Molly Crabapple is truly no talent, but one:
self-promotion. The pictures are crude, ugly and childish; the prose is mawkish and adolescent, with much crass salesman desperation leading to strings of clichés in the style of the J Peterman catalogue. But all this would just be pitiable if she weren't a malicious and destructive character, a propagandist who goes to Chatila refugee camp and stages herself, an American with an Israeli right of return, as sexually molested by a paranoid and anti-Semitic ten year old Palestinian child. (Hard to believe this happened, but even if by some wild chance it had, what is the ethic of journalism that could possibly authorize going to a camp that was the scene of a such a horror and then writing shit about a child who lives still dispossessed on that bloodsoaked site, to aggrandize the author? Without offering him space to defend himself?)
Crabapple's stock in trade is the tale of her bravely enduring another victimization, and endless gropings, oglings, stalkings, "shoulder rape" and "eye-fucking" -- reckless eyeballing -- by brown men and boys:
"Of a mysterious three month journey in Turkey after 911, the young woman who says she dreams of being a "burlesque dancer/artist/spy" relates very little in
Drawing Blood, except for four short encounters with men, one a sexual assault by a Turkish hotel clerk, one sexual harassment by Turkish soldiers, one inappropriate sexual pursuit by an Turkish inn owner, last a vague, highly romantic encounter with a glamorized Bulgarian war reporter who has never reported a war (like Molly Crabapple herself now), who sounds like a thinly disguised Mossad agent. ("War journalists are some of the last macho archetypes we can lust after without ambivalence. They chronicle violence without being violent themselves. Victor hadn’t covered wars, but he had traveled to dangerous places.") ...She imagines herself moving through an endless jungle as she treks toward her tawdry goal, the people around her fauna, simply obstacles (frequently), menaces (usually), or things for her use then and now to aggrandize herself one way or another. During her entire three months sojourn in Turkey, much of it spent in Istanbul, Caban has no interaction with any woman that seems worthy of report. " --
here
Home in Williamsburg, Caban is still wandering through that imagined jungle, braving the desire and abuse of the brown male fauna, Latino this time ("Sssss! Rubia!" "Hey white bitch!" is all she reports her neighbors saying within her hearing). These experiences are given as titillatingly revolting and the men depicted as contemptible, in contrast to the thrills she gets from burlesque performing for rich white men.
Repeated episodes of lusted-after-white-girl among the comical brutes establish a colonial paradigm in which JC's sub-mediocre art and infantile pseudo-journalism are to escape ordinary professional evaluation, because, as they said in the 19th century, "the Orient is a career," like these:
[A] boy, perhaps eleven but taller than me, hissed that I was making maps “so the Jews could bomb the camp”. He told Mae that she was a Shi’ite who would be slaughtered. He grabbed my arm, hard, trying to gouge out skin. We turned to leave. He grabbed my hair — harder. Grabbed my ass.
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As we got farther in, we passed homemade roulette wheels and porn. The market was illegal but tolerated. As I spoke to vendors, more and more men gathered around me. In all-male Musaffah, a white girl might as well be an alien.
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Then the other officers left. I sat alone with the boss in my compartment. By that time, my food poisoning had turned into a full-blown fever. I was delirious. It was three A.M. I wanted to sleep. I lay down in the bunk. He pressed himself on top of me, his breath hot in my face. I didn’t understand. Then I did. I shoved him off, then stared in shock when he stuttered an apology.
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"If you keep traveling, you're going to get yourself raped."
Z. and I were sitting in a cafe on the edge of the Sahara. We'd been bumming around Morocco for three weeks. Despite my warnings, Z was increasingly disgusted with me for provoking constant street harassment. I covered myself chin to toe, but guys at the bus station would hiss at me like snakes anyway.
"That man just left a mosque," Z said, after an elderly man eye-fucked me. "He's supposed to be thinking of god."
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In Şanliurfa, a city near the Syrian border, I smiled too long at a hotel clerk. He pounced on me, trying to force his tongue into my mouth. I shoved him off. He looked embarrassed to have misread the situation.
...and between them, Crabapple proves a tireless source of
disinformation, slander, and warmongering platformed by Vice and Fusion. Her entire product is fake; almost all the "facts" in her "reporting" are false, and they're often lurid, racist, Streicher-esque inventions scarcely less grotesque than the
minstrel shows she produces (Chavistas murdered a Venezuelan model, she "reports" baselessly, for attending a protest; Syrian Arab Army soldiers "raped women with rats" she contends, without a shred of substantiation; "Maoist guerrillas" are causing the mass migration of guest workers to Emirates by terror, she "reports" absurdly). Her slanders extend to personal vendettas, but these also often coincide with the needs of the Pentagon and State Dept, so she finds endless empathy for the mercenary rapist murderers in ISIS but feigns outrage to falsely accuse a critic of the US military's Tor project, of which she is a promoter, of sexual harassment, in between making racist jokes about North Koreans (Kim Jong Il was their "Dear Reader" yuk yuk yuk) on the Joe Rogan show.
Caban's main scam (Crabapple is of course a brand name) - and as a con artist she is reasonably gifted -- is a kind of penny ante disaster capitalism: she's the girl who sells t-shirts at the site of a terrorist bombing instead of the rock concert. And she has developed a way to use her crappy drawings to "put her imprint on the world" and drain value from public concern, to leech credibility and attention from other people's agony and other people's resistance -- whether victims of police terror in US or victims of her paramilitary terrorist friends in Syria -- in order to monetize their suffering and steal their glory. For example, she made promo intersticials for Fusion in which she expropriated the image and pain of Eric Garner and other victims of police murder to sell to the the network, making it look as though Eric Garner had endorsed this notoriously right-wing racist media project. Rivalling this bloodsucking for chutzpah and tastelessness was Caban's attempt to siphon for herself the heroism of the honored martyr Rachel Corrie, and to coopt her dignity, righteousness, and sacrifice as a brand enhancenent for the very Empire she opposed and its servants like Crabapple who claimed kinship and credit via a supposedly shared tribal affiliation: "No one did more than Rachel Corrie for the name 'Americans in Palestine", tweeted Caban promoting herself as An American in Palestine. Corrie did not choose to go to represent and promote US Empire, or American Ethnic Pride, but being dead, she can't stop Crabapple from exploiting and manipulating her corpse for those odious causes and her own and her sponsors' profit.
This cynical lamprey-ism characterizes all Caban's proceedings. Everything is mimicry, the reproduction of something already kitsch in the even more depleted paper doll cutouts register: Zak Smith painted punky
“professional naked girls with octopuses”, Caban painted
twee professional cheesecake girls with octopuses. Laurie Penny portrays herself as a magical child, late of Hogwarts, out “having adventures,” to "change the world," but pole dancing and "humping a webcam", Caban draws herself as another girl child beside her, two toddlers in a porny fairy tale dragging suitcases bigger than they are through a storybook Athens created to display them as little lost children who are objects of adult sexual desire.
What is most striking, however, is how clear it becomes from the narrative of her rise in
Drawing Blood that the cartoonish, porny-carny sensibility of Caban’s bogus “war reporting” for Vice etc, featuring (fictional and 'creatively' non fictional) women “raped with rats” and Keebler elf refugees beside glamorized jihadists holding dripping heads, fiendish "Shia Militias" rocking the Punisher as logo, and the uppity evil clown types she makes of Gaddafi, Assad, and Mugabe, merely repackages as disinfotainment the throwback white supremacist perverse-puritanical Lynchian music hall scene at the Box, where Crabapple was launched as a pseudo-bohemian hanger on of the rich. It's remarkable how her later "journalism" flashes for attention with the Box' same prurient-prude formula of tribal grotesquerie and its Nazi schemes of beauty and freakishness. Her "reporting" was incubated in this sleazy cabaret where Caban found herself titillated to a trembling swoon by a woman jabbing herself with a butcher knife instead of a dildo and “drag queens in blackface” (yes, blackface), expelling “fireworks out of their asses”. These acts, she relates breathlessly, became the muses who loosened her own artistic sphincter:
The Box stayed open till five A.M. every night. Beyoncé, Lindsay, Scarlett Johansson slipped out. I-bankers blew twenty grand on bottles of champagne. Onstage, Russian acrobats did backflips over chainsaws, drag queens in blackface shot fireworks out of their asses, and Broadway dancers shoved their bare breasts into the audience’s collective maw. The singer Raven O presided over the nights like a god of sex.
…Flambeaux ran through the crowd in a top hat, stockings, and girdle, a leer cracking his thin Scottish face. He held a gas can. “Wouldn’t it be fun to ring the funeral bell/On our civilization, and watch it burn in Hell,” the Tiger Lilies sang.
Flambeaux poured the can’s contents madly on the audience, splashing liquid over their suits and evening gowns. It was water, of course, but they were too drunk to tell. One man tried to run. On stage, Flambeaux lifted a drape to reveal a hog-tied girl. She screamed. He shoved an apple into her mouth. He drew a circle with his torch, and flames leapt around her. Then, from his panties, he pulled another torch, like a penis, and lit the tip on fire. The girl writhed in terror. He pulled her up by her hair, leered, and grabbed the apple from her mouth.
The curtain lowered right before he forced the girl to suck the torch.
I was spellbound.
The next act began. Acantha, a blues singer from New Orleans, slunk out. She wore her hair in forties curls, her skin dark against her white silk slip. “I put a spell on you,” Acantha sang. Around her, girls materialized. They wore slips. They were sleepwalkers, the lights blue on their thighs as they hitched up their skirts. They moved as if through gel. Then they ripped open their slips in unison to reveal small, upturned breasts, which they shoved in the front row’s faces.
The curtain closed. It opened. An acrobat balanced on a dildo with one finger. The curtain closed. It opened. The performance artist Narcissister stood on a rotating platform, nude except for a mask, pulling her outfit out of every orifice of her body. The curtain closed.
It was four A.M. I was delirious, covered in sweat, having consumed nothing but stolen popcorn. My mind swam with images. I was bursting with them, as if I’d eaten too much. I couldn’t wait to get back to Fred’s studio and draw. Broke though I was, I hailed a taxi from the line outside, tearing open the door in my eagerness to get back to the studio before the images fled from my head. As the cab sped over the Williamsburg Bridge, I scribbled with lipstick onto the back of a receipt. Crows. Dancers. The earth. The sun rose. The skyline shone silver in that humid dawn. In my excitement, I broke the lipstick.
This wasn’t like the burlesque shows I’d danced in, where friends cheered no matter how badly I missed my mark. This was New York at its most fucked and glamorous. The rich and poor rubbed against each other until they bled. This was angry. It was louche. It was corrupt with millions of dollars. It was for real.
The car let me out at Fred’s building. I waited outside for a moment. Bushwick was silent, the illegal spray shop closed, a cat prowling outside one of the warehouses. I breathed harder, to cover the ache in my throat.
The Box was my girl. My muse. My Moulin Rouge. I wanted in.
And this commercial, cartoon fascioid authoritarian BDSM sensibility is repeated also in the entitlement Caban exhibits in insisting on penetrating the delivery room in a refugee camp in Iraq, a few years later, to draw a young Syrian woman’s really bleeding genitals as she gave birth far from home, to sell to Vice as Grand Guignol “conflict journalism.” Her racket is to take the real horror she helps her sponsors inflict on real people, derive imagery charged with "true story" frisson from it, stage it as comic book panels in the vaudeville proscenium of Vice or Vanity Fair for the pleasure of the audience, with a winking barker's alibi that what is beheld is an edifying as well as a titillatingly terrifying spectacle, and as she monetizes the attention, shift the blame for this exploitation from herself and her paymasters to the audience when the feigned piety and compassion of her act (when she is monetizing Syrian refugees or jailed Americans, say) means she cannot merely get away with chest pounding Nietzschean boasting of her cynical winner-ism.
All this hucksterism and scavenging in the cesspools around the immense crime of Wall Street is narrated by Caban as both glamorous nightlife and valiant political struggle (her more recent immersion in the pseudo-left sphere of Jacobin and Verso has taught her to go back to inject a perfunctory diagnosis of “class war” into the flat anecdotes she told before several times without it.
Her earlier versions describe the Box instead as the fantasy setting for Cinderella upward mobility.) On this just god awful tasteless environment, Crabapple’s recollections now impose a veneer of high school status war, in which an imagined constant angling for mutual postures of Nietzschean contempt characterizes the sociality of the establishment and somehow is supposed to redeem its sheer Disneyland yukiness, papering over quotidian humiliating and dangerous work conditions and tastelessness with some adolescent fantasy of “subversive” battles between the women paid to be dangling bound in wire sucking things and the oglers of the sucking, the cork-sooted drag queens, their white bosses, and their white bosses’ white “house artist” clerk.
I tried to capture the rays of contempt Nik was throwing toward the audience. You fucking peasants, he seemed to say with each curl of his mouth. (We are to admire this petty bourgeois ressentiment as "anarchist" or god knows what.)
Crabapple's product is an endless stream of such exploitative fraudulence in the service of violence: ersatz journalism, ersatz politics, ersatz revolutions (today the neoliberal gangster crew of "revolutionaries" she did aggressively deceptive pr for to bring to power in Greece sent the Greek airforce to buzz the Syrian refugees for whom she claims so much sympathy) ,
fake philanthropy, make-believe battlefield surgery, an endless charade, Grand Guignol and Tarzan comix. A
fascist, a
fabricator,
a plagiarist,
an opportunist, a fraud, and, sleaziest of all,
a snitch in league with her friends from the department of homeland security and the jihadist gangs chopping heads across Syria, Crabapple is one of most vile as well as the most vapid micro celebs to succeed in exploiting a largely fictitious relation to the Occupy Wall Street movement to launch the profitable illusion of a career.
(Honestly, she looks older than I thought she was.)
