treated like a heretic for not "trusting" science. What the hell is that? The problem is that I'm right, and most other people believe what's on TV and artificially "trending" on Twitter, and those media hijack good-natured peoples' sense of trust and deferral to credentialism.
There's a significant difference between believing Covid19 was cooked up by the producers of the vaccines/therapeutics for it and having a latent skepticism towards unaccountable power. You would make more friends not to blur the line between your perception of stupidity and the basic accounting arithmetic of trust.
Once again a conspiracy theory, as if that’s the only possible alternative to the rule of authority.
Even if you trust that Covid-19 was dangerous (it wasn’t really but hindsight, etc) and that every action of the regime was justified and in good faith (lol), what’s inappropriate about distrusting the authority on the next step?
Especially when said authority had 1000 different contradictions in their rule that everyone could see but only those not willingly engaged in a political game of power.
If you’re honest with yourself you know it’s not about truth anywhere as much as power and that no side of anything is righteous or even anywhere near honest.
> Even if you trust that Covid-19 was dangerous (it wasn’t really but hindsight, etc) …
In the UK: Killed 200,000 - would have got 500,000 without extraordinary measures and vaccination development.
Are you using a definition of dangerous that somehow discounts mass casualties provided, I assume, younger people aren’t significantly affected and economic activity isn’t seriously disrupted?
Well put. It's a shame but also an appreciable motivator of careful thought that this explanation, one which many understand intuitively, seems on the edge of what many will tolerate to think.
