R. Crumb's "Book of Genesis Illustrated."

Chapter 19 — Sodom and Gomorrah — in readable enlargements.

You can pre-order it here.

"My problem was, how am I going to draw God?"

"Should I just draw him as a light in the sky that has dialogue balloons coming out from it? Then I had this dream. God came to me in this dream, only for a split second, but I saw very clearly what he looked like. And I thought, OK, there it is, I've got God. He has a white beard but he actually ended up looking more like my father. He has a very masculine face like my father... [I]f you actually read the Old Testament he's just an old, cranky Jewish patriarch." — Robert Crumb.

“Parallel Worlds, Parallel Lives."

I'm just watching this video after watching "Parallel Worlds, Parallel Lives" on "Nova":



As one of the commenters over at YouTube says "Can we all agree that that is the BEST performance ever from a carrot in a music video?"

Here's a review of the documentary:

MARK OLIVER EVERETT does not deal in reassuring platitudes, whether writing bruised and barbed confessionals as the frontman for his cult rock band, Eels, or discussing the suburban Virginia upbringing that sometimes informs them. “My father was always there,” Mr. Everett said, “in the way that the furniture was always there.”

His father, Hugh Everett III, was a quantum physicist who, as a graduate student at Princeton in the ’50s, pioneered the many-worlds theory, an interpretation of quantum mechanics that proposed the existence of parallel universes. But to the younger Mr. Everett, the rock singer known to fans and friends simply as E, his father was a shirt-and-tie-clad fixture at the dining room table, an inscrutable figure who preferred chain-smoking Kents to conversation, and scrawling calculations on yellow legal pads to parenting.

“I didn’t really know he was a famous quantum physicist,” Mr. Everett, 45, said.... “It wasn’t something anyone talked about around the house. He barely spoke at all.”

I guess it's not so cool to have a genius dad. The younger Everett, we learn, couldn't understand math at all and flunked basic algebra.

IN THE COMMENTS: ElcubanitoKC said...

I really wanted to kill this whiney idiot. He can't speak in plain English ("behold my metaphor!" again), and he obviously didn't care about his father. He has no idea about science, in fact he very obviously rejected it all "because daddy didn't hug me!"...ugh. I wanted to refresh my quantum mechanics and the history of it, but this bearded fool was in the middle of it, and irritated me to no end. I had to turn the TV off.

Yes, I started watching thinking I could gain some appreciation for a theory that has always only seemed perfectly insane to me, but it turned out to be much more of a personal interest story about a mopey alternative rocker. The science part of it was therefore slow-moving. At one point, I thought the story was aimed at children. Then, I adapted and started thinking of it as a more creative documentary along the lines of "Crumb" and "Fast, Cheap and Out of Control" -- two of my favorite movies -- and I thought it was kind of cool. Are you supposed to like Mark Oliver Everett -- was his father a secret 3 Stooges fan? -- or was he more of a Charles Crumb sort of character who inspires pity, mild loathing, and fearsome recognition?

100 geniuses.

"The top 100 features not just brainiacs and boffins, but 19 musicians, two artists (Damien Hirst and the illustrator Robert Crumb) and one sportsman (Muhammad Ali). He is joined at number 43 by a surprise entry: Osama bin Laden."

Boffins? I don't know what the hell is going on here, but it's irking me, and why are so many of the geniuses British? Was the list compiled in Britain by any chance? In this country, when we make a thing of calling people geniuses, we give them half a million dollars.

The gender politics of candy.

We were just talking about that Super Bowl Snickers commercial that pushed the envelope too far for contemporary Americans. It made Victoria -- our own "Cheers, Victoria" -- remember a to-do in Britain over a candy bar commercial back in 2001. Well, if the subject is sex and candy bars, let me show you what I have:





I bought these at the candy counter at the Majestic Theater, back in the days when the Majestic showed movies, and the movie was "Crumb" (that great, great documentary about Robert Crumb and his brothers). You know, for $25, you can buy the empty box they packed these bars in, over at Kitchen Sink, where they say:

Robert Crumb's Devil Girl bars were an instant success when they hit the market in 1994. The bars themselves are long gone and any surviving bars are probably not edible. But Kitchen Sink Press marketed the chocolate bars in a sturdy display box modeled after the heavy-duty cigar boxes of earlier days.

Not edible, but still, the very survival of the chocolate all these years is damned impressive, no? And, anyway, they were always "bad for you."

What's that cool looking book underneath, you're wondering? It's "My Most Secret Desire," by Julie Doucet, one of my favorite comics artists. You can buy the book -- here -- but it's a new edition with a different cover.

In short, it will be very difficult for you to recreate the still life you see in my photograph. But maybe it's a good day to photograph two objects on top of a book. The possibilities are endless.

For more Julie Doucet, check out "Leve Ta Jambe, Mon Poisson Est Mort!" -- don't worry, it's in English. There's a "search inside" function, so you can see more drawings (NSFW). No references to candy, unfortunately. No fish either, outside of the title. Actually, it's hard to do the "search inside" when the text is drawn. But try "cats" and click to the next two pages, to get a sense of it. Again, NSFW.

Is this post disturbing you? Let me return you to mainstream America:

"I am a Situationist... I am an adventurer of the present."

It's time to pay attention to the Crumbs again. Aline has another book, and we're supposed to think this represents something new. But she's been doing autobiographical comics for years, as have many female artists, so it's actually not new at all. But anyone with a book coming out is entitled to seek publicity, and if she has a famous husband to leverage her fame, am I going to object? Well, yeah, I am. A little. I like to see women succeed, but the ones who do it through men irk me a bit. It's not their fault they're married, and using one's marriage to get ahead is a long tradition. But it irks me. It irks me in Hillary. It irks me in Padma. If you take the benefits, you also have to pay the costs. Including Althousian irkage.

To its credit, the NYT buries the information about Aline's new book. Unless you click on the slide show in the sidebar, you won't notice much about it in the article. The Times took advantage of the access to R. Crumb, who really is a great artist and someone who made his own way in the world. I love the movie "Crumb." As you can see in my profile, it's on my list of favorite movies. I watch it about one a year, and when I saw it originally in the theater, I went back and saw it again the next day. It's a movie I impose on other people. I don't accept everything about Crumb (the man), and neither does the movie. But, clearly, he's a worthy artist and a fascinating human being.

Speaking of the marriage between Robert and Aline, there's this juicy material:

Another village newcomer is Christian Coudurès, a printmaker, who moved from Paris. When he was depressed after breaking up with a girlfriend, Ms. Crumb decided he was a project she wanted to take on.

“When I first met him, he was in bad shape, drinking a lot,” she said. “I decided I needed to save this worthy person.” Mr. Coudurès eventually became what Ms. Crumb calls her “second husband.”

The Crumbs have long had an open marriage, that brave (and largely discarded) institution of the 1960s. Mr. Crumb travels to Oregon once a year to rekindle a relationship with an old girlfriend.

Speaking of Mr. Coudurès, Mr. Crumb said, “Between the two of us, we kind of make an ideal husband, because he can do all the masculine things I can’t do.” He cited Mr. Coudurès’s talents for wiring, plumbing, engaging in shouting matches with the highly energetic Ms. Crumb and driving a car.

“If she ever started making comparisons about our lovemaking technique, I might get jealous,” Mr. Crumb added.

Their daughter, Sophie, is not so sure about the arrangement. She called the idea of her mother’s having a second husband “gross.”

Nonetheless, the strong-jawed Mr. Coudurès, 61, has become a part of the support system that frees Mr. Crumb to focus on work. The Frenchman, who has a thick mane of black hair, does handyman chores. His daughter Agathe McCamy, 35, helps Ms. Crumb color her comics.

“I am a Situationist,” Mr. Coudurès explained in French after sharing a dinner with the Crumbs next to a gently crackling fireplace in his kitchen. He was referring to a European avant-garde philosophy born in 1957 and championed by Guy Debord. “I am an adventurer of the present.”

Hey, they are artists. Deal with it.

"You listen to these modern records, they're atrocious, they have sound all over them."

Sound all over them... you know, I hate that too. "There's no definition of nothing, no vocal, no nothing, just like ... static." So do you think Bob Dylan's just a messed up old man -- he's 65 -- or does he know what he's talking about? I'm so used to the old time records he plays on his radio show, that I'm inclined to believe him. It reminds me of the way R. Crumb talks about his old records in the movie "Crumb." I'll have to dig out the quote and post it later.

"The sort of movie that plays best when you stumble across it on cable."

I'm clicking through the Rotten Tomatoes reviews of "Leonard Cohen -- I'm Your Man," and this "Short Takes" one by Elizabeth Weitzman of The Daily News sounds apt:

The possibilities inherent in Cohen's complex life and work are extensive, which may be why [director Lian] Lunson never gets a handle on either. Extended scenes from a tribute concert featuring artists like Rufus Wainwright are interspersed with gushing compliments from Bono, and neither is half as interesting as the curiously brief interviews with Cohen himself. Offering both too little material and too much, the movie leaves us in the bizarre position of understanding its subject no better by the end than we did at the beginning.

There is some great singing in this film, and the songs are exactly what you'd want to put in front of a great singer. But Lunson simply doesn't have any documentarian panache. I get the feeling he was way too excited about the fact that he got Bono to stand in front of a door and babble about Leonard Cohen. I feel sorry for Bono -- not really, why feel sorry for Bono?! -- who quite rationally could have assumed that somewhere in the verbiage there would be a few cool phrases and these would be plucked out by the editor and it would be perfect. Instead, they ran with all the footage.

Check it out, it's Bono! He's still standing in front of that brown door! He's still got those wraparound glasses on. He's still murmuring about Leonard! Okay, let's go watch Rufus emote charmingly around Leonard-lyrics. And now... Oh! It's Bono! And that richly paneled door! And he thinks Leonard is truly sublime.

The filmmaker must have loved the idea of Cohen as an enigma. To this end, Buddhism is used heavily. Don't Buddhists ever get sick of the use of their religion to create an aura of depth and mystery around a Western celebrity? We see a lot of shots of Leonard sitting next to a fat gnome of a monk. Hey, he's a Buddhist monk. You're supposed to be automatically impressed. He doesn't have to say a damned thing interesting about Buddhism or anything else. You're supposed to just get it. Ooh, he's a fat monk! He must be full of profound wisdom. And there's Leonard sitting right next to him.

I would have liked more substance, less abstract effusion. There was a nice sequence in there about "Suzanne," accompanied by some of Cohen's drawings. Suzanne was his friend's wife, and she really did live by the river. "And she feeds you tea and oranges/That come all the way from China." Yeah, she really did serve tea that had little bits of oranges in it. Oh, all these years, I've been eating a whole orange with my tea and thinking "Suzanne." But here's Leonard, and he's saying Suzanne's tea had the oranges in it. It was Constant Comment tea, he says. (It comes all the way from Connecticut, I note.)

What's so cool about the song "Suzanne" is that it has all the concrete detail surrounding the enigmatic character and the religious mysteries. River, boats, tea, oranges, rags, feathers, honey, garbage, flowers, seaweed...

Nothing against Cohen, but the filmmaker lacked the art to make a real documentary film. It would have made a great TV show to stumble across on cable. If you want to get a sense of what a real film would be, watch "Crumb" again.

"We're emenies on account of we both loves Olive Oyl."

Said Popeye, wondering why Curly wanted him to come over, in an old E.C. Segar comic I was reading today at the Milwaukee Art Museum, which has a big, cool exhibition called "Masters of American Comics."

I'd been looking at comics art for about half an hour, working my way through the Winsor McKay and Lyonel Feininger comics, and got to the Segar stuff, and that line of Popeye's made me laugh out loud. And then I was doubly amused to realize that was the first laughter I'd heard at this huge exhibition of comics. I stayed for another hour, and I think I laughed one or two other times, but I never heard anyone else laugh. It was like a church in there. Is this the effect of museums or did the curators choose the very comics that were least likely to make you laugh? Fantasy and surrealism loomed large. So did serious comics like "Maus." And a lot of the humor was the sort of thing that you appreciate intellectually and don't giggle over. Like:

And with insipid porcine vapidness he lapses into somniverous oblivion.

That's a caption in a "Krazy Kat" comic, as a pig goes to sleep.

"S'turbil" = It's terrible, in Krazy Kat dialect. She also says "Jee-Wizzil." I find all of that amusing, but you'd only laugh out loud at that sort of thing in a social situation, where you were interested in elevating the mood of the people you're with. In the museum setting, everyone's floating along in his own little reverie.



Hmmm.... I see there were no women artists in this exhibition, and there were 15 male artists. I'm surprised, not because I think there is a woman who deserved to be in this group. (Winsor McCay, George Herriman, Lyonel Feininger, E.C. Segar, Frank King, Chester Gould, Milton Caniff, Charles M. Schulz, Will Eisner, Jack Kirby, Harvey Kurtzman, R. Crumb, Art Spiegelman, Gary Panter, and Chris Ware.) I'm surprised because I would have thought curators would feel uneasy about a show with that many artists that lacked even one woman. Thanks for not patronizing me.



Anyway, it's an excellent show, well worth the trip to Milwaukee if you're roughly in the area. It will be there until August 13th.

And, in case you don't know, the museum itself is quite the architectural marvel:

"The R. Crumb Handbook."

I've been reading "The R. Crumb Handbook." (Yeah, it's one of the five books referred to here, the guessing commenters will be interested to know.) I was not an R. Crumb fan until the movie "Crumb" drew me in. The Handbook is terrific, mixing written biographical text and illustrated pages. The text to a great extent tracks the story told in the movie, with some notable differences. The book emphasizes Crumb's Catholic upbringing, a subject entirely missing from the movie.

When you make a documentary, you take your footage and tell the story you want -- like a lawyer deciding what evidence to present. The R. Crumb of the movie was shaped by weird parents, the repressive American culture of the 1950s, and the liberating effect of LSD and sex. The Crumb of the book is much more grounded in serious respect for art and an intensely religious upbringing.

The book comes with a CD of Crumb's old-timey music. Fans -- like me! -- of Jim Kweskin should enjoy it. I'm sitting in a café, waiting to get my hands on the new marijuana case, and, needing to screen out something awful the baristas decided to unleash on the nerve-jangled customers, I started playing the Crumb CD through the headphones on my computer. The fifth song is a bit much, but it makes me laugh anyway. It's a jaunty little ditty called "My Girl's P***y."

Now, let's see if I can get to the case.

Robert Hughes and R. Crumb talk about Andy Warhol and Albert Speer.

Robert Hughes and R. Crumb, together at last. Hughes is the art critic who praises Crumb in the movie "Crumb." After a public appearance, at which it's established that both men hate Andy Warhol, the two go out to dinner and talk about Albert Speer:

After the discussion, Mr. Crumb quickly ducked out of the library, avoiding a throng of fans, and later joined Mr. Hughes for dinner, where they took a while to warm up to each other, but by the end were in a spirited discussion about Hitler's architect, Albert Speer, whom Mr. Hughes interviewed in the late 1970's.

Mr. Hughes told about an exchange in which Speer said that architecture was certainly one way to unite a people, but that if the Nazis had had television, there would have been no stopping them.

Mr. Crumb, finishing his plate of baked chicken, beamed. "Oh, that's great," he said. "It's true."

Is it? It seems to me television makes everything small. Grandiosity miniaturized and contained in a box, viewed across the tops of your toes, is not awesome but ridiculous. There you are, in your house, not merged in a massive throng, but on a sofa alone or with your intimates. If we were starting with a free country -- and not state-controlled TV -- I think instant mockery would doom a televised propaganda effort of the sort Speer wielded with architecture.

By the way, I recommend the documentary "The Architecture of Doom," which you should watch in a double feature with "The Wonderful, Horrible Life of Leni Riefenstahl."

Hey, did you notice that Hughes and Crumb ducked out of the assembly and ate chicken; they didn't chicken out of the assembly and eat duck. Why do I bother to think and write such things? Maybe because I was raised on television and still like nothing more than idly flipping the channels looking for stray amusements. Am I wasting my life on trivia? A bit. But I'm also utterly immune to the charms of fascist dictators. Even the politicians I like enough to vote for, I still laugh at and think of as funny little men. That's another way of saying that on TV, Jon Stewart would outmatch Speer.