crumb and coffee
this is R. Crumb's A Short History of America:
http://www.crumbmuseum.com/history2.html
this is one of my favorite pieces of cartooning. we who've lived a while have seen this: purity messed with by good intentions at first, then completely disregarded as more and more stuff is piled upon it. it's surely the american story, except that i'm not so sure we can connect that past time of purity to any of our ancestors. evil's been waiting in this old land, as burroughs knew, as he had been telepathically taught, and as we have been schooled and sliced by the cut-up bits and pieces of our own experiences and mindsets. crumb's short history of america is a mirror turned towards our own collective (and mostly personal) disintegration, entropy, rot. o but that's not me, right? chuck you farley, grab a gander, you silly goose. sometimes it's painful to look at things too clearly; we all like to blur, even if only once in a while.
that's one reason i like this strip. and because of however i'm wired, i've also found great beauty in his landscapes and backdrops. it might be a bare-bulb tenement room with a window open to a city's summer night (a junkie on the nod at a rickety table); or his lines in the sky telling us the sun is rising, or falling; or the other lines, strung across wooden poles, embellished by boxy transformer stuff: when i was young they were all images imprinting deep within me - feelings and ideas waiting to be explored. i had not yet the distance from these things in my own life; now i look at his panels and understand this. but first reads left me with stirrings only. this was the american landscape for me. anytime i got a chance to go to the country i didn't know how to act. it was hard to enjoy. i was beginning to go my own way, better or worse, like it or not.
i've been a fanboy of robert crumb from around '69, what a surprise. there were breaks, sure (as in most of my life's timelines), but i was drawn to him first time i saw a Zap comic, and recently purchased THE R. CRUMB HANDBOOK (which does have the america strip in it, full color) and find i am right back there. the handbook is a true story of a life that simultaneously feeds upon and is disgusted by popular culture. this has been a life simultaneously unfettered and obsessed. this is a (popular) art directly drawn out of the artist - at certain times of his life passed through sieves, collected in bowls, poured down.
most people around me at the time i discovered crumb were turned on by his outrageousness, rather than the sadness or the acceptance of what-is-strange in his cartooning. s.clay wilson was probably cooler to them than crumb at the time. you know: mutilation, weird sex (though crumb sure had both!) for me, a highpoint then was something like the narrative duck's ya yas, or even the panel where mr. natural simply yells at foont (in big letters) YOU'RE SO EXASPERATING or something. what a release, heh.
my last year at high school i took a few interesting courses, like video (called creative electography back then), creative (12th grade) writing and contemporary literature. i was already into stuff on my own (the padgett/shapiro anthology AN ANTHOLOGY OF NEW YORK POETS was at the library and i fondly remember (am i getting creaky or what?) cutting school on rainy days to read stuff like that sitting at the back of the stacks near an open window. i found ginsberg, others. an extreme fascination with ted berrigan's THE SONNETS began back then; i still have that edition, over 30 years later, with the great back cover.), but my creative lit teach was inspiring, most of the course. her name was Anna M. and she was jolly and slightly irreverent most of the time. she was a regular person, not hip or anything, but she sparked me into people like stevens, eliot, joyce; she helped me tremendously, through a stevens poem, to have that AHA moment about poetry. back then i began to understand the relationship between how you write a poem, and what a poem really is. anyway, i shared some stuff with her like dylan lyrics and crumb. i gave her a ZAP to read. when she gave it back she was mostly noncommital (not outraged or anything, so she was heading in the right direction), but opened it to this one surreal strip and pointed: the ONE ENORMOUS TIT was the funniest thing in the book, she told me. this remark is one of those things i have thought about from time to time in my life, like that little scene with the parakeet a few posts down. why did she get off on that one panel? was there some darkness there i couldn't see that she appreciated? something jungian, or at least freudish? or was it just a goof? and did she think anything at all about the rest? did she know anything about crumb before i gave her the comic? into the big whatever now....
for an exam i had a choice of essay topics. i wrote a piece in first person, trying to be a modern day stevie d. from PORTRAIT. i was probably either stoned or on one of those experimental what-happens-when-you-go-for-days-without-sleep jags. those places open me, give me foolish bravery. the essay charted high.
an addendum re crumb: most times, the same people who got a kick out of the rougher stuff in crumb could also appreciate the sound of the name FLAKEY FOONT - many repetitions of FOONT later, we'd still be laughin'. in his cute little obsessive garden, crumb planted poetry. and old american music, but that's another story, at least partly, 'cause he wove it into his cartooning too, and gave it the sad beauty of things passing, and the dumb joys of being alive.
anyway (sooner or later THAT word creeps into my stuff, like stuff flitting about, all over the place), i guess the point of all this (if you'd feel more satisfied, more aristoteleanny-pleasured) has something to do with how certain things are put together, and also with how most things fall apart. both of these have to do with increasing complexity. our world is falling apart under the strain of having to maintain the connections among ever-increasing piles of junk; poetry builds upon itself from bottom up - what is the poem, then how do we bring it, then knowing how to bring it, just knowing, from best intentions through things passing, and the mystery of the enormous tit.
http://www.crumbmuseum.com/history2.html
this is one of my favorite pieces of cartooning. we who've lived a while have seen this: purity messed with by good intentions at first, then completely disregarded as more and more stuff is piled upon it. it's surely the american story, except that i'm not so sure we can connect that past time of purity to any of our ancestors. evil's been waiting in this old land, as burroughs knew, as he had been telepathically taught, and as we have been schooled and sliced by the cut-up bits and pieces of our own experiences and mindsets. crumb's short history of america is a mirror turned towards our own collective (and mostly personal) disintegration, entropy, rot. o but that's not me, right? chuck you farley, grab a gander, you silly goose. sometimes it's painful to look at things too clearly; we all like to blur, even if only once in a while.
that's one reason i like this strip. and because of however i'm wired, i've also found great beauty in his landscapes and backdrops. it might be a bare-bulb tenement room with a window open to a city's summer night (a junkie on the nod at a rickety table); or his lines in the sky telling us the sun is rising, or falling; or the other lines, strung across wooden poles, embellished by boxy transformer stuff: when i was young they were all images imprinting deep within me - feelings and ideas waiting to be explored. i had not yet the distance from these things in my own life; now i look at his panels and understand this. but first reads left me with stirrings only. this was the american landscape for me. anytime i got a chance to go to the country i didn't know how to act. it was hard to enjoy. i was beginning to go my own way, better or worse, like it or not.
i've been a fanboy of robert crumb from around '69, what a surprise. there were breaks, sure (as in most of my life's timelines), but i was drawn to him first time i saw a Zap comic, and recently purchased THE R. CRUMB HANDBOOK (which does have the america strip in it, full color) and find i am right back there. the handbook is a true story of a life that simultaneously feeds upon and is disgusted by popular culture. this has been a life simultaneously unfettered and obsessed. this is a (popular) art directly drawn out of the artist - at certain times of his life passed through sieves, collected in bowls, poured down.most people around me at the time i discovered crumb were turned on by his outrageousness, rather than the sadness or the acceptance of what-is-strange in his cartooning. s.clay wilson was probably cooler to them than crumb at the time. you know: mutilation, weird sex (though crumb sure had both!) for me, a highpoint then was something like the narrative duck's ya yas, or even the panel where mr. natural simply yells at foont (in big letters) YOU'RE SO EXASPERATING or something. what a release, heh.
my last year at high school i took a few interesting courses, like video (called creative electography back then), creative (12th grade) writing and contemporary literature. i was already into stuff on my own (the padgett/shapiro anthology AN ANTHOLOGY OF NEW YORK POETS was at the library and i fondly remember (am i getting creaky or what?) cutting school on rainy days to read stuff like that sitting at the back of the stacks near an open window. i found ginsberg, others. an extreme fascination with ted berrigan's THE SONNETS began back then; i still have that edition, over 30 years later, with the great back cover.), but my creative lit teach was inspiring, most of the course. her name was Anna M. and she was jolly and slightly irreverent most of the time. she was a regular person, not hip or anything, but she sparked me into people like stevens, eliot, joyce; she helped me tremendously, through a stevens poem, to have that AHA moment about poetry. back then i began to understand the relationship between how you write a poem, and what a poem really is. anyway, i shared some stuff with her like dylan lyrics and crumb. i gave her a ZAP to read. when she gave it back she was mostly noncommital (not outraged or anything, so she was heading in the right direction), but opened it to this one surreal strip and pointed: the ONE ENORMOUS TIT was the funniest thing in the book, she told me. this remark is one of those things i have thought about from time to time in my life, like that little scene with the parakeet a few posts down. why did she get off on that one panel? was there some darkness there i couldn't see that she appreciated? something jungian, or at least freudish? or was it just a goof? and did she think anything at all about the rest? did she know anything about crumb before i gave her the comic? into the big whatever now....
for an exam i had a choice of essay topics. i wrote a piece in first person, trying to be a modern day stevie d. from PORTRAIT. i was probably either stoned or on one of those experimental what-happens-when-you-go-for-days-without-sleep jags. those places open me, give me foolish bravery. the essay charted high.an addendum re crumb: most times, the same people who got a kick out of the rougher stuff in crumb could also appreciate the sound of the name FLAKEY FOONT - many repetitions of FOONT later, we'd still be laughin'. in his cute little obsessive garden, crumb planted poetry. and old american music, but that's another story, at least partly, 'cause he wove it into his cartooning too, and gave it the sad beauty of things passing, and the dumb joys of being alive.
anyway (sooner or later THAT word creeps into my stuff, like stuff flitting about, all over the place), i guess the point of all this (if you'd feel more satisfied, more aristoteleanny-pleasured) has something to do with how certain things are put together, and also with how most things fall apart. both of these have to do with increasing complexity. our world is falling apart under the strain of having to maintain the connections among ever-increasing piles of junk; poetry builds upon itself from bottom up - what is the poem, then how do we bring it, then knowing how to bring it, just knowing, from best intentions through things passing, and the mystery of the enormous tit.
posted by johnee at 8:31 AM
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