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and leads us all to this nice little

pie-in-the-sky moral heaven...

where nobody's nasty to anybody else.

But the only thing is that

literature, culture, art...

isn't put there to have

that pleasant, normative effect.

Conservatives like to think great

works of art lead us towards democracy.

Bull.

There were speeches in Shakespeare that

were so full of hatred for the mob...

they're passionately elitist,

passionately antidemocratic.

What do you with someone like Celine,

a Nazi sympathizer yet a great novelist?

What do you do with practically anybody

who's got a vision of the world...

not in accord with

the present standards at Berkeley?

They're all wearing Raiders

and 49ers jackets.

Sophie wants us to get her

a 49ers jacket.

Why do you want to live

in the midst of it?

Like Hamlet,

I'm too scared to kill myself.

You gonna move to the south of France?

You gonna miss all this?

I'II be out of here

in a couple more months.

I can't live in it.

I can't take it.

They can't wait to have the money

to get their hands on this stuff.

They live for it.

It's a beautiful world.

You gonna finish this one soon?

It depends on when I have a chance

to pick up an oil brush again.

You worked on this recently, right?

Did you do something to this recently?

When was the last time I painted?

I was working on that thing of Dian...

that portrait of that New York floozie

you were running with.

- This one?

- This is a portrait number.

You put things together

and watch the paint do stuff.

How come you put that

metallic-Iooking brassiere on her?

Her personality was like that.

She had a hard, armored personality.

She was a broad underneath it.

She would find that thing you put on her

really disturbing.

It just reflects the personality,

an icy, crazed expression in the eyes.

But there's a warmth and reluctance

in the smile.

- You know what I mean?

- Interesting.

- She's in therapy now.

- She is?

She doesn't need therapy.

She fucks too hard.

How do you cure that except by death?

You start from a blob. When you do

ink work, you start from a line.

Being fixated with...

Like that one. This is also an example

of being fixated with line.

I started getting into very detailed...

You can see a very distinct line thing

in the character of it.

You're pleased with this

when you look at it now?

I like the style a lot.

This is Van Gogh shooting himself.

- In a cornfield.

- What's the corn about?

It's like that Walt Whitman line:

Quintillions ripen

and the quintillions green.

He was out picking fruit,

a transient picker.

He came to this realization:

the abundance of the farm thing.

The abundance of plant growth.

He wrote this line: Quintillions ripen

and the quintillions green.

- The same thing with corn.

- A stylized Van Gogh painting.

Corn has infinite ability,

like primal nature.

- What's with Van Gogh shooting himself?

- His mind went to this place.

There's this infinite abundance,

like in an ear of corn.

This is the first oil painting

you ever did, isn't it?

It's the first oil I ever did. Yeah.

You never drew before,

and it suddenly just came out of you.

It's like something was released

inside of you.

When I had that first epileptic fit

in sixth grade...

I was drawing a picture of my face

with charcoal in art class.

I said, Hey, you can draw.

It started working out.

It was the first time I had

this artistic experience.

It was so violent to me

that I had a f***ing seizure.

I ended up in the hospital

the next day.

This is probably one of the last

comic covers Charles ever did.

It might be the very last one.

His psychotic bunny rabbits.

In our late teens,

I persuaded Charles...

that we should send away for

The Famous Artists Talent Test.

They had ads in magazines.

We each sent away for this test.

I did mine legitimately,

the way you were supposed to.

But Charles couldn't help himself.

You were supposed to complete the figure

by drawing a costume on it.

But he put pasties on her tits...

and started drawing weird,

psychotic characters in the background.

Psychotic Mickey Mouse.

They had an outline

of this barn and tree.

You were supposed to draw in textures

on surfaces.

They gave suggestions on

how to fill in the textures.

That's his interpretation of that.

Here was your ability

to arrange elements in a picture.

They give you objects.

You're supposed to make an arrangement.

So he did this and this.

Your imagination as an illustrator.

Complete this picture by adding...

whatever other figure or objects

you think are necessary.

So he drew this girl here.

A week after this came in the mail,

a salesman showed up to grade our tests.

If you got a good grade,

you got the privilege...

of paying $400 to take the course.

He looked at Charles...

at what he had done,

and he was speechless.

He didn't know what to say.

He told me mine was good, I had a lot of

potential and I should take the course.

But Charles,

he wouldn't even speak to him.

He was pretty far gone

at that point already.

This is some of his later work...

sort of the end of his comic period.

About 1961. He's about 18.

He started developing this weird

wrinkle technique in his drawing...

and it became stranger and stranger.

Had nothing to do

with the outside world at all.

Became more and more ingrown

in this way.

It had to do with his increasing

alienation from the world. Isolation.

He never went to pen and ink.

He never got beyond pencil and crayons.

This is some of the last

Treasure Island stuff he did.

This is late '61.

It's beautifully drawn except

the wrinkle stuff gets out of hand.

He got more and more obsessed

with that.

It gets real dark-looking.

He had this fascination

with the relationship...

between the kid and Long John Silver,

the pirate character...

which he elaborated on endlessly.

This is one of our two-mans. You can see

he gradually added more and more text.

The writing takes over.

Look at that.

He lost interest in drawing...

and then he went

to this loony writing.

There's a certain phase of Charles' life

that had this compulsive graphomania.

He did dozens of these notebooks.

He gave me a bunch of them.

People found them fascinating.

This is upside down,

though it doesn't make any difference.

I don't know if it's upside down

or right side up.

When he first started out,

it was readable...

and then it became

less and less readable.

What I definitely need is some kind

of external stimulation...

to rejuvenate me

and get me going again.

But I don't know how I'm going

to be able to arrange this eventually.

I don't know.

I'll have to start doing that

in a mental hospital.

I remember this time we were

at Neal's house and Mary was there.

Mary said, I'm bored. I'm gonna take

a bath. She went in the bathroom and...

I told her not to do it.

Maxon's eyes glazed over

and he got kind of red.

He got up as if he was in a trance

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