The 1987 documentary on the life of Robert Crumb, underground comics pioneer, 60s icon, and the quintessential Dirty Old Man. Written by the man himself, it lacks the distance from its subject that made Terry Zwigoff’s Crumb more of a revelatory study in neuroses and emotional trauma and instead puts you squarely in the middle of Crumb’s gonzo world of misogyny and self-loathing and in that sense it is a much better illustration of Crumb the Artist as opposed to Crumb the Man.
There are, I suppose, two ways to take this ad for Goodyear’s “Double Eagle” tires. The first is that a woman, incapable of understanding the subtleties of using a jack to raise a portion of her car off the ground and then having to deal with the mysterious complexity of threaded nuts and bolts, will walk for what seems like miles, running the risk of being dragged off into the bushes to be raped and murdered by a man or group of men, only so that she can get to a phone — because those broads love to just yak yak yak, am I right fellas?
The other way to take it is that men can easily be replaced by dual walled, rubber tires.
This anti-pornography film from the 1960s left me with one very obvious, and troubling, conclusion: I am deeply envious of the wordsmithery of morally conservative propagandists. From his terse, esoteric pronunciation of bestiality, to his description of a “flood-tide of filth” — a description that calls to mind great, towering waves of briny genitalia — in terms of oratorical outrage, George Putnam is equal parts Shakespeare and Don King. Listening to his ode to a young, female sex toy, he paints a picture of sleazy, corrupted innocence that far exceeds any photograph. His insights are pointed, “[…]very few blind people join the nudist colonies,” he notes; his logic flawless. It was only when he described the irreversible effects of pornography that I realized why man-on-top missionary style sex did not excite me and why I insisted that my girlfriend participate in elaborate, 80s themed cos-play. Suddenly forcing her to dress like Jem or one of the My Little Ponies made perfect, if horrible, sense.
Yet, Putnam remains humble throughout. “In this ad, the titles of the magazines and their table of contents speak more eloquently than I about the tremendous problem here presented,” he says, before uttering the words “Sexual sadism. Strange flagellation cults” with a gravitas that would drive Morgan Freeman mad with jealousy. Oh George, you sell yourself short. Who else could speak of homosexuals as an evil “species” without coming off as a completely ignorant, hateful bigot? Who else could retain their composure while narrating over scores of photographs of female breasts covered by bars so large that one would think these women were in possession of the most freakishly huge areolas to be found on this planet, Earth? Not I!
Towards the end of the clip he quotes Pitirim A. Sorokin — the famed sociologist and author of, among other works, the hysterical and reactionary The American Sex Revolution — as saying that the newsstands of the time
[…] depict the world as a sort of human zoo, inhabited by raped, mutilated, and murdered females and by he-males, outmatching in bestiality, cavemen and out-lusting the lustiest of animals. Male and female alike are hardened in cynical contempt for human life and values.
Part of me wishes these two gentleman had been able to see some of the more interesting corners of the internet, if only to have been able to see their brains leak out their ears. In fact, Putnam is still alive and has, at the very least, changed his opinion on homosexuals. Someone should sit him down in front of 4chan before it’s too late.
In sheer defiance of the World Wide Web Consortium's will, Ectomo was designed using a non-web-standard font. Luckily, it is included in the excellent font pack released by the H.P. Lovecraft Historical Society, which can be freely downloaded in Mac and PC formats here. Ectomo should still look fine without it, though.
