Music critic and author Greil Marcus will deliver a lecture titled "On the Birth of the Cool " at 11 a.m. Wednesday, Oct. 7, in Graham Chapel as part of the Assembly Series. The lecture is free and open to the public. There will be an informal discussion with Marcus at 2 p.m. that afternoon in the Women's Building Formal Lounge.
Marcus has been writing about music for 30 years and is one of pop music's best-known critics. In 1969, while working as a music columnist for the San Francisco Express Times, he became Rolling Stone's first records editor. He was a music critic for Creem magazine from 1970 to 1975 and a book columnist for Rolling Stone from 1975 to 1980. He also has written extensively for Artforum, the Village Voice, Interview and The New York Times.
His 1975 book "Mystery Train: Images of America in Rock 'n' Roll Music," now in its third edition, examines the myths and images behind the music of some of the century's most important popular musicians and is regarded by Rolling Stone as "probably the best book ever written about rock." His most recent book is "Invisible Republic: Bob Dylan's Basement Tapes," a look at the various folk and blues traditions that in many ways found their culmination in Dylan's late 1960's recordings with The Band.
Marcus served as director of the National Book Critics Circle from 1983 to 1989 and as a member of the Executive Board of the College of Letters and Science at the University of California-Berkeley from 1992 to 1998.
In 1989, Marcus was the co-curator of an exhibition titled "On the Passage of a Few People Through a Rather Brief Moment in Time: The Situationist International, 1957-1972," which appeared in Paris' National Museum of Modern Art, London's Institute of Contemporary Art and Boston's Institute of Contemporary Art. In addition, he is director of Pagnol et Cie, the proprietary company for Berkeley's Chez Panisse restaurant, often listed as one of the best restaurants in the United States.
Marcus earned a bachelor's degree in American studies in 1967 and a master's in political science in 1968, both from the University of California-Berkeley. He has lectured often at Berkeley and other universities and also at museums and art institutes in the United States and Europe.
For more information, visit the Assembly Series Web page at http://wupa.wustl.edu/assembly or call 935-5285.
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