For many of us, getting through Reed without a good pair of headphones or earbuds would be impossible. So here’s a playlist that will possibly help you deal whatever Reed is throwing your way. The main theme for this week’s playlist is change and uncertainty. Whether you’re a first-year or a senior, the first few weeks of school will always leave you with an unsettling mix of feelings. Personally, the weirdest part of the start of a semester is the time I spend walking to and from class. I always end up missing some old faces and having to adjust to some new ones. I made this playlist because to me it feels like the right mixture of sad yet sweet, anxious yet hopeful.
In a previous Cultural Column on famous movie monsters last semester, I mentioned the upcoming movie The Shape of Water’s potential to tell a story of radical empathy. Having now seen the film, I can say with certainty that the film delivers on that potential—The Shape of Water is a beautiful tale told with passion, and a massive accomplishment for director del Toro.
Fried plantains, a.k.a. “tostones” in Puerto Rico and Cuba, are eaten in many Latin American countries, especially in the Caribbean. I’ve decided to share my abuela’s version of the popular dish, adding a little Puerto Rican flair to the Grail in the process. Although tostones are generally served as a side dish, I’ve added a recipe for a dip so that, if you so choose, you can serve the tostones as a snack.
Plátanos fritos se comen en muchísimas partes de Latinoamérica, especialmente en el Caribe. He decidido compartir la receta de mi abuela de este platillo popular, dándole un toque puertorriqueño a the Grail en el proceso. Aunque los tostones generalmente se sirven como acompañamiento para otro plato, he incluido un mojo por si quieres servirlos como un tentempié.
Only around three-hundred men stormed the Winter Palace in 1917. The process was slow, with red guards climbing onto ledges and struggling to break windows to gain entrance to the seat of the Provisional Government. But it was with this occupation that the world was forever changed.
The Portland International Film Festival is upon us, and it gives us such an embarrassment of riches so that if one cannot find something of interest, they probably haven’t even taken a look yet. PIFF goes on for most of the month of February, and our local Moreland Theater is showing films, so nearly anyone, from thesis-crazed seniors to freshmen newly discovering the joys and terrors of a full class load, should be able to find time to see at least one film. I’m personally excited for The Duke of Burgundy, a sexy S&M tale with an all-female cast by Berberian Sound Studio director Peter Strickland (who also promises a follow up about a male-on-male S&M relationship, for, ya know, balance and whatnot). This promises to be better than 50 Shades of Grey, not that it would be difficult to top that. The other movie I’m excited for is totally-not-sexy The Look of Silence, Joshua Oppenheimer’s follow-up to his devastating and amazing documentary The Act of Killing. The Look of Silence shifts attention from the perpetrators of Indonesia’s awful massacres to the victims and the families of victims. If it’s even half as good as The Act of Killing, it’ll still be one of the best documentaries in recent memory.
I, for one, welcome our new annotating overlords. By which I mean us, I suppose, although I haven’t completely figured out how one becomes an annotator for Genius. It might be rather easy, but I’m still too awestruck as a witness to the process to become an active cog in the exegesis machine. For those that aren’t familiar, Genius.com is the website formerly known as Rap Genius, that has long been expanding its purview to include non-hip hop genres like rock, pop, and historical tracts and speeches. But did you know that now you can type genius.com/ in front of nearly any website and see/create annotations on that webpage? It’s crazy! The new motto of the company seems to be “Annotate the World” and I’m excited to see where this goes; in the least, it will be interesting, and at most, it could revolutionize the way we relate to the consumption of media and news and, well, the world. Genius is attracting some big names, including their poaching of music writer Sasha Frere-Jones from New Yorker. Hell, Judith Butler is annotating her own works and interviews on the site. Judith Butler! All hail the new age of annotation.
In the age of PONO (I’ll be using the ‘age of ...’ phrase a lot this week, it seems), corporate synergy seems to be taking a backseat to audio quality in the music listening experience. At the very least, Neil Young has tricked us into believing that audio quality should be what matters. We’ll have to see if the boomers buy into it, shelling out for that triangular monument to post-iPod minimalist mindfuckery, and also shelling out for $40 album downloads on the PONO webstore (like honestly, what the hell?). But if we know where old Neil’s cards lay, we also know where new folk troubadour on the block, Mr. Josh Tillman of Father John Misty himself, stands with his new website http://www.fatherjohnmisty.com/sap/, which offers a “Free to Hear” album stream of his new album I Love You, Honeybear. Like many early album streams (and leaks) the sound is extremely low quality; in this case, it’s actually in that audioprimitivist format MIDI, a sonic experience reminiscent of an acid trip in one of the SEGA Genesis Sonic the Hedgehog games. The website and the MIDI stream is a work of art, but seriously, the normal album has merit as well. I never cared for J. Tillman’s work in Fleet Foxes, or even his first Father John Misty album, but this record is a brilliant exercise in balancing self-aware shmaltz and even more self-aware (and frequently hilarious) cynicism. In lesser hands, it would elicit an eye roll, but he really pulls off the mix in this album, and it will be resonating for quite some time to come.
