Monday, March 24, 2008
Aline and the Universal Need for More Love
Aline is a teenager living in a Long Island in the sixties. The only folks she has contact with are Jewish or Italian. Her mother Blabette (name fictionalized from Annette) is ranting at her about her sullenness, caused by her hearthrob Stuie's choice to go out with Trudy Klein, a perfect little blond.
Blabette: Why are you so miserable...Look how beautiful Trudy is!! What a nice boy Stuie is Too...
Aline: I hate their guts! They're stoopid asses!
Blabette: Oh Be quiet...You're just jealous...Why don't you go on a diet & put a smile on your face for a change.
Aline: I can't smile while our country is at war with Vietnam
Much is lost in this passage without the impossibly bright colors,(but you get the idea from the cover reproduction), the text in hand block capitals, and the characters not seen in profile extremis (the pointy cones of the contemporary lingerie quite predominant) Yet one can still see the real truth in that exchange of the teenage experience.
Need More Love is a feast, a celebration and a chance for an artist to claim her due. Aline is going to be forever best known as Robert Crumb's wife. And with that comes weirdness, perceptions of the odd, and a whole lot of baggage. "She stole him away to France!" "He only loves her for her butt, which he helped make famous" "She is a Yoko-like wench who he indulges to have her collaborate with in the likes of The New Yorker!"
The book is heavy and is on heavy stock. Its nearly 400 pages are a bit difficult to handle before falling asleep. What works here is that by using text, scrapbook images, reproductions of her comic work and other art work, an interview with her publisher and a couple brief messages from daughter Sophie and famous husband, something livelier and rather boundless appears than a routine memoir. Spend some time with Need More Love and a frank multi-faceted portrait appears, bluntly honest and ultimately a bit inspirational.
A roughly-hewn illustrated with confessional autobiographical content (e.g. Lynda Barry) is common these days, but back in the early days of underground comics and early feminist comics, Aline's work was highly unusual. It and her derriere caught the eye of R Crumb. The open marriage and artistic collaboration of the Crumbs is one of the central components to her story obviously. I found the excerpts from their Dirty Laundry comics among the most enjoyable in Need More Love.
Through bumpy childhood (was or wasn't father Arnie some kind of mobster), sex and drugathons of the late sixties and early seventies, celebrity wife to one of the quirkiest people on the planet, and domineering expatriate homemaker/artist, Aline comes out a winner. One of the last sections of the book is an interview with publisher Zaro Weil, where she truly comes out as a victorious fifty something more than a survivor, almost a kind of counter culture art moll version of Jane Fonda proud of her body, her family, and her accomplishments. Come 'on Aline! You Go Girl!
posted by well-executed buffet at 8:08 PM
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