ROBERT CRUMB: So, it’s early in the year 1966. I’m 22 years old and I have no idea what I’m doing. I’ve just broken up with my wife Dana. She went back to Cleveland and I stayed in New York. My big career as a commercial artist was just one more cardboard cut-out dream forgotten in the dust after many heavenly trips taken on LSD. I feel like I’m back in kindergarten, it’s all new to me… I’ve been stumbling around in a delirium since I took some weird psychedelic drug… the stuff came on like normal acid… the usual trippy sensations, the visual effects, the expanding consciousness into infinity-like WOW — then all the sudden everything went, like, fuzzy-like; the reception went bad — I lost the picture, the sound, everything — it was so WEIRD, but not particularly frightening. For the next couple of months I felt like the guy in Eraserhead… everything was dreamlike and unreal. It was rather pleasant in a certain way except that I was helpless and barely able to cope.

One morning, after being up all night tripping on a mild dose of LSD with this girl Bobbi Fox at her place (all I remember about it is sitting on her bed, and holding her by her mop of curly hair and flopping her head around, and later her talking to my bare feet like they were two little critters.) I went into the subway and saw an attractive young girl lying dead on the platform. A crowd had gathered, police were there. I took this as an omen that I must leave New York. I decided I’d go to Chicago, stay with Ol’ Marty. He’d give me shelter from this harsh world. He had a job, he was stable, he didn’t take mind-altering substances, so I abandoned the apartment on East 11th street in my youthful, irresponsible way, and took the Greyhound to Chicago, Marty was a little bewildered by the sickly green psychedelic aura that buzzed and crackled around my head, but he was fascinated by the strange images that began to appear in my sketchbook.

A whole new thing was emerging in my drawings, a sort of harkening back, a calling up for what G. Legman had called the “Horror-Squinky” forces lurking in American comics of the 1940s. I had no control over it, the whole time I was in this fuzzy state of mind; the separation, the barrier betwixt the conscious and the subconscious was broken open somehow. A grotesque kaleidoscope, a tawdry carnival of disassociated images kept sputtering to the surface… especially if I was sitting and staring, which I often did. It was difficult to function in this condition, I was certifiably crazy, I sat staring on the couch at Marty’s apartment, or on long aimless bus rides around Chicago. These jerky animated cartoons in my mind were not beautiful, poetic or spiritual, they were like an out-of-tune player piano that you couldn’t shut off… pretty disturbing… this strange interlude ended as abruptly as it had begun in the next time I took a powerful dose of LSD in April ’66. My mind suddenly cleared. The fuzziness was gone, the fog lifted. It was a great relief… a weird drug, that was. But what the heck — “minds are made to be blown.”

And what a boon to my art! It was during that fuzzy period that I recorded in my sketchbook all the main characters I would be using in my comics for the next ten years; Mr. Natural, Flakey Foont, Schuman The Human, The Snoid, Eggs Ackley, The Vulture Demoness, Shabno The Shoe-Horn Dog, this one, that one… which is interesting. It was a once-in-a-lifetime experience, like a religious vision that changes someone’s life, but in my case it was the psychotoic manifestation of some grimy part of America’s collective unconscious. MORE

PREVIOUSLY: How Devil Girl Became Mrs. Natural

BY JONATHAN VALANIA Almost everyone knows R. Crumb’s work whether they realize it or not. Keep On Truckin‘? You’re soaking in it. Cheap Thrills? You betcha. Big butts? He invented them. Devil doll glamazons offering piggyback rides to nebbishy four-eyed horn dogs? Sweet Jesus! Giddyup! (If none of this rings a bell, you would do well by renting Terry Zwigoff’s 1994 documentary, CRUMB.)

Aline Kominsky-Crumb, his wife of 35 years, is not quite the household word her husband is, but that may well change, depending on how hip the household. Aline has been cartooning as long as her husband has, but generally her comics have received about as much love as Yoko Ono at a White Album recording session. Though formally art schooled and a capable painter, not to mention a very attractive woman, Aline has always opted to draw herself hideous and, to the untrained eye, incompetently. Actually, her work looks incompetent to the trained eye, too — as even her famous husband will tell you. At one point she got so discouraged, she gave up drawing comics altogether. This was after yet another publisher almost went bankrupt putting her work in print. “When he told me about how poorly the issue sold, I asked him if I could have the unsold copies,” she says. “He told me he used them to insulate his barn.”

Not that Aline is unaccustomed to bad reviews. One day when she was 14 and putting on make-up in the bathroom mirror, her father barged in announcing he needed to relieve himself. And besides, he told his daughter, “You can’t shine shit.” Her mother could be just as discouraging: fearing her daughter was getting too fat, she restricted her French fry intake at the family dinner table and once literally choked Aline until she spit out a fry purloined from her brother’s plate. Needless to say, Aline escaped as soon as possible. Fortunately, growing up on Long Island, The Big City was just a train ride away and by her late teens, she was living in a hovel on the Lower East Side, dropping acid and partying with the Fugs as the Beat Generation morphed psychedelically into the Hippy Generation.

When New York got too seedy and dangerous, she headed for Arizona, getting more than her fill of cosmic cowboys and cactus peyote, before heading to San Francisco with some flowers in her hair. It was there that she met Robert Crumb, and the rest, as they say, is history. All of which is encapsulated in NEED MORE LOVE, Aline’s endlessly fascinating graphic memoir, itself a fitting companion piece to the R. Crumb Handbook, published in 2005.

As a Valentine’s Day gift to his wife, the increasingly hermetic cartoonist agreed to interview his wife at the New York Public Library, and Phawker, in turn, interviewed the couple the next day. Calling their hotel room on Thursday morning was like a scene out of Crumb, as Aline simultaneously answered our questions and barked out directions to Robert on how to make the coffee maker work. The notoriously press-shy Robert is not doing any this time out, and the interview was only supposed to be with Aline but he kept chiming in and we finally convinced him to get on the line and tell us a little bit about growing up in Philadelphia.

PHAWKER: To hear you tell it, a lot of who you became was a direct reaction against the kind of people your parents were. Can you give us a brief thumbnail sketch of your parents?

ALINE KOMINKSY-CRUMB: They were part of what I call The Post-War Jerk Generation. My mom was spoiled, high-strung and on diet pills, which only made her crazier. My dad was a salesman, a bitter Willie Loman-esque loser. Growing up Jewish in Long Island in the late ’50s and early ’60s, it was all about keeping up appearances — there was no food in the fridge, but we had marble steps out front of the house. In fairness, they were young and didn’t really know any better, but they were quite psychologically abusive. Put this way: I became me and my brother became a heroin addict. Like Robert, I escaped into art when I was about eight.

PHAWKER: You were going to see The Fugs play in the Lower East Side before you were old enough to drive?

ALINE KOMINSKY-CRUMB: At the time I was reading things like Norman Mailer’s The Naked And The Dead and escaping into the city as often as I could. One day I saw a flyer for the Fugs so I went to see them perform and it totally blew my little mind, although I probably only ‘got’ about half of it. I went to see them a lot. I would always try to sneak backstage for the little after-show parties but they always threw me out for being too young, but one day I did get into one of those parties and some guy handed me a sugar cube and said ‘Here ya go, girlie.’ It was LSD and I of course had no idea what was going on. I took the train home and I’m laying in bed hallucinating when my parents knocked on the door. When they opened it, they were standing in the doorway and there was this strange light behind them and I remember thinking they looked like monsters! They thought I was drunk so they started yelling and hitting me. Here I am on LSD for the first time being beaten up by my parents. They grounded me after that, semi-permanently. But I just hid a ladder in the bushes outside my window and I would bar my bedroom door with a chair and sneak out and head to the city. That was the beginning of my ‘real life.’

PHAWKER: It was around this time that you ‘met’ George Harrison . . .

ALINE KOMINSKY-CRUMB: I was a Beatles fanatic and George was my man. I was sure he would love me as much as I loved him if he could only meet me. Long story short, when the Beatles were coming to town, I found out from my uncle who owned a store at Idlewild Airport [now JFK] that the Beatles were arriving there, even though the radio was saying they were arriving at Penn Station just to throw everyone off the trail. So anway, there’s 10,000 kids hanging off the rafters at Penn Station waiting for the Beatles to arrive and I’m pretty much all by myself at the airport. When they get off the plane, I literally jump over the crowd barrier and get George in a bear hug and I look up at him expecting to see love in his eyes and realize that’s he’s afraid for his life. By then the cops had peeled me off and dragged me away — which, by the way, was captured by a news camera and broadcast on the evening news, much to my parents horror.

PHAWKER: Not long after that you headed west . . .

ALINE KOMINSKY-CRUMB: I got my degree in painting and then my father died. My mother wanted me to get an apartment with her in the city and live like swinging singles. I was so horrified, I convinced my best friend at the time to marry me, just to avoid living with my mother. My new husband wanted to move out to Arizona, which was like another planet to a girl from Long Island. So beautiful. Anyway, to make a long story short, I spent a lot of time eating peyote, drinking Coors beer and laying on my back staring at the stars in the back of a pick-up truck.

PHAWKER: Sweet. And then you went to San Francisco right as the Summer of Love was flowering and it was there that you met Robert Crumb.

ALINE KOMINSKY-CRUMB: I was introduced by a girlfriend. I had heard of his work before I met him, but she told me he was really creepy and ugly. When I finally met him I thought he was shy and sweet, but then he’s my type — I’ve always been a sucker for depressed intellectual white boys in glasses. Plus, he was sexually perverted in a way that appealed to me. You have to remember, at the time I was looking to have as much wanton sex as possible.

PHAWKER: Can you explain the origin of Robert’s attraction to powerfully built women with big butts and pillar-like thighs?

ALINE KOMINSKY-CRUMB: Giant nuns? Being a little kid crawling under the table and fixating on women’s legs? Who can say. His brother wound up being attracted to young boys. Robert is magnetically drawn to strong women and really put off by strong men. I like wimpy guys, but at the same time I am submissive and want the man to totally take me over. So our desires match up pretty perfectly.

PHAWKER: Can you explain the piggyback thing?

ALINE KOMINSKY-CRUMB: I always like to show off my strength. The first time I met Robert, he jumped up on my back and I started trotting around — it appeals to the horsey in me.

PHAWKER: Well, that makes sense. You and Robert live in a quaint old house in a village in the South of France, having fled America 16 years ago — appalled at the encroachment of McMansions, fundamentalist Christians and crass hyper-consumerism. When you come back from time to time these days do things seem even more sick and dysfunctional than you last remembered?

ALINE KOMINSKY-CRUMB: Definitely. When you step off the plane you are just assaulted with this hyper-stimulation and hyper-commercialism and the sense that most people are leading virtual lives instead of ‘real’ ones. But just to be clear, the French can be just as cantankerous and annoying, and they are terrible drivers. There are 1,800 people living in our village, representing 23 nationalities. And that includes a lot of rough-edged peasant folk, who I having nothing but respect for. Also, they hid a lot of Jews there during the war, so I feel safe.

PHAWKER: You look fantastic, by the way. You mentioned last night you had some ‘work’ done…

ALINE KOMINSKY-CRUMB: When my face fell, I had this procedure done to restore my cheek bones. Basically, they suck fat our of your thighs and inject it into your cheeks. Afterwards my upper lip swelled up and for weeks I looked like Marge Simpson and then the swelling went away and I had my cheekbones back! Robert says I don’t look any better.

PHAWKER: You guys have an ‘open marriage.’ Robert still has a lover that he visits once a year in Oregon. You and Robert live with your French lover, aka your ’second husband,’ and he was in the audience last night. I’m curious how that works. Do you guys plan dates or do you have a big chalkboard with a schedule on it?

ALINE KOMINKSY-CRUMB: We’re old and not as sex-driven as we once were. We all eat together. Most of the time I stay with Robert. But when I want to do things that Robert doesn’t like, such as going to the beach or going into Paris — or for that matter when I need somebody to do the ‘man’ things that Robert can’t do, such as fix the plumbing or drive a car — I go with the ’second husband.’ I always say that Robert is emotionally autistic — he just incapable of jealousy. Besides, monogamous marriage is a relatively modern invention. People have lived as tribes for much, much longer. That’s how we live, like a tribe.

[in the background Robert can be heard saying, “Just tell ‘em we’re polyamorous.”]

PHAWKER: I know Robert’s not doing any press, but do you think we could ask him just one question about growing up in Philadelphia? [Robert agrees and gets on the line] Great. First of all, can you tell me exactly where you lived and when?

ROBERT CRUMB: Hmm, we left town when I was seven. We actually lived in a couple places. The first was South 53rd St. When my father got out of the Marines, we moved to this housing project down by the oil refineries. Eventually it became this incredibly violent black slum and it’s since been razed. I have a lot of nostalgic memories from my childhood in Philadelphia in the ’40s: the brick houses, the trolley cars, the coal man, the ice man, me and my brother Charles* delivering groceries in our little red wagon and then climbing up on the El to watch the trains go by.

*Charles committed suicide while Crumb was in post-production.

[Artwork by KURT KAUPER]

WFMU: It was 1943. Cary Grant was starring in the motion picture Destination Tokyo; an action-filled wartime drama co-starring John Garfield and a deluge of racial slurs. While America was embroiled in the intense fighting of World War Two, Axis powers had surrounded the neutral country of Switzerland. Deep within Nazi surrounded boundaries, Swiss chemist Albert Hoffman was busy toiling away in a dimly lit laboratory, about to study the properties of a synthesis he had abandoned five years earlier. Hoffman was trying to devise a chemical agent that could act as a circulatory and respiratory stimulant when he accidentally absorbed lysergic acid through his fingers. While Americans sat in darkened theaters enjoying Cary Grant’s portrayal of a submarine captain, Hoffman was experiencing accelerated thought patterns, polychromatic visions and an unbearable onslaught of intense emotion. This was the world’s first acid trip. The discovery was soon to transform the life of one of Hollywood’s most glamorous stars. Cary Grant was the first mainstream celebrity to espouse the virtues of psychedelic drugs. Whereas novelist Aldous Huxley’s famous 1954 treatise The Doors of Perception recounted his remarkable experiences with mescaline, Huxley was hardly mainstream – a darling of intellectual circles to be sure, but a far cry from a matinee idol. Grant was one of the biggest stars Hollywood had to offer when he jumped headlong into Huxley’s Heaven and Hell. His endorsement of subconscious exploration, arguably, created more interest in LSD than Dr. Timothy Leary who was largely preaching to the converted.¹ Grant on the other hand was the fantasy of countless Midwestern women. He convinced wholesome movie starlets like Esther Williams and Dyan Cannon to blow their minds. When Ladies Home Journal and Good Housekeeping interviewed him, the topic of conversation wasn’t Cary’s favorite recipe or “the problem with youth today.” Instead, Cary Grant was telling happy homemakers that LSD was the greatest thing in the world. MORE

CARY GRANT: Under the effect of LSD 25, these dreams or hallucinations, if you wish, are speeded up, and interpreted, when properly conducted ba a psychiatrically orientated doctor who sits quietly by, awaiting whatever communication one cares to make — the revealing of a hidden memory seen again from an older, more mature viewpoint, or the dawning of new enlightenment. Then, if the doctor is as skilled as mine was, he carefully proffers a word or key, that can lead to the next release, the next step toward fuller understanding. The shock of each revelation brings with it an anguish of sadness for what was not known before in the wasted years of ignorance and, at the same time, an ecstasy of joy at being freed from the shackles of such ignorance. One becomes a battleground of old and new beliefs. Of nightmares beyond description. I passed through changing seas of horrifying and happy sights, through a montage of intense hate and love, a mosaic of past impressions assembling and reassembling; through terrifying depths of dark despair replaced by glorious heavenlike religious symbolisms. Session after session. Week after week. I learned may things in the quiet of that small room. I learned to accept the responsibility for my own actions, and to blame myself and no one else for circumstances of my own creating. I learned that no one else was keeping me unhappy but me; that I could whip myself better than any other guy in the joint. I learned that all clichés prove true; which is, of course, the reason for their repetition, even when the meaning has been forgotten by the constant usage.I learned that everything is, or becomes, its own opposite. A theory I can sometimes apply, but would find difficult to convey. For a slow learner, I learned a great deal — and the result of it all was rebirth. A new assessment of life and myself in it. An immeasurably beneficial cleansing of so many needless fears and guilts, and a release of the tensions that had been the result of them. Not a cleansing and release of them all, certainly, for that would be the absolute — the innocence of the newly born baby with an unformed ego still close to God — and I cannot experience the absolute until I have unreservedly returned to the comfort of God. In life there is no end to getting well. Perhaps death itself is the end to getting well. Or, if you prefer to think as I do, the beginning of being well. MORE

EROWID: Albert Hofmann passed away at his home at 9am on Tuesday Apr 29, 2008 of a heart attack at the age of 102. He will be missed. Albert Hofmann was born in Baden, Switzerland in 1906. He graduated from the University of Zürich with a degree in chemistry in 1929 and went to work for Sandoz Pharmaceutical in Basel, Switzerland. With the laboratory goal of working towards isolation of the active principles of known medicinal plants, Hofmann worked with Mediterranean squill (Scilla maritima) for several years, before moving on to the study of Claviceps purpurea (ergot) and ergot alkaloids.Over the next few years, he worked his way through the lysergic acid derivatives, eventually synthesizing LSD-25 for the first time in 1938. After minimal testing, LSD-25 was set aside as he continued with other derivatives. Four years later, on April 16, 1943, he re-synthesized LSD-25 because he felt he might have missed something the first time around. That day, he became the first human to experience the effects of LSD after accidentally ingesting a minute amount. Three days later, on April 19, 1943, he decided to verify his results by intentionally ingesting 250 ug of LSD. This day has become known as “Bicycle Day” as Hofmann experienced an incredible bicycle ride on his way home from the lab.

In addition to his discovery of LSD, he was also the first to synthesize psilocybin (the active constituent of ‘magic mushrooms’) in 1958. Albert Hofmann, known as the ‘father of LSD’, continued to work at Sandoz until 1971 when he retired as Director of Research for the Department of Natural Products. He continued to write, lecture, and play a leading role as an elder in the psychedelic community until his death at the age of 102. MORE

WIKIPEDIA: Hofmann called LSD “medicine for the soul” and was frustrated by the worldwide prohibition that has pushed it underground. “It was used very successfully for 10 years in psychoanalysis,” he said, adding that the drug was hijacked by the youth movement of the 1960s and then unfairly demonized by the establishment that the movement opposed. He conceded that LSD can be dangerous in the wrong hands.^[5] In December 2007, Swiss medical authorities permitted a psychotherapist to perform psychotherapeutical experiments with patients who suffer from terminal stage cancer and other deadly diseases. Although not yet started, these experiments will represent the first study of the therapeutic effects of LSD on humans in 35 years, as other studies have focused on the drug’s effects on consciousness and body. Hofmann supported the study, and continued to believe in the therapeutic benefits of LSD.^[7] Hofmann was due to speak at the World Psychedelic Forum^[6] from March 21 to March 24, 2008 but was forced to pull out due to poor health. MORE

I’VE GOT A BIKE: Dr. Hofmann’s Wild Ride

[albert hofmann 1943 – a bicycle trip (2009)]