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R. Crumb Means Some Offense
- CharlesW 4y agoThe page was unscrollable for me, so for anyone who might be having a similar problem: https://web.archive.org/web/20220919190513/https://www.nytimes.com/2022/09/15/t-magazine/r-crumb.html https://web.archive.org/web/20220919190513/https://www.nytim...
- nanna 4y agoI'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. https://i.pinimg.com/736x/0a/95/97/0a95973f25e055a10a4e29b03dcfaea6.jpg https://i.pinimg.com/736x/0a/95/97/0a95973f25e055a10a4e29b03...
- randombits0 4y agoCheck 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!
- bravura 4y agoHis 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 https://theslingsandarrows.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/08/The-Book-of-Genesis-int.jpg https://theslingsandarrows.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/08/Th...
- aidenn0 4y agoMy wife went to seminary and that was on a recommended reading list for one class; maybe the only time she borrowed a book from me for school.
- vintermann 4y agoAs 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.
- hhmc 4y agoHow did your supervisor react?
- nanna 4y agoHe 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.
- W-Stool 4y agoI 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.
- dieselgate 4y agoOh I wasn’t aware he no longer lived there
- avrionov 4y agoAt the end of the movie "Crumb" he moves to France.
- itronitron 4y agoI'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.
- maroonblazer 4y ago+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.
- retroafroman 4y agoJust want to agree, the film Crumb is a wild documentary,and totally worth watching for adults who have any interest in counter culture.
- lucas_membrane 4y agoBesides 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.
- SleepilyLimping 4y agoI 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.
- deleted 4y ago[deleted]
- majormajor 4y ago"Too old"? He's younger than Bill Cosby... Maybe "cancelling" is a cheap word for a more complex set of phenomenon than you're treating it as.
- standyro 4y agoR. Crumb was authentic. 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.
- js2 4y agoA picture is worth the first paragraph: https://imgur.com/h1D5Qo3 https://imgur.com/h1D5Qo3 (Oddly, mid-way through the article is an image of six of the 12 panels but in black & white.)
- deleted 4y ago[deleted]
- pfarrell 4y agoI was wondering if there was a licensing thing that prevented them from publishing it. I thought it was kind of weird too.
- nraynaud 4y agoFunny, I first heard of him from friends who live une the same village. I have met his daughter but not him.
- nemo44x 4y agoA 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.
- dale_glass 4y agoI 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.
- nemo44x 4y agoI 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.
- jrajav 4y ago
- olivermarks 4y agoI love Crumb. I have several t shirts from the official KOT site https://www.kotapparel.com 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...
- csours 4y agoI 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. --- They're Made out of Meat - Terry Bisson https://www.mit.edu/people/dpolicar/writing/prose/text/thinkingMeat.html https://www.mit.edu/people/dpolicar/writing/prose/text/think...
- robocat 4y ago“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 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.
- ReactiveJelly 4y agoI don't agree with him on some things, but somehow I do enjoy the blatant streak of femdom in his work.
- coolandsmartrr 4y agoThe 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.
- badpun 4y ago> 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.
- Tepix 4y agoHe moved to France in 1991 yet he doesn't speak french. Shocking.