Articles Written by:    DAVID HAJDU     

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God Gets Graphic

It is not in praise of the Creator that R. Crumb portrays him — in the splash page that begins his much-anticipated adaptation of Genesis in comic-book form — as Crumb sees his own father. He grew up in helpless terror of Charles Crumb Sr., a former ...

From DAVID HAJDU, The New York Times,  24 Oct 2009
Related Topics: US Marine Corps,  Robert Hughes,  Thomas Nast,  Norman Mailer

The Transformer

Michael Jackson was a great many things, as we've been reminded in innumerable encomia since his death, and his special place in pop-culture history has to do not only with the multitude of his qualities, but also with his elemental thingness. When I ...

From DAVID HAJDU, The New Republic,  26 Jun 2009
Related Topics: Michael Jackson,  Chris Rock,  Andy Warhol,  P. T. Barnum,  HBO

Music In The Meltdown: What Should Pop Sound Like When The Country’s Going To Hell?

When all this is over, the economic crisis will take lasting form in the American consciousness as a video montage. The images are already familiar: traders gaping in horror at the Stock Exchange ... Paulson testifying before Congress ... A foreclosure ...

From DAVID HAJDU, The New Republic,  3 Jun 2009
Related Topics: Young Jeezy,  Neil Young,  U.S. Congress,  Craigslist.org,  Barack Obama

Op-Ed Contributor: Exploring the Universe, One B-Movie at a Time

ALMOST exactly 40 years after the original TV series was canceled by NBC for low ratings, the 11th feature film based on or spun off “Star Trek” has arrived on a wave (I suppose I should say a photon wave) of excitement and fanfare. This latest “Star ...

From DAVID HAJDU, The New York Times,  9 May 2009
Related Topics: Gene Roddenberry

New York Observed: His Kind of River

UNTOLD numbers of books, articles, love letters, goodbye notes, lists of dog-sitting instructions and poems have been composed in Riverside Park, and I’m hereby adding one more item to the count. I’m writing this on the Riverside promenade precisely, ...

From DAVID HAJDU, The New York Times,  21 Mar 2009
Related Topics: New York University,  Billy Strayhorn,  Bruce Springsteen,  Duke Ellington,  Ralph Ellison

Remembering Michel Petrucciani, A Hero Of Jazz Piano

One grave away from Chopin and not far from Balzac and Jim Morrison in Pere-Lachaise, the Parisian cemetery and tourist hotspot, lies the French-Italian pianist Michel Petrucciani. He died ten years ago this January in New York, the city where he had ...

From DAVID HAJDU, The New Republic,  10 Mar 2009
Related Topics: Clark Terry,  Jim Morrison,  Duke Ellington,  Marcus Roberts,  People Magazine

Condition Critical

I saw the future through a two-way mirror in November 1990. I had just started a new job as a senior editor at Entertainment Weekly, a magazine then less than a year old, and I was sitting in a darkened room with nine or ten other members of the staff, ...

From DAVID HAJDU, Columbia Journalism Review,  29 Jan 2009
Related Topics: Entertainment Weekly,  John Lennon,  Roger Ebert,  Gene Siskel,  Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism

Not Yet A Woman: Teaching Beyoncé, Taylor Swift, And Other Pop Starlets How To Grow Up

If you're going to run around with peacocks, which is what people generally do in the pop-music business, you could have no better training than Lucinda Williams had at the age of five. Her father, the poet Miller Williams, taught college in Macon, ...

From DAVID HAJDU, The New Republic,  24 Jan 2009
Related Topics: Taylor Swift,  Lucinda Williams,  Flannery O'Connor

The Year In Music

Ten of my favorite musical things from 2008, in roughly descending order of favoriteness. Half the ten items here are concerts, nightclub shows, or other performances, and the August night when I heard Andrade with a small band at Birdland was the most ...

From DAVID HAJDU, The New Republic,  25 Dec 2008
Related Topics: Grateful Dead,  Leon Wieseltier

Will Elder | b. 1921: His Mad World

’Twas a week before Christmas in 1953 when the artwork of Will Elder stirred the attorney general of Massachusetts to ban a comic-book adaptation of Clement Clarke Moore’s treasured piece of holiday piffle, “A Visit From St. Nicholas.” The outlawed ...

From DAVID HAJDU, The New York Times,  24 Dec 2008
Related Topics: Jerry Garcia,  Marilyn Monroe,  Jane Russell,  Playboy Magazine,  Bob Kane

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