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Message 178: Lecture at OSU on Radiohead

I will be lecturing on Radiohead at Oregon State University, Corvallis, OR on April 6 as part of the Craft of Writing Series. The lecture will be held in the Memorial Union’s Joyce Powell Leadership Center from 5-6:30PM. An abstract:

“Into Radiohead, or How to Disappear Completely in Music, Art and Politics”

This multimedia lecture is part of an on-going investigation of the music and art of Radiohead, a five-member English music group. The presentation outlines the project’s beginning and explores how one thread was followed through the labyrinth of influences and allusions in the band’s songs, cover art, videos and web sites. Together, these influences and allusions are read as an elaborate response to and critique of the twenty-first century’s commercial and political pressures. During the lecture, we will lose ourselves several places in the maze Radiohead has constructed—high places, low places including but not limited to: New Orleans funeral-march jazz, Cy Twombly’s art, Shakespeare’s Pericles, Jenny Holzer’s sloganeering, early and late twentieth-century electronic music (from the ondes martenot to Brian Eno), Stanley Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey, Dante’s hell, urban myths, Greek mythology, George Orwell’s 1984, current American politics, The Smiths, Anselm Kiefer’s charred landscapes, Giovanni Battista Piranesi’s etchings, and the BBC Shipping Forecast.

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