In the Greenroom with R Crumb
Fred Astaire, pre-show nerves, and a dip into our archives
This week, we celebrated the launch of Dan Nadel’s extraordinary new biography of R. Crumb. The biographer and his subject were joined by Naomi Fry, and over 900 Crumb fans in the audience, for a freewheeling conversation about Crumb’s storied career, the nature of biography, and much more. If you missed it, you can watch it here.
What you cannot watch, and what I am here instead to report, is the very lively time we had backstage before the event. See below from our dispatch from the greenroom.
— Mikaela Dery, Director, Unterberg Poetry Center
Crumb explained to us that he gets all of his pants custom-made, which is how he achieves the same kind of fit that old-movie stars did (he insisted during the conversation that he’s “old-school” and “a square”). He also revealed to us that his tie was a real prop from a Fred Astaire movie. I can’t imagine a better outfit for an event.
Something important that happens in the green room before all of our events is that the speakers sign a red, leather-bound book, a version of which everyone who has ever spoken at the Poetry Center has signed (Dylan Thomas! Robert Frost! Truman Capote! James Baldwin! Joan Didion! And more!). The above image is the page that Crumb, Dan, and Naomi signed.
I will leave you with the above series of images, in which Crumb flipped his hat before going on stage as Dan looks on. Regretably, we did not discuss his hat, but based on the label, I think it might be an original Dobbs hat from the 1930s.
In some non-Crumb-related news, we have been thinking of Mario Vargas Llosa, the Nobel prize-winner who spoke many times at the 92nd Street Y, and passed away this week. Below is a clip of a 2007 appearance, which followed the publication of his book The Bad Girl. He talks here about leaving home.