By: Jason Grote

“Batman’s doing his best to sound gay, but…”

By: Jason Grote

“Robin — what have I done to you?”

By: Jason Grote

Frederick Wertham wasn’t wrong…

By: Jason Grote

No one personified the knotty relationship between comedy and brutality quite like MICHAEL O’DONOGHUE (1940–94), the man responsible for the funniest (and most unnerving) comic bits from the golden ages of both Saturday Night Live […]

By: Jason Grote

If there were to be a patron saint for misfit smart kids who do poorly in school, it would have to be MADELEINE L’ENGLE (1918-2007). A gifted writer from the age of 5, she was […]

By: Jason Grote

Writing in 1949, Philip Rahv divided American literature into volatile, rebellious “redskins” and puritan, effete “palefaces.” Although Rahv was dividing the lowbrow from the high, I would assert that, today, our “redskins” are intellectually restless […]

By: Jason Grote

In his error, performance art was born.

By: Jason Grote

ALFRED HITCHCOCK (1899-1980) was schooled in the genre conventions of the English Murder Mystery and the Hollywood Thriller, and his primary goal was always to entertain. A legendary control freak, he invented some of cinema’s […]

By: Jason Grote

As a kid, my upbringing pulled me in divergent directions: on my mother’s side, an urban technophile Jewishness (inspired, in part by her own lack of nostalgia for her childhood on a chicken farm) and […]

By: Jason Grote

The biography of ROBERT A. HEINLEIN (1907-88) firmly places Golden-Age SF on the grand continuum of Americana: the no-nonsense engineer’s mentality of his Kansas City upbringing, his longing for military service (he graduated from the […]

By: Jason Grote

My heart still skips a beat when I look at old Rolling Stone photos of GILDA RADNER (1946-89), an early childhood crush and, then as now, one of America’s greatest comediennes — and it still […]

By: Jason Grote

Octavia E. Butler

By: Jason Grote

It’s never been easy to like Eric Reed Boucher, better known as JELLO BIAFRA (born 1958). In my New Jersey high school, the mainstream kids were offended the very idea of the Dead Kennedys, while […]

By: Jason Grote

There are two kinds of people in this world: Shaft and Superfly people. But while Shaft and Isaac Hayes have long enjoyed an irony-driven revival, the far superior Superfly and CURTIS MAYFIELD (1942-99) are overdue […]

By: Jason Grote

Editor’s note: This is one of the most popular posts, traffic-wise, ever published on HiLobrow. Click here to see a list of the Top 25 Most Popular posts (as of October 2012); and click here […]