R. Crumb Means Some Offense
nytimes.com
nytimes.com
https://i.pinimg.com/736x/0a/95/97/0a95973f25e055a10a4e29b03...
https://theslingsandarrows.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/08/Th...
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.
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.
(Oddly, mid-way through the article is an image of six of the 12 panels but in black & white.)
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...
The documentary is absolutely fascinating, if just for the window into his family's life, if not for his work. Highly recommend.
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.
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.
Maybe "cancelling" is a cheap word for a more complex set of phenomenon than you're treating it as.
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.
There are no twitter moral police, there are just opinions you don't like.
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.
But with his oeuvre it is unlikely Disney will hire him any time soon.
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.
YMMV.
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.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lemon_Incest
[2] https://www.crikey.com.au/2010/12/13/rundle-assange-accuser-...
[3] https://nypost.com/2021/10/01/katie-couric-reveals-herself-a...
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 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.").
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.
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.
Or that's my opinion of it. Good or bad it's here to stay for at least a few more years.
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.
That seems like quite a stretch — and I would say built on a questionable premise.
That's not even an incest one
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.
"This is not a fantasy. They dwell among us!" https://i.imgur.com/9tituT7.png
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.
I think that was the point of the OP. Crumb is clearly fascinated and taken by women.
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.
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.
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.
As a society, we need to come together and move past things like curriculum-based trauma. Not good for anyone.
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.
https://www.michigandaily.com/news/daily-investigation-finds...
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.
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They're Made out of Meat - Terry Bisson
https://www.mit.edu/people/dpolicar/writing/prose/text/think...
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.
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.
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.
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.
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!
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?
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.
[1]: https://thehill.com/homenews/sunday-talk-shows/572926-gottli...
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.
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?
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.