Robert Crumb, America’s Pervert | Portland Monthly
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Robert Crumb has been called a lot worse than pervert, but it’s proven to be the stickiest epithet thrown at his monumentally influential career, for better and worse. It hasn’t helped that, outside of his gnomic New Age hippie God Mr. Natural, the big-stepping “Keep on Truckin’…” dudes, and his horny cat Fritz, Crumb regularly drew himself into his comic strips as a groping, eye-popping, shameless pervert. But there’s more to the inventor of so-called underground comix—the kind that spill unchecked thoughts and parody and fantasize with ruthless abandon—again, for better and worse. You might hear some of the story Tuesday, when Dan Nadel reads from his recently published biography, Crumb: A Cartoonist’s Life, at the Powell’s at Cedar Hills Crossing (7pm, April 22).
Crumb’s comix came about amid 1960s psychedelia in postwar America. That is to say, they stuck it to the man, big time. Nadel’s is the first authorized biography of Crumb, and the two have toured its release together (Crumb, however, will not be at this event). The New Yorker calls the book “affectionate but unsparing.” Crumb, who’s 81, told that magazine he entrusted Nadel to dispel claims that his drawings are not only perverted, but also racist and sexist.
In reality, Crumb’s pictures have been all of those things. They’re also lewd, deranged, dangerous, and just plain weird. Critics are grateful for the new excuse the book offers to keep fighting over whether his ability to depict the minds of society’s worst comes from his keen observation skills or his being one of those worst. They are also terrified to confront what’s inside his—and, it seems, everyone else’s—head.
“You may want to dismiss Crumb as a morsel of some strange loaf, fallen to the ground to be swept away,” Dan Piepenbring writes in Harper’s. “But today he is shown by David Zwirner, among the bluest of the blue-chip galleries, and his pieces command six figures.” Somewhat ironically, Crumb never seemed to be after “legitimizing” his comic form. Instead, he clawed out a nasty space for the opposite, a self-assuredly degenerate space to show the world to itself. Crumb’s world, Piepenbring goes on, is “a place of illegitimacy and anarchy, shame and desire, surplus and oblivion.” It’s sort of like the real one.
More Things to Do This Week
DANCE Rakesh Sukesh
THU–SAT, APR 17–19 | PICA, $20+
Sukesh, a choreographer born in India who lives in Belgium, became the subject of an anti-immigration propaganda campaign after a right-wing news outlet took his picture while he was lecturing in Estonia. because i love the diversity (this micro-attitude, we all have it), a solo dance performance PICA is copresenting with Boom Arts, is based on the ways this campaign appropriated Sukesh’s image, and therefore his body.
COMEDY Jimmy O. Yang
8PM FRI, APR 18 | ARLENE SCHNITZER CONCERT HALL, $53.50+
Yang first found his audience with a bit part that grew and grew playing Jian Yang on Silicon Valley. He stretched another small part into a memorable performance in Crazy Rich Asians a few years later. Funny, then, that as a star of Hulu’s show Interior Chinatown, which is based on Charles Yu’s novel, Yang plays an extra in a surreal, movie-set universe. His sharp timing and deadpan delivery carry over to his stand-up, too. Every time he cracks even half of an incredulous smirk, it feels like getting a laugh out of your most stoic friend.
COOKBOOKS Cathy Whims
3PM SAT, APR 19 | POWELL’S CITY OF BOOKS, FREE
Whims is one of the more decorated chefs in Portland, with seven James Beard Award nominations to her name and 20 years leading Nostrana—still the city’s best bet for a flame-blistered margherita pizza and a stiff Negroni. She spent a decade leading the godfather Italian spot Genoa before that. Yet somehow, though it’s fully illustrated with watercolors like a gem of the last millennium, The Italian Summer Kitchen is Whims’s debut cookbook. What took so long? After all these years, she told us recently, “I think maybe I just had time to really focus on what I wanted the book to be.”
Elsewhere…
- Portland’s modern artgoing history by way of Arlene Schnitzer. (Oregon ArtsWatch)
- A week of photos from the city’s ongoing Trump and Musk protests. (Willamette Week)
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