Volume 16 Issue 2
Erik Beserra
Lockdowniversary

A year ago I stared at the numbers rising on the New York Times website. Every day I found myself feeling more inept as 10,000 became 20,000 became 40,000 became 80,000. I stared at the numbers like a moth at lights. Inept and discouraged. I still feel inept. I now have a tab with the New York Times vaccine distribution map. It is weird staring at this good news. Some part of me doesn’t feel hopeful since this is just what needs to be done. We failed and are now picking up the pieces.

Lockdowniversary
Volume 15 Issue 3
Lauren Mondroski
Dying to Get Outside? A Grave History of Hiking ...

This was before the establishment of large public parks, meaning that if you were a Victorian-era urban American, you most likely spent your time outdoors strolling and picnicking with family, friends, and lovers, all amidst the dead.

Dying to Get Outside? A Grave History of Hiking and Cemeteries
Volume 15 Issue 2
Allison Wallace
A list of good: a good list to make

· Arriving
· The first song you listen to through headphones
· When a good bakery has good tea (the complete experience)
· The crisp, blue outlines of the hills here in Western Oregon

A list of good: a good list to make
Volume 15 Issue 2
Nerissa Wright
Seek Discomfort

Portland is a peculiar white haven, and I come from a melting pot that smells like urine year-round. Both are good, but very different.

Seek Discomfort
Volume 14 Issue 1
Lauren Mondroski
Spoiler Alert: There Is No Coming of Age

Released on August 25, 2020, Haley Blais’ Below the Salt is an album I wish I had during my first year of college. Coincidentally, that’s when I first started listening to Blais, a Vancouver-based singer-songwriter and vlogger whose wacky sense of humor and DIY bedroom-pop bangers resonated with me, a freshman living on her own for the very first time and trying to make sense of the world and herself. That unsure first-year is a senior now, but no less unsure, and I think that’s the point of Blais’ debut album: her label writes, “Below the Salt is a coming of age story that recognizes that there is no real ‘coming of age.’”

Spoiler Alert: There Is No Coming of Age

Resting in an Eternal Moment

Resting in an Eternal Moment

There’s an old story about Yuri Gagarin, the first man in space. The story goes that when he was up there, alone in orbit, looking at the earth, completely alone, he began to hear this ticking noise coming from somewhere. The noise continued for minutes, and then hours. He frantically searched through the whole cockpit, tearing panels out of walls, but he couldn't find it. There’s nothing he could do. So he decided, after it all, that the only way he would be able to make it out alive was to fall in love with the sound.

Lockdowniversary

Lockdowniversary

A year ago I stared at the numbers rising on the New York Times website. Every day I found myself feeling more inept as 10,000 became 20,000 became 40,000 became 80,000. I stared at the numbers like a moth at lights. Inept and discouraged. I still feel inept. I now have a tab with the New York Times vaccine distribution map. It is weird staring at this good news. Some part of me doesn’t feel hopeful since this is just what needs to be done. We failed and are now picking up the pieces.

Jennifer's Body: Eleven years and one Tumblr phase later

In the ultimate act of unmonitored internet access, I made my first Tumblr account at the tender age of 11. I remember stumbling upon One Direction fan blogs and thinking “yes, this is a site full of people who know what’s hip and cool!” For better or for worse, I grew up in the so-called golden age of Tumblr and saw many trends come and go. I first came across Karyn Kusama’s 2009 movie Jennifer’s Body in the form of a GIF on my dashboard. I still remember it vividly: Megan Fox flicks a lighter against her tongue and burns the tip of it to a crisp. Her beauty mesmerized me. Who was this beautiful and totally badass woman? In the years that followed, I absorbed more and more of Jennifer’s Body via osmosis. Despite never watching it, I reblogged quotes, GIFs, and stills as if I had. The movie perfectly fit my middle school teen-angst-meets-girl-power aesthetic, and lots of bloggers who I thought were cool loved the movie, so I went with the crowd.

I finally decided to watch the movie this past weekend and was almost nervous, because I had heard two different narratives about the movie: I knew it was a universally critically panned box office failure, but every single person who I spoke to about it had nothing but praise for the film. Was Jennifer’s Body really as good as my peers said it was? 


Short answer: yes. Long answer: fuck yes.


Jennifer’s Body follows the story of Jennifer Check (Megan Fox) and Anita “Needy” Lesnicki (Amanda Seyfried). Jennifer is the high school mean girl turned boy-eating demon, and Needy is her nerdy best friend. As Jennifer works her way through their high school’s male population, Needy vows to put an end to the bloodbath. 

Jennifer’s Body’s biggest strength is its whip-smart script penned by Diablo Cody (writer of beloved indie hit Juno). Cody’s dialogue is clever without being too clever; even though all of the characters say many witty things off the cuff, they still totally sound like regular teenagersOne of my favorite lines really encapsulates this cleverness: Jennifer threatens to kill Anita, and Anita says that she thought Jennifer only killed boys. Jennifer cracks her neck and replies, “I go both ways.”

Cody’s script allows her female characters to be smart without it being unrealistic, and she shows off all of the layers that make up these women. Although some aspects of the script didn’t age very well–it was 2009, after all–it still remains one of the funniest and smartest horror movies ever made.


While the script is a huge part of what makes Jennifer’s Body so great, so are the performances by the two leads, Megan Fox and Amanda Seyfriend. Fox’s performance as high-school-bitch-turned-boy-eating-demon Jennifer Check is just the right balance of icy and humorous. Even handed the role of the typical high school mean girl, she plays it well.

While Fox portrays the titular Jennifer, it’s Seyfried’s performance as Anita “Needy” Lesnicki, Jennifer’s childhood best friend, that really shines. Needy is the polar opposite of Jennifer; she’s a mousy, nerdy girl who doesn’t attract much attention from boys. Seyfried plays the role of Jennifer’s scared best friend with the kind of teenage earnestness that feels uncommon in most teen movies, especially teen horror movies. While Fox and Seyfriend are stellar on their own, they’re electric together. The chemistry between Jennifer and Needy makes for a captivating story about female friendship–and  queerness–that sucks you in and keeps you rooting for these girls to make it out of this hellish situation with their friendship unscathed.


So, why did a movie this great completely flop at the box office? Many people smarter than I have talked at length about this, but it seems to have come down to marketing. In a retrospective for Entertainment Tonight, Diablo Cody and Megan Fox sat down to discuss the movie. Cody recalled studio execs wanting to market Jennifer’s Body as a horror sex comedy for a male audience without touching on the true focus of the film–female friendship. Fox noted that her image in Hollywood must have contributed to that, and Cody confirmed this with an anecdote. When she asked a studio executive what exactly he saw the point of the movie being, he replied with a succinct three-word email: “Megan Fox hot.” From the jump, none of the people responsible for faithfully representing this movie to audiences took it seriously, and silenced several brilliant women in the name of what they perceived as the focus of the movie. 

Their negligence didn’t come without consequences: Diablo Cody was never given the same degree of creative freedom on a project again, and Megan Fox continued to be mercilessly bullied by the press in a sexist tirade that was already bad enough without a box office flop under her belt. Despite the hardship they both endured, Cody and Fox both look back on Jennifer’s Body fondly. Cody says it’s the project she’s asked about the most, and Fox has said in multiple interviews that Jennifer Check remains  her favorite role. Even though I grew up hearing nothing but praise for Jennifer’s Body, I’m still saddened whenever I hear about all the backlash it faced upon its initial release. However, I’m grateful that it’s found the audience it was always intended for and finally got the following and praise it deserves.


  • You’re eating people?

  • No, I’m eating boys.

Spoiler Alert: There Is No Coming of Age

Spoiler Alert: There Is No Coming of Age

Released on August 25, 2020, Haley Blais’ Below the Salt is an album I wish I had during my first year of college. Coincidentally, that’s when I first started listening to Blais, a Vancouver-based singer-songwriter and vlogger whose wacky sense of humor and DIY bedroom-pop bangers resonated with me, a freshman living on her own for the very first time and trying to make sense of the world and herself. That unsure first-year is a senior now, but no less unsure, and I think that’s the point of Blais’ debut album: her label writes, “Below the Salt is a coming of age story that recognizes that there is no real ‘coming of age.’”

This Must Be The Place

Valentine’s Day is often about gestures, gifts, and words exchanged that situate romance in the spotlight. Love, though, is obviously much more than that. It’s more experiential, imbued into aromas, the songs we hear, and significantly, the places we exist in together. I often think about the love stories held in the places on Reed’s campus over its hundred year history.

Travelogue from Russia

For this semester, I have spent my time reading a genre which I believed was all but dead, the literary travel-louge. In this age of the information superhighway, the literary travelogue, with its cliched markets, leaning italics of words and phrases in the native tongue of the location in question, and contrived reflections on the state of the folk, seems to no longer be needed. Of course, there is the immensely popular genre of the video-travelogue, but I would prefer to put these, for the most part, in the category of “free-advertisement” for specific locations.

My Father's Apple Pie

In the Draves household, nothing is as sacred as pie. No holiday or birthday was ever complete without a pie made by my father. There was something so magical about spending a whole day with my (usually very busy) father creating a delicious pie for our family to share. Something so warm and so cozy. Turn a dreary day into a homey fall afternoon with this classic apple pie recipe.

Pomp and Psycho-stance

Death is universal. There’s no getting around it, really. Eventually, Death will arrive knocking at your front door, making sure its records are accurate, and will whisk you away to the afterlife (which might not actually exist, but we’re going to make that assumption for this metaphorical discussion anyway, whatever, fuck off). In order to better understand and rationalize the phenomenon of death, a common trope in mythology is reimagining Death as a personified force.

Revisionism

Revisionism

If you go to Vilnius and walk down Pylimo Gatve, there stands, only a few blocks away from the last remaining synagogue, a rather unassuming structure. Vilnius—a city that has particular fondness for the baroque churches of the Counter-Reformation—has on its streets a rather unassuming neo-classical reform church. Like most buildings in the city, it is mainly a brick structure, given it’s grandiose appearance from a thick layer of plaster that coats the entire surface—plaster that is slowly being chipped away by the elements. The stairs that lead up to the church are uniformly rectangular ranging in color from grey to a muted red. Here the question can be asked: why the difference in color if all of these stones ideally should have been extracted from the same quarry? Indeed these stones were all extracted from the same quarry—a quarry of the dead. Look closer at the stones themselves and it will become apparent that despite the perpetual precipitation that coats the southeast Baltic, horizontal demarcations can be made out—demarcations that are read from right to left. If this has not already become apparent, the stones here are not normal stones, but rather gravestones from a Jewish cemetery.

Dimensions of a Man

Dimensions of a Man

In a letter from 1967, kept carefully preserved in Reed College’s Special Collections, Gary Snyder writes to a fellow student Charles Leong of “the state of things in Poetland (I actually was intending to write Portland).” Snyder, a student at Reed College from 1947 to 1951, went on in life to become a Pulitzer Prize-winning poet commonly associated with the San Francisco Poetry Renaissance, the Black Mountain Poets, and Beat Poetry, an essayist, an environmental activist, and an avid calligrapher. Starting in his time at Reed, he became interested in Buddhist spirituality and would go on to study Buddhism in Kyoto, Japan for much of his life.

First Years's First Weeks

First Years's First Weeks

The second to last week of August 2018 saw blazing red skies as the setting sun's rays fought through thick clouds of wildfire smoke. First-years starting this year at Reed will likely remember these smoldering hot days for the rest of their lives as Orientation Week 2018. O-Week is memorable for most matriculated students here, if not fondly, then at least as a chaotic crash course in Reed culture. Orientation Week has changed greatly throughout Reed’s history, with the biggest and most recent change being the switch from House Advisors working as staff during Orientation to the hiring of an entire Orientation Team to develop and lead events. Lauren, Grail writer and Orientation 2018 Team Member, caught up with Hayfa Anchour, one half of the dynamic duo of amazing Orientation Coordinators, to discuss these and other new changes, and also to uncover both the distant and more recent past of Reed Orientation along the way.