Geoff Klock

Geoff Klock has a doctorate from Oxford and is a professor at BMCC-CUNY. He teaches philosophy (mostly the philosophy of art), Shakespeare, canonical poetry in English, parables, and film (mostly movies about movies, and David Lynch). He is the author of four academic books on things like television shows and superheroes. He has been cited 290 times, including in the New Yorker and the LA Times and made a Hamlet Mash Up that got 57,000 views.

His friend Mitch says of his work “it not only takes a highbrow literary thing and applies it to a more mainstream thing in a fun way, it also serves as a simple introduction to that highbrow thing.” He has done more than 40 Olios, and was featured in their story in Southwest Airlines Magazine. He was trained as an actor, survived a hit and run with a NYC taxi, was in a play with Christopher Lloyd and a conga line with Rebecca del Rio, won a sexy Halloween costume context at a burlesque show in NYC, sang Auld Lang Syne with all three children from It’s a Wonderful Life, and he was 8 miles into a lava field in Hawaii when he received a national emergency message to seek shelter because a ballistic missile strike was imminent.


Past Olios with Geoff Klock


Psychosexual Cinema Club | Mulholland Drive

You know the Allegory of the Cave, from Plato. Well, that's a fucking movie theater, that’s the temple where we all go to worship, that's where our dreams are manufactured, and David Lynch has a few things to say on that subject.

Venue: None

Teacher: Geoff Klock

March 10, 2020, 7:30 p.m.

Psychosexual Cinema Club | Psycho

Join Geoff Klock for a look at absurdly famous movies where fantasy, dreams, sexuality, identity and performance bleed in eerie ways. This week's film is "Psycho" from 1960: Hitchcock is the real slasher, cutting open narrative and audience.

Venue: None

Teacher: Geoff Klock

Feb. 4, 2020, 7:30 p.m.

Kafka’s Very Short Stories: A Phantasmagoria of Loss and Destruction

Join us for happy hour at Strong Rope Brewery as we dive into Kafka's short stories with Geoff Klock!

Venue: Strong Rope Brewery

Teacher: Geoff Klock

Nov. 26, 2019, 7:30 p.m.

Kafka’s The Castle: God’s Nightmare Bureaucracy

Join Geoff Klock at Strongrope brewery as we explore the comic absurdity and terror of Kafka's 'The Castle'.

Venue: Strong Rope Brewery

Teacher: Geoff Klock

Nov. 12, 2019, 7:30 p.m.

Kafka’s The Trial: Guilt and the (Almost) Sexual Perversion of Justice

Join us at Strong Rope Brewery for a look at Kafka's 'The Trial' with professor Geoff Klock. We'll read and discuss quotes and recover the sense of humor that Kafka intended with his writing.

Venue: Strong Rope Brewery

Teacher: Geoff Klock

Oct. 29, 2019, 7:30 p.m.

Prospect Park Philosophy | Art vs. Reality

Is art a dangerous illusion, an instruction manual, a mirror, or an escape, and can we even tell where art begins and reality ends? Join us as Geoff Klock leads Think Olio's first ever series in the park.

Venue: Prospect Park (Grand Army Entrance)

Teacher: Geoff Klock

Aug. 14, 2019, 7:15 p.m.

OlioHouse Weekend | Midsummer Night’s Dream

This will be a 2-night OlioHouse weekend where you can leave NYC and join us in the woods where we will take an intense weekend-long look at this play about a bunch of faerie creatures – and think role of the imagination.

Venue: OlioHouse | Wassaic, NY

Teacher: Geoff Klock

Aug. 2, 2019, 7:30 p.m.

The Holy Fool

Join Geoff Klock in the Strand's Rare Book Room as we look to Shakespeare, David Lynch, and other sources of pop culture to explore the idea that the stupidest characters might be our best source of groundbreaking wisdom.

Venue: Strand Bookstore

Teacher: Geoff Klock

May 22, 2019, 7 p.m.

Olio Movie Night | Eraserhead

Join Geoff Klock in Nitehawk's Williamsburg lounge for an evening of watching and discussing David Lynch's Eraserhead over food and specialty cocktails.

Venue: Nitehawk Cinema Williamsburg

Teacher: Geoff Klock

May 7, 2019, 7 p.m.

OlioHouse | Shakespeare Weekend: Macbeth, Masculinity, Misogyny, and Madness

Only in Shakespeare do you get, all in the same work, the most powerful, entertaining personalities, combined with the most subtle poetry, and the smartest kind of philosophy. Plus so much sex and death!

Venue: OlioHouse | Wassaic, NY

Teacher: Geoff Klock

March 23, 2019, noon

Anecdotes are Better Than Evidence (or at least they were this one time you guys)

New Member Appreciation Party! We'll have happy hour all night as we discuss the future of Think Olio and hear a classic Geoff Klock Olio.

Venue: Berg'n

Teacher: Geoff Klock

Feb. 20, 2019, 7:30 p.m.

The Dangerous Pleasure of Art

It is a tour-de-force intellectual analysis of the relationship between art and morality, illusion and reality, sex and masculinity and violence and pornography and women — one that outshines 100 philosophers and 1000 think-pieces.

Venue: Blender Workspace

Teacher: Geoff Klock

Jan. 31, 2019, 7:30 p.m.

Living Room Salon | Tough Poetry in Dark Times

Join us for this two hour Olio where we read difficult poetry that asks some tough goddamn questions

Venue: Living Room

Teacher: Geoff Klock

Jan. 24, 2019, 7:30 p.m.

OlioHouse Weekend | The David Lynch Existential Dread in the Woods Seminar Retreat of Doom

Join us at OlioHouse for this retreat, designed to ruin your mind as we take a deep dive into three of the most mind blowing films of all time: Mulholland Drive, Lost Highway, and Blue Velvet.

Venue: OlioHouse | Wassaic, NY

Teacher: Geoff Klock

Nov. 10, 2018, noon

David Lynch’s Lost Highway: Masculinity, Pornography, Psychoanalysis, Noir

We will watch the entire movie, spoiler free in Neuehouse's gorgeous theater and you will walk out with a surprisingly strong grasp of what the hell just happened.

Venue: Neuehouse Madison Sq.

Teacher: Geoff Klock

Sept. 16, 2018, 1 p.m.

The Wisdom of Pop Culture

Books are smart; TV and movies are dumb. That is what people usually say.

Venue: Neuehouse Madison Sq.

Teacher: Geoff Klock

Aug. 22, 2018, 6:15 p.m.

NYC Poetry Festival | The Dangerous Pleasure of Art

Hot takes are for babies; let’s get a context hundreds of years old for the things that concern us now.

Venue: Governors Island

Teacher: Geoff Klock

July 29, 2018, 3:30 p.m.

Kafka Will Ruin Your Life and Make You Laugh About It

Let's get a handle on the guy who Harold Bloom said, alongside Proust and Freud, dominated the 20th century.

Venue: Strong Rope Brewery

Teacher: Geoff Klock

May 14, 2018, 7:30 p.m.

Shakespeare Happy Hour | Think Olio 3rd Anniversary

We'll look at a few scenes in Shakespeare where characters seem to know that they are in a play — and what that can tell us about mindfulness, our own relationship to art and to our lives.

Venue: Strand Bookstore

Teacher: Geoff Klock

March 2, 2018, 7 p.m.

Shakespeare and the Invention of the Supervillain

The modern supervillain has one single pure origin: Shakespeare’s Iago, an ordinary person whose multiple motives conceal his essential drive for, and unrestrained theatrical enjoyment of chaos and evil for the sake of evil.

Venue: Strand Bookstore

Teacher: Geoff Klock

Nov. 3, 2017, 7 p.m.

Aestheticism, Pop Culture, Evil & Oscar Wilde

Oscar Wilde popularized the idea that Beauty, rather than Truth or Goodness, should be the aim of art

Venue: The Old Stone House

Teacher: Geoff Klock

Oct. 16, 2017, 7:30 p.m.

Unlocking Mulholland Drive, David Lynch, and the Monstrous Hollywood Dream Machine

Join Prof. Klock for a four-hour Olio, where we will watch a chunk of the movie, pausing occasionally to look at details, and discuss the chunk we just watched, till it's all over. If you have not seen Mulholland Drive before, see it for the first time here, as I will be enforcing spoilers

Venue: Neuehouse Madison Sq.

Teacher: Geoff Klock

Sept. 17, 2017, 2 p.m.

Getting out of our Comfort Zone: David Foster Wallace’s “The Depressed Person” and “This is Water”

Join us as we experience one of the most grim and darkly funny short stories ever as well as an uplifting commencement address, and think about art that stretches our capacity for empathy, sometimes quite painfully.

Venue: Nowadays

Teacher: Geoff Klock

Aug. 15, 2017, 7:30 p.m.

That Fresh Sound: Modern Poetry, Kanye West, And Shaking Your Mind Out of Its Rut

This Olio is specifically charged to break the mind out of cliché and into a perpetual freshness of language – and maybe cure writer’s block.

Venue: JWALK

Teacher: Geoff Klock

June 21, 2017, 7 p.m.

More Than A Hipster Touchstone: Neutral Milk Hotel’s In The Aeroplane Over The Sea

Join us for a special Olio where we look closely at the supreme poetry of the printed out lyrics for 60 minutes, and then listen to the whole album, and remember for a second what it is to be whole.

Venue: Strand Bookstore

Teacher: Geoff Klock

June 9, 2017, 7 p.m.

*Professor Showdown* Birdman: Revealing or Reinforcing Patriarchy?

Join Think Olio professors Jason McCormick and Geoff Klock at Berg'n beerhall for a screening and discussion of 2015's Academy Awards Best Picture winner, Birdman.

Venue: Berg'n

Teacher: Geoff Klock

May 18, 2017, 7 p.m.

*Read-in* Tough Poetry in Dark Times: Shelley, Melville, Brecht, Pope & Yeats

Join us for this two hour Olio where we read difficulty poetry that asks some tough goddamn questions.

Venue: IDIO Gallery

Teacher: Geoff Klock

April 9, 2017, 4 p.m.

Eating with Hedonism or Morals?: Aesthetics & Ethics From Vegetarianism to Cannibalism

We'll look at the relationship between our natural impulses toward hedonism on one side -- and our desire to live a good life on the other.

Venue: Blue Apron - Flatiron

Teacher: Geoff Klock

March 28, 2017, 7:30 p.m.

Kill Bill Vol. 1: Quentin Tarantino as Mash-Up DJ & the Value of Trash Culture

Venue: Brooklyn Boulders

Teacher: Geoff Klock

Jan. 28, 2017, 6:30 p.m.

Macbeth: Toxic Masculinity, Misogyny, & Monarchy

Venue: Strand Bookstore

Teacher: Geoff Klock

Nov. 28, 2016, 7:30 p.m.

That Fresh Sound: Modern Poetry, Kanye West, And Shaking Your Mind Out of Its Rut

Venue: Threes Brewing

Teacher: Geoff Klock

Sept. 28, 2016, 6:30 p.m.

Dinner and a Movie: Synecdoche, New York

Venue: Berg'n

Teacher: Geoff Klock

Sept. 21, 2016, 8 p.m.

The Joker, Hamlet, and George R.R. Martin: Radical Nihilism

Venue: The Pennsy

Teacher: Geoff Klock

Sept. 13, 2016, 7 p.m.

Hamlet, the Joker, and George R.R. Martin: Radical Nihilism

Venue: WeWork Dumbo Heights

Teacher: Geoff Klock

July 12, 2016, 7 p.m.

Dinner and a Movie: Barton Fink pt.2

Venue: Berg'n

Teacher: Geoff Klock

July 6, 2016, 8 p.m.

Dinner and a Movie: Barton Fink

Venue: Berg'n

Teacher: Geoff Klock

June 29, 2016, 8 p.m.

Dinner and a Movie: The Prestige pt 2

Venue: Berg'n

Teacher: Geoff Klock

June 22, 2016, 8 p.m.

Truth Tellers and Troublemakers: Shelley and Free Love

Venue: Chandelier Creative

Teacher: Geoff Klock

June 16, 2016, 7 p.m.

Dinner and a Movie: The Prestige pt 1

Venue: Berg'n

Teacher: Geoff Klock

June 15, 2016, 8 p.m.

The People vs Oscar Wilde: Aestheticism, Popular Culture, Evil

Venue: Strand Bookstore

Teacher: Geoff Klock

June 13, 2016, 7:30 p.m.


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Olio: A miscellaneous collection of art and literature.