Hacker News Reader

Comment by narrator | Hacker News Reader

Anyone see the documentary about him: "Crumb" (1994)? Everyone in his family is a little off, but back in those days, you just did the best you could with what you got and if you were a gifted artist like Crumb, you turned being an odd ball into a career.

View on HN

I strongly recommend the documentary. But "a little off" is an understatement. By the time of the documentary, his highly intelligent brother Charles is still living with his amphetamine-addicted mother in his late 40ies and rarely leaves his childhood bedroom. He admits on camera that he has "homosexual pedophiliac tendencies" and fantasized about killing Robert as a teenager, and complains that he cannot have an erection anymore because of his medication. Tragically, Charles killed himself shortly after filming of the documentary wrapped. Crumbs other brother Maxon [0], an accomplished and highly talented painter who earns money as a beggar on the streets, tries to find some peace of mind by living a zen-like life in celibacy, in a decrepit hotel room, full of meditation on a bed of nails, and is struggling with his intense sexual desire, several sexual harassment suits, and the fact that he cannot physically have sex, because the pleasure is so intense for him that it triggers epileptic seizures. All three brothers appear to have problems with extreme sexual desire, and Robert is the only one who seems to be able to function at all, although the documentary shows him several times in a trance-like, babbling state induced by the sight of a woman (in older age, he once said in an interview that he is "no longer a slave to a raging libido" [1]).

[0] https://www.sfgate.com/entertainment/article/Still-in-the-sh...

[1] https://www.theguardian.com/books/2019/mar/07/robert-crumb-i...

Wasn't one of the brothers also a (heterosexual) stalker with an Asian fetish and a habit of drawing art about it? Presumably that was Maxon. It's been a long time since I've seen the documentary.

TFA is also frankly pretty underhanded in talking up Crumb's love of inter-war blues recordings while saying very little about his forays into anti-black racism, including one example which is so notorious that the Crumb documentary confronts him directly about it.

Or more directly, his art often portrayed black people in caricature.

>> his art often portrayed black people in caricature

His art often portrayed people in caricature.

If the subjects are rarely white and mostly black, is it not fair to say that he often portrayed black people in caricature?

Similar to saying 'Van Gogh often painted sunflowers' instead of 'Van Gogh often painted flowers'.

A majority of Van Gogh's flower painting are not of sunflowers.

A majority of Robert Crumbs paintings are not caricatures, but he did paint caricatures and the subjects were often black.

There's a fuzzy but very real distinction between caricature in general and frankly racist caricature. Quite a few of Crumb's drawings of black people have been clearly over that line, and (polite warning) it would be pretty rash to try to deny that.

That is putting it mildly. Crumbs art is ridiculously over the top offensive.

Of course taboo-breaking was the point of underground comics.

the art was published underground because plenty of it was plenty offensive to lots of groups of people. .. that was the intention completely. Lots of R Crumb's art was controversial and outrageous by definition. Lots of reasonable and caring people had a lot of concern, volunteer censors appeared from many corners with torches and brimstone, and the art was published anyway.

Little mentioned is the fact that the three crumb brothers had two sisters. Neither of them agreed to take part in the movie, and very little is known about them.

One of them reportedly declined to take part because of his "crimes against women".

Along similar lines, Steve Buscemi's character Seymour in "Ghost World" (2001) is pretty clearly heavily inspired by Robert Crumb. Seymour collects old blues records and it put off by rock music, not to mention normal mainstream American culture. "Ghost World" was based on a comic book and was directed by Terry Zwigoff, the director of "Crumb".

The first record Enid looks at is actually by "R. Crumb and his Cheap Suit Serenaders" that Seymour directs her away from to another selection. Zwigoff was a member of that group.

Is that where the subplot of the chicken poster in that movie came from? I was just thinking about Ghost World as I was reading the comments above, thinking, "now that's a subject Hollywood doesn't want to touch anymore."

Also Seymor gets into trouble because of his fascination with vintage racist carricature.

I didn't know that about Buscemi's character.

Ghost World was such a rare film for me. The story wasn't anything I was expecting when I randomly turned the TV on that day.

I found Gwern's review of that quite good: https://gwern.net/review/crumb

That review reads like an extremely shallow tech bro take.

It is an excellent documentary, even if you've had little or no exposure to his work.

yes

“back in those days” … it really was not that long ago, and what you say is also true today.

and furthermore, "families that are a bit off" are still plenty today, and people still do the best with what they got. I don't see the need to say that was that way then...

Agree, and the bizarre things that the family members were into have simply been replaced with a new set of things. Arguably the only difference is back then they weren't thrown out on the streets due to high rents

Yes, but they tend to be 'off' in quite different ways. Crumb's father was the kind of hyper-repressed figure who for most of us nowadays only exists as a boogeyman character in fiction, but who was much more of a reality in the pre-1970 world.

1968 is over 50 years ago. As a 1961 vintage person, 50 years back was pre WW1.

the past is another country. They do things very differently in Fritz the cat's time. I don't think you could publish that now.

> I don't think you could publish that now

Maybe you'd struggle to get widespread (physical) distribution, or to build an audience, or to make a living off it. I don't think anybody would stop you printing it, or take down your website or whatever.

It wasn't mainstream or uncontroversial in the '60s either.

Wally Wood did "The Disneyland Memorial Orgy" (Google it) around the same time.

I'm pretty sure it was banned (not anymore, as that Google It will show).

there are plenty of things published today that push boundaries in the same way

> I don't think you could publish that now.

What would prevent you from publishing something like that today?

It's not merely that 50 years is a long time. There's a profound cultural watershed between the Before Times, the overcontrolled, neurotic world of roughly up to the late '60s, and the narcissistic/sociopathic world of today. Robert Crumb, and the whole Crumb family, embody that change in an unusually extreme way.

https://ok.ru/video/1214780017199

Add "David Lynch: The Art Life" and make it a double-feature.

Jesus. I couldn't finish that documentary. I only knew him by his more popular art, but that film put me off anything he'd done. His family was a mess, and he himself is without a doubt the last person of it I'd ever want to meet. Every single interaction he had with a woman (even by proxy) on screen made my skin crawl. A creep of the highest caliber.

Same. Went with a bunch of people when it came out. We all left after about half an hour.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com