Crumb

Finally got around to seeing Terry Zwigoff's "Crumb" at the Nowheresville arthouse. Amazing movie, though I wish he'd made a different movie. Mo' deep thoughts later, but for now, some quick takes on what I liked. No time for factchecking, quotes are paraphrases, and neatness don't count...

I liked just seeing Crumb draw -- the act of drawing itself. Amazing. All that nervous energy, all those scratchy lines. Am a cartoonist myself and simply don't work that hard. Exhausting to look at him. Must have an obsessive-compulsive streak.

Funny moment. Crumb's daughter watching the TV set, some old black and white cartoon. She says something like, "Why can't we get a color TV and watch some new cartoons?" Crumb says they haven't made good American cartoon since 1940. Daughter says that's typical. "Everything has to be black and white with you--everything has to be old-fashioned."

Also funny seeing R. Crumb in the ahht gallery with the gallery owner, who is spouting typical artspeak. Crumb standing next to him and I'm pretty sure he is trying not to laugh.

And then there's Mr. Serious Art Critic Robert Hughes and it's funny just hearing him compare Crumb to Goya, noting the similarity of Crumb's vulture demonesses to Goya's nightmare visions. Great tradition of this kind of thing in the graphic arts: social commentary etched in acid, Crumb draws out of that poison well. I happen to agree with him here (and like R. Hughes) but it's still funny.

Once upon a time, Crumb was a despised, bad, naughty person. Now we put his scrawls on gallery walls and serious critics take him seriously. No, no, no, Meester Crumb, you're not just another prole cartoonist. You're in an ART GALLERY now. You're a respectable arteest!

OK. And then there's his family: what R. Crumb calls a "Whatever Happened to Baby Jane" scene. Brother Max is frightening, Charles is more so. (I didn't know he'd committed suicide when I saw the movie). I thought only Southern people had families that screwed up...

Great seeing Crumb (in effect) tell some Hollywood producer to kiss his ass.

Loved seeing Crumb on streets of LA. Just watching him watch the people, seeing Amerika-world with his eyes.

Great comment from R.C. "Everybody walks around in these t-shirts with somebody's logo on it -- they're walking advertisements. It used to be people fermented their own culture outside this thing created to make money, but we're turning into one big unified field of market research. I'm disgusted with people don't have any intellectual curiosity what's behind all this jive bullshit."

Amen, bro.

Crumb in his house with all those old records. "You hear the best part of the soul of the common people in these things..." going on to say we're losing that.

And then there's his attitude towards women...

Crumb flipping through 60s-era sketchbooks, talking to one of his old girlfriends, (Dana?) who's talking about various affairs Crumb had. RC shrugs and sez something like "What do you care? It didn't really matter anyway. I never really loved you." Her jaw drops. To make her feel better he sez, "I was very fond of you." -- PUNCH. And she gets him right in the gut.

Crumb was asking for it, got what he deserved. The question most women are asking: would an icepick be better? More on that later...

As to the movie I wish Zwigoff had made --

The film has a freak show quality to it. Zwigoff points his camera at Crumb's weird family and says, "See the freaks! Born to live! Alive, alive, alive!" Yeah, OK. That's all morbidly fascinating, but I wish he'd offered more background about underground cartooning in the late 1960s and early '70s -- and placed R. Crumb in the context of the circle of San Francisco's underground cartoonists, and the American underground cartooning movement in general. As it is, you'd think the whole thing popped out of R. Crumb's deranged head. Like he's the only guy doing this kinda thing. Gilbert Shelton isn't even mentioned! I mean, come on ...

The future of the Internet

OK, working on a business proposal for AOL's so-called "Greenhouse." My biz idea for the grand, glorious Internet future has put me in mind of that so-called future. And how grand and glorious it ain't gonna be. Gonna whip out my crystal ball right now ...

Hocus-pocus, blahblahblah. Shazam. OK ...

Here's the future, kids.

What happened to radio, TV and the fucking printing press will happen to the Internet. It's a pretty obvious prediction, but somebody has to say it.

Right now, the Internet is a big playground that's basically free (except for "walled gardens" like AOL). The reason is: talk is cheap. Most of what we do here is yap. Yap as in words. Mere text.

As fiber optic cable gets laid down and bandwidth increases, the Internet will open up to more than text. It'll get easier and easier to zip photos, video and sound files around. Basically, the wire leading into the computer will have the same capacity as coaxial cable. Thanks to Moore's Law, your 'puter will be able to process some heavy data.

As in movies.

At the same time, expect a repetition of the desktop publishing revolution in the world of video. Right now, a "Video Toaster" editing system costs around 5K. It'll probably drop to chump change. You won't need a dedicated box anymore; you'll have a video editing program on your computer. And (based on the Marching Morons principle) video editing will get easier and easier. So, desktop video will be born.

As a result, Users will be downloading TV and movies. (Music, too.)

And uploading their own User-generated TV and movies. (Music, too.)

And -- you better believe -- paying for it.

Somewhere along the line, the folks controlling the wire will set up a gate -- like that toll booth in "Blazing Saddles." We're all riding along on the big wide open West. All of a sudden, here's a toll booth. We need to ride back for a shitload of dimes.

The content won't be "free" any more -- in the same way that Cable TV isn't free.

At the same time, the content you pay for will be barnacle-encrusted with ads. Just like radio, TV, or even movies. To get to the cool stuff, you'll have to watch some shit that's selling you something.

The future of the Internet?

It'll be exactly like everything else.

Fee Speech: a brief history of advertising

Good name in man and woman, dear my lord,
Is the immediate jewel of their souls:
Who steals my purse steals trash; 'tis something, nothing;
'Twas mine, 'tis his, and has been slave to thousands;
But he that filches from me my good name
Robs me of that which not enriches him
And makes me poor indeed.

--Shakespeare, Othello

We are all clowns. Well, I am. We bob in the foam of history like a ping pong ball in a tidal wave. We have no idea of what's driving us.

OK, enough with the mixed metaphors.

The notion of free speech goes back to John Locke and the ancient Geeks. We assume it's a right. But that's a shockingly new assumption. There's an older assumption.

Let me spell it out for you:

New idea: Society should be a vast brainstorming session. Everybody should be free to say anything. Let millions of ideas boil. Keep the good ones. Throw the bad ones away.

Old idea: Ideas are property. Image is property. Reputation is property. The important question is not "What's the idea?" The key question is: "Whose idea is it?"

This is the reason that those who insult the King were thrown in dungeons.

The King's image is the King's property.

Insult is a form of theft. As Shakespeare noted, he who filches your good name makes you poor indeed. Logically, it follows that you can throw such a thief in a dungeon. Dueling flows from the same logic.

Bill Hicks is dead

But Joe Piscopo lives on. Ain't life a motherfucker?

R.I.P. Harry Nilsson

Death, smeath.

R.I.P. Anthony Burgess

Anthony Burgess snuffed it, O my bratties. A cruel mesto this world is. The cancers he craved gave him the like-eemyaed disease. Irony, that. The rest is, like, silence.

Education Shmeducation

Education performs three basic functions:

A) The transmission of culture.
B) The transmission of knowledge.
C). Babysitting.

Needless to say these divisions are arbitrary.

By (A) I mean, basically, that besides from teaching "facts," schools, to some degree, exist to turn "kids" into adults. You can expand this to mean "American adults who can function in a democracy" and include saluting the flag, the four freedoms, etc—but the bottom line is your basic culturalization stuff. Standing in line, waiting your turn...people learning to live with people in a group.


Damned if I've ever seen anybody else write about this, but it seems like one of the big problems in schools is the fact that the students already have their own culture. The kids are their own tribe. They want to raise hell, hang out, party, etc. On the other hand...these boring adult types are droning on about chemistry, geography, history and all the crap.
Schools exist to turn kids into adults. 
There is a powerful kid subculture that works against that.


I've talked to a lot of people who've told me basically this: "Life sucks. I'm never going to get a good job. I'm never going to own my own home, own a decent car. Once I get out of high school/college...that's it. My life is over. I'm going to spend the rest of my live slaving away in some shit job. This is the last chance to enjoy myself I'm ever going to have so screw it, why should I study, why should I learn anything--I'm going to have fun while I can."


There's a war going on right now about what exactly our culture is. The left says the educational system has been a cunning ploy by rich white males to dupe the suffering masses into submission. 

But at the same time the legitimacy of school as a cultural-transmission institution is under attack, the institutions in our society that normally transmit culture (church, family, neighborhoods, etc) are failing. The teacher is given a raging mob of disaffected rebels and told to teach them "values."
Who's values? The values of the "dominant culture"...gasp!
Fascist decrees like "raise your hand to speak"

This puts teachers in a double bind. They're given a responsibility without the authority.

(B) By B) I mean both practical and abstract knowledge.
Thinking, of course, is really practical knowledge. Thinking is something to do, a series of skills that can be learned.
Our culture is anti-analytical. 

Skills. The big problem here is that most people come out of the educational system not knowing how to do anything. The curriculum is dumped on students in isolated, abstract chunks of facts. Here, says the school system, learn these facts, these facts are good for you. What's the point, says the average student...

So a mass of unemployables is continually being ejected into our culture--with destablizing results. Strictly speaking, no one is really responsible for teaching job skills. It isn't the employer's responsibility. The employer wants to hire somebody who already knows something and can already do something that will help him/her make money. Justly so. It isn't the government's responsibility. The educational system exits to teach insolated chunks of facts! We want to teach the joy of learning as a thing in itself...the pure Platonic joy of knowing facts-as-facts. All triangles have 180 degrees. How beautiful. How pure.

Vocational education is a joke.
The government's vocational education is pathetically underfunded and behind the times.
Vocational education is the private sector is largely the work of con artists.
What's left?
Well...get a job that you're not really qualified for and desperately try to figure out what you're doing and hope you don't get fired before you finally figure out what you're doing. 
There is also prison.

C) Babysitting. This is the absolute bare minimum of what the educational system actually has to do. Keep young bodies in buildings, off the streets, out of peoples' hair, and try to make sure they come out in one piece at the end of the day. It will take a helluva lot of educational cuts until this function starts to fail...but we're getting there.