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.
How do you prioritize? Always an important question to a Reed student, and there are many resources available to us that give us insight into how we can prioritize our academic demands (for many of us over spring break, that insight may have been: DROP EVERYTHING YOU HAVE A THESIS DRAFT DUE IN THREE DAAAAAAAAAYS). What we aren’t given a whole lotta insight on is how we can prioritize our cultural consumption. For that, I’m here to help.
I talked at length about The Life of Pablo without even mentioning the music! I bet that’s the first time that’s happened! But honestly, it’s good stuff. I think the noise about the rollout has sometimes overshadowed the actual noise (understatement of the year), but perhaps, like we could say about many things regarding Kanye, what seemed off the cuff is actually intentional. The music on The Life of Pablo indicates a low-key release, at least the lowest key Yeezy could possibly reach for. This is kaleidoscopic Kanye, you try and see one version of him and it is instantly replaced with another version. For a quick sec it seems like Graduation-era Kanye has returned, but then he throws you face-first into 2009 Taylor-interrupting Kanye; some beats would be at home on the first half of Yeezus, while others carry on the glory of My Beautiful Dark Twisted Fantasy. This is mid-career retrospective Kanye, and it seems that it may be a turning point to something different from him. I don’t know what it is, but this album, as inconsistent as it is, makes me think we’ll be getting a more moderate, consistent Kanye in the future. He’s just as likely to prove me wrong (especially if we are truly getting another album this summer) but if he’s still operating at this level, I’ll take it. Kanye 2020.
IDK why “Arthouse Horror” has become such a thing lately, but it has and it should be much better than it is. I was excited for The Witch, I was. And let me tell you, as a piece of craft, that thing is immaculate. But if you go to movies for, ya know, themes and characters and such, The Witch may not be for you. I don’t know if I’m the most suitable dude to go in on why The Witch fails as a certain type of feminist narrative, even if its director Robert Eggers thinks it succeeds, but I know someone who is. She likes her horror gory and her feminism obligatory, heeeere’s Kasie with her hot hot hot take:
Whew, I didn’t know if we were going to make it through that. I’m not talking about the album, or even the pre-release hype cycle of name and tracklist changes, or even Kanye’s extracurricular twitter emissions (Innocent ?????? Yeah right), but I’m talking about the nonstop internet chatter and complaining about all of the above. Yeah, he changed the name at least three times, yeah, he was still putting it together, in a very public manner, up until, and past, the release date. Get over it, no one needs another “ugh Kanye enough already” comment on the music journalism website of your choice (and if you are a “Waves is the superior album title” truther, you can just get out).
Hey buddies! This past weekend was Valentine’s Day, so what better way to celebrate romance than to invite my partner in affection and movie-going to the column so we can argue about movies? This will be the last cultural column before the Oscars on February 28, so we thought we would discuss some of the movies nominated (and not nominated), so you guys know what you should catch up on. Kasie, what’s good in this year’s Oscars race?
On to music! I feel like music in 2015 was characterized by an excessive outpouring of good-to-great but not quite exceedingly excellent music, if that makes sense. Every single week seemed to bring about a handful of exciting or big name releases, to the point that there was never really a quiet period or moment of the year. By my own count, there were somewhere around 200 albums that I listened to that I thought were quite good, which is pretty crazy! That being said, there wasn’t a whole lot that truly dug into me and affected me intensely. But these 25 albums represent some amazing tunes in all genres that did get to me. Take a listen:
Hey y’all. I’m back again for one last semester of this column, so, to quote Ray Arnold, played impeccably by Samuel L. Jackson, “Hold onto yer butts.” Before we get into some new stuff, I want to look back a bit on the year that was 2015. To do so, let’s delve into some lists. Here are my ten favorite books from 2015:
‘Tis the season, folks. Not only the Christmas season, but also it’s Papa Wilcox’s 60th Birthday. Hi Dad! Happy birthday! To honor the patriarch’s entrance into his 7th decade of existence, I combined the two major seasons and watched a classic of the Wilcox household, the 1989 comedy Christmas Vacation. If you aren’t familiar with Christmas Vacation, I suggest you make a trip to Movie Madness and get to know the Griswold family immediately.
In a recent episode of NPR’s Pop Culture Happy Hour podcast that I was listening to, one of the co-hosts remarked on how, as far as the cultural output calendar goes, October and November are relatively calm months. For them, that means that the fall months are a time for ruminating on the year and catching up on things that they may have missed in the preceding seasons. This all leads up to the wintertime take-no-prisoners mêlée of year-end best-of list season, in which every columnist, blogger, and critic finally publishes their highly curated index of 2015’s best offerings and scours their rivals’ lists and furiously downloads whatever they’ve been foolish enough to ignore. Of course, this is coming from people inside the industry, who get albums, books, and screeners about three months early. For us normies, the months of October and November can feel just as packed with content as the summer and spring seasons that came before. The fall TV season is in full swing, meaning that the best new shows have finally pulled ahead of the pack and we can begin whittling down our interest from the insurmountable mound of programming that the networks and streaming companies have dumped upon us. O veritable mount of fine hour-long dramas and ten-episode sitcoms! How would I ever conquer thee? New vital albums are coming out every week, some that you can’t get enough of (hello, Arca) and some that you can’t help hearing about all the time (oh hey Grimes). That pile of library books that you put on hold in August isn’t getting any smaller. All those movies you heard about when they were getting rave reviews on the festival circuit are coming out.
If you need more emo shit after the TWIABP show, just come back a few days later for this show. “MoBo is a suckier Front Bottoms, for all you genre loving folk” sez my partner (perhaps facetiously), but I would have to flip dat hierarchy. Modern Baseball is better, and their new album should be pretty dang alright.
No one is quite sure at any point if there are more words in the name or members in the band TWIABP. . . but if that’s all you know about the band (and decide it’s all you need to know) you are making a big mistake. With their new album Harmlessness, TWIABP move from a screamier version of emo towards a more baroque pop sensibility (probably because they lost the screamy member of the band). This show will be a veritable cornucopia of twinkly guitars.
This under-the-radar pop act is surprisingly better than it has any right to be. If you find yourself jonesing for a Carly Rae Jepsen concert, but are miffed that she has no dates anywhere near PDX, this may be the singer for you to discover. Although her debut full-length Pocketknife can wear itself a little thin, there are some legitimate gems in there for you to discover.
Oh hey, the dude from The National has a new project and long, quasi-creepy hair. It’s with the guy from Menomena, but I don’t really care about him/that band. Your mileage may vary on fairly conventional dude-indie music, and El Vy definitely isn’t The National, but it ain’t bad either. I do have to say, when I saw The National on the Trouble Will Find Me tour, it was pretty earth-shatteringly, tears-on-my-wine-bottle great; Matt Berninger is a fantastic live presence, and this would be pretty much your only chance to see him in a room this small. Plus, this is their tour kickoff, so you’d be among the first people to see them ever.
Hey everyone, Charlie here, I want to take a minute to talk to you about Rick and Morty. Rick and Morty is a fairly popular animated television program that just ended its second season this past Sunday. I say fairly popular based entirely on my Facebook feed, which consisted of nary a R&M post during its first season, growing healthily over the year-and-a-half absence, and seemed to reached a healthy consistency over the course of this summer’s delivery of episodes. This is all well and good, but there’s a slight problem: this season hasn’t been that great.
Much has been written about the McConaissance, so much so that Google Docs doesn’t even mark the word McConaissance as a typo, once I figured out how to spell the damned thing. Now that the idea of affixing the descriptor “prestige” to the phrase “actor Matthew McConaughey, star of Sahara, Failure to Launch, and Fool’s Gold” is old hat, it has reached the time for the cultural consciousness to move on and bring a different performer to the spotlight. And that actor is one of our all-time greats, Lily Tomlin. Now, I know this comparison doesn’t quite work; McConaughey went from rom-com dreck to mumbly, apocalyptic greatness, Tomlin has been consistently great throughout her entire career. Also, Tomlinaissance doesn’t quite have the same ring (and Google Docs insists it isn’t a word.) But for some reason, Tomlin doesn’t quite have the resonance amongst the younger generations that she should have. After seeing the new film Grandma, now playing at the Hollywood Theatre, I think that may change. In the film, Tomlin plays a semi-retired and penniless Californian lesbian poet-academic, basically the spirit animal/future self of many a Reed student. Over the course of the movie, she assists her granddaughter scrape together the money she needs for an abortion. Many reviews are positively assessing Grandma as being a progressive step forward following last year’s Obvious Child in terms of abortion plots; the idea of abortion is thoroughly normalized throughout the film, and the narrative never second-guesses the character’s intention to follow through with the procedure. The abortion is really a backdrop for Tomlin to work her magic, though. She wields tremendous emotional power in every scene, mixing mirth, sadness, and disgust into singular facial expressions. There’s one episode in the middle of the movie that features Tomlin squaring off with Sam Elliott, and it is definitely up there with the best scenes of the year. Hopefully films like this, will lead a new generation of viewers (shall we call them… the TOMLINELLIALS?) to delve into her deep back catalog of hits, especially 9 to 5, the workplace comedy/proto-third wave feminist tract featuring her alongside Jane Fonda and Dolly Parton. 9 to 5 has firmly integrated itself into the lexicon of my partner and I, so much so that we have decided who would be each character (I think I would be the Dolly, but she insists I’m the Jane. Whatever, she’s definitely the Lily.) Rumor has it a 9 to 5 reunion might be coming soon, fingers crossed.
If you were asked what the most important political or social development in the United States has been in this past year, what would you say? Donald Trump, right? Nah, or at least I hope not. A healthy amount of you would probably say the continued development and growth of the Black Lives Matter movement, and rightly so. As such, one of the most timely and essential books to come out in the recent months is Ta-Nehisi Coates’s Between the World and Me. Taking on the form of James Baldwin’s The Fire Next Time, Coates writes a long essay-letter to his son, describing his hopes and worries about his son’s continued existence in a society that actively destroys black and brown bodies. Coates’s sentiments are heartrending, and one leaves this book feeling both furious and numb. Put simply, Between the World and Me is a Serious Book. But it is also a serious book, which is why I’m not discussing it here today. I’m discussing funny books.
