Canyon Update: New Path

Canyon Update: New Path

If something can be learned from the history of Reed’s canyon, it’s that the land is constantly changing. The summer of 2016 was no different: a new trail has been built in the southeastern corner of the 40-acre urban wildlife refuge. The area was a wall of blackberries just last spring; since then it has been cleared of invasive species, and can now be explored along a meandering 670 feet of trail that connects to the path leading up toward 38th Street, and another entering the Canyon from behind the Art Building. The clearing and construction of the path took about a month of on and off work by the summer Canyon Crew, and was this summer’s big canyon project.

Blue Bridge: A History

Blue Bridge: A History

Our iconic bridge was built in 1991, but what stood before? This particular stretch of canyon has a history rooted in the early 20th century, so listen in. The earliest bridge was a rudimentary structure built in the '30s, before the Cross Canyons or any other structures were built on the far side. Purely for the utility of getting across, and never commuting, this bridge evaporated practically without a trace. One of the only surviving records of this bridge is a grainy 1957 photograph documenting one of Portland's infrequent snow dustings. 

Canyon Bucket List

  • Walk the entire canyon trail (1.5 miles)
  • Find a favorite picnic table for doing homework
  • Get to know one of the neighborhood dog-walkers and befriend their dog
  • Eat an apple or plum from the orchard
  • Spot the canyon crew symbol on benches and stairs
  • Sit on the stumps at the new east end loop with friends
  • Walk the canyon at dusk and try to spot a beaver
  • Read a book on the island: try to not get too distracted by the cattails and ducks
  • How many different ways can you use the canyon to get to class
  • Play a game of chess under the blue bridge using leaves as chesspieces
  • Watch bees flying into their nest in the amphitheatre
  • Watch salmon spawning in the fish ladder
  • Spot one of the elusive canyon cats
  • Observe the tree canopy from the bouncy bridge
  • Attend Canyon Day!

Flora & Fauna of the Canyon

Hook-Heal

Found as ground cover across the campus - healing properties, technically a weed.

Found as ground cover across the campus - healing properties, technically a weed.

English Ivy

The bane of canyon crew's existence, this pesky plant climbs trees and bricks alike.

The bane of canyon crew's existence, this pesky plant climbs trees and bricks alike.

Himalayan Blackberry

Grows wild in the Northwest, fruit ripens mid-summer through early August. Watch out for thorns!

Grows wild in the Northwest, fruit ripens mid-summer through early August. Watch out for thorns!

Lupine

Legume seeds can be eaten when prepared properly.

Legume seeds can be eaten when prepared properly.

You can find these adorable little creatures swimming between the logs along the banks and under the bridges.

You can find these adorable little creatures swimming between the logs along the banks and under the bridges.

Nutria

These terrifying rat-like water creatures like to swim under the canyon bridges. You can see their tails wiggling behind them as they glide through the water.

These terrifying rat-like water creatures like to swim under the canyon bridges. You can see their tails wiggling behind them as they glide through the water.

Screech Owl

Highly territorial, these beautiful birds are a rare sight in the canyon. Look up! Maybe you'll spot one.

Highly territorial, these beautiful birds are a rare sight in the canyon. Look up! Maybe you'll spot one.

History of the Scrounge

History of the Scrounge

Today the Scrounge is a cafeteria quirk praised for reducing waste while feeding hungry students who don’t have board plans. But this source of free food was not always so favored, and for many decades scrounging was considered a questionable and even disgusting practice. Some accounts claim that versions of scrounging began as early as the 1960s, though reliable records in the Reed library archives don’t begin until about a decade later.

Lingua Latina

Lingua Latina

I love Latin because it is able to be simple. Not easy, but concise. Latin has fewer words than Greek has, which allows for the most beautiful poems to be written. The first poem that I read was written by Catullus. He wrote, “odi et amo” (“I hate and I love”). When it is read out loud “odi et amo” sounds like one word. “Odetamo,” as if it were one feeling. Vergil wrote, “vasto rex Aeolus antro” (“King Aeolus in a vast cave”). This placement of the Latin words paints a picture. The picture is of little Aeolus enveloped by a big cave just like the words themselves are. Latin remains so beautiful that it can create the most beautiful poems.

"Ending the Denial of Latino Identity"

"Ending the Denial of Latino Identity"

I grew up in a small town playing with the children of university professors, white, rich and liberal (not unlike life at Reed). This environment did not hate the Mexican within me (at least not consciously), it simply could not relate to it. My grandmother’s fantastic stories, the smell of tortillas made by hand and mornings painted with dust and punctuated by the cry of the rooster did not have a place. I never thought much of the parts of my identity that hid from the society around me. I never thought that maybe my environment was not simply denying my identity but the identity of millions of other people and ultimately its own.

"Hotshots of the French Chanson"

You know all of Edith Piaf's songs by heart. You're sick of Maître Gims' operatic voice, and even your cats don't want to watch "The Aristocats" anymore because you've been pissing them off by singing Maurice Chevalier in the shower for six years. Face it, kid: it's high time you discover some new French singers. Luckily, there are loads of hidden gems in the French repertoire, artists of nearly mythic status whose melodies are just as captivating as their glamorous (or woefully bleak) lives. I present to you three musical superstars in the French tradition who have offered me endless inspiration. Give them a chance. Your cats will thank you.
Let's begin with the Master. No! I'm not talking about Maître Gims! Stop bringing him up! I'm referring to Serge Gainsbourg. Famous for his provocative songs (so very provocative!) and for his high-profile love affairs, Gainsbourg was also incredibly talented as a lyricist. I cite an example of his exquisite wordplay: in the domain of sonority and lovely extended metaphors, "Coffee Color" attests to Gainsbourg's poetic genius:
Oh, how wild is the effect
The effect that it makes
To see you roll thus
Your eyes and your hips
If, like coffee, you do
Nothing but bother me
Nothing but arouse me,
Tonight will surely be sleepless

"Night Market Wandering"

In the city of Tainan there is a bustling night market called the Flower Night Market. It is open three days in a week, and each there it is filled with people who come to try out the foods there. Stinky tofu, grilled chicken, oyster omelets, it seems they have all kind of food there. You can also find all kinds of people there. Every street is filled with hawkers selling their wares, though whether they’re selling junk or precious goods is up to you to decide. Pick a street and walk down; you’ll find busking musicians. Their music isn’t bad, though sometimes it’s drowned out by the noise of the crowd. I’d like to say something about the crowd of people in this night market, but it’s a little difficult for me to sum it all up for you in a few sentences.  Let’s see, I’ll start with one person then.

The Complete History of Renn Fayre Part IV: 2000-2008

“Renn Fayre should be the festival of Dionysus, not a real-life reenactment of The Bacchae.”

The Quest, December 5, 2000

“Everybody understood immediately that, oh shit, this is in danger of not continuing unless we get our act together. With that knowledge, people started acting accordingly.

— Gordon Feighner ’02, Renn Fayre Czar in 2001

We ended our last chapter on a cliffhanger: just as the modern accoutrements of Renn Fayre were beginning to appear, just after the festival had cleared its quarter-century mark, it was thrown into jeopardy by a bunch of dumb vandalism. Of course, you know what happened. Renn Fayre survived. It was saved through both an official community renovation process and a renewed sense of responsibility among all the Fayre’s attendees. Ultimately, the damage report from RF2K1 consisted only of $250 in lawn damage and one person hospitalized for appendicitis.

The only sour note was when the seniors who turned in their theses were issued paddle-balls instead of laurels. The registrar’s office had been giving out “gag gifts” for years, but the laurels they had awarded in 2000 had truly meant something, as furious graduates soon made clear. It’s been the golden crowns ever since.

Renn Fayre Resuscitation

The $15,517.77 damage bill was published in the Quest at the start of the 2000–2001 school year. The itemized list included thousands of dollars each of graffiti removal and glass replacement, a urinal partition torn from a wall, vandalism of a Phys Plant truck and of the beer distributors’ van, and stolen electrical equipment. There were a few token attempts at justification: an editorial the next week attempted to explain away almost all of the Renn Fayre damages and every single cost, implying that it was all circumstantial, a regular weekend’s worth of mess. According to maintenance themselves, that was completely bogus. “It used to take us four hours to clean up,” Gloria Torbeck, Reed’s maintenance supervisor at the time, informed the student body. “Now it takes two days of overtime. The staff doesn’t even have time to clean the bathrooms.”

By and large, however, everyone knew that the situation was serious. It became even more so in December, when the Board of Trustees ordered then-President Steven Koblik to “pursue compliance with the law as it pertains to the issues surrounding Renn Fayre and report back to the board in February 2001.” The author of the article noted that this had been the first time that the board had asked anything of Koblik. In his message to the students, Koblik brought up the “liability” word and made note of a six million dollar settlement resulting from a fraternity death at MIT. Yet he also promised student involvement in the “Renn Fayre Renovation” project and said “we don’t want the board to assume control.”

The Renn Fayre Renovation Committee convened that fall. Consisting of the czars of Renn Fayres 2000 and 2001, as well as representatives of the community safety, facilities, and conference and events planning, the main goal of the committee was to ensure the Fayre would “work better, be safer, and be a community asset rather than a liability.” Institutionalized in later years as the Renn Fayre Committee, the renovation process ended the total student control over the party that had existed in the past. Its reforms did, however, help stop the exorbitant damages—together with the communal realization that rampant destruction would endanger Renn Fayre’s future. “We by no means take all the credit,” czar Gordon Feighner ’02 says, emphasizing that the reason RF2K has never been repeated is mostly due to simple mindfulness.

Contrary to popular belief, wristbands and Border Patrol were not created in reaction to the disaster: there had been some kind of pass (first buttons, then wristbands) since the 1980s and the Patrol had been founded in the late ’90s. Yet these had been mostly a formality, and Clevies, Clarkies, and other outsiders of all stripes strolled around with abandon during Renn Fayre. Serious problems were infrequent, but could be truly nasty: Chiara Thayer  recalls that during the late ’90s, a Reed student taking a psychedelic stroll in the canyon late on Saturday night was accosted and tied up by strangers, and left there until the morning. This mostly came to an end after Renovation, when it was rumored that party crashers had been responsible for the worst of the carnage. Enforcement was taken much more seriously, and in 2001 and 2002, student volunteers checked wristbands at the entrance to every space and event, including the lodges and SU.

Increased alumni involvement may have helped keep damages down as well. Ironically, one of the administration’s first responses in the aftermath of RF2K had been to blame the alumni — Regina Mooney, dean of student services, falsely accused the Meatsmoke Crew of fueling the carnage by giving drugs to students and attempted to expel the group from campus permanently. Her efforts failed, Meatsmoke survived, and 2001 saw instead a new swell of alumni volunteering for Karma Patrol. Johanna Colgrove ’92 and several other alumni and staff members organized a Sub-Free Coffeehouse in which people could decompress, a predecessor to today’s Blue Lodge.

One of the biggest changes to come out of the process was the creation of the Klean Up Krew. There had been on-and-off efforts to organize Sunday cleaning parties for years, but it is obvious from the resigned tone of the recruitment notices that they never really cut the mustard. Phys Plant had been unfairly taking on most of the burden themselves. In 2001, however, John Saller ’03 came to the czars and volunteered to put people on duty—an example of the communal taking of responsibility which was more significant than official Renovation.

The National Junta Triumphs

Renovation, however, did not solve the political struggle over the beer supply. The administration had been mistrustful of student-run beer gardens since the beginning. They had only been saved in the ’90s by a sustained letter-writing campaign that solicited signatures from students, alumni, and every CSO on the force to argue that it was safer for everyone to drink in one location, monitored by people they knew and trusted. The case was helped by the fact that Chiara Thayer, a former student and Lutz bartender, agreed to assume all legal liability as an independent contractor for each garden. After she ended her stint as Beer Czar in 1997, the administration pounced and took over.

Thayer handed the beer reins over to the “ministers,” Chris Flink ’02, Paul Manson ’01, Steve Seal ’01 and Jim Soto ’01. They had a few things going for them in their effort to reclaim the gardens for the student body. First, by their own admission, they “had a lot of trucks and were the biggest, loudest, dumbest students on campus.” In addition, Soto, an autodidact nontrad student, was older than most Reedies and had the necessary maturity: “Not to cast any asparagus, but 21-year-olds are children, and children fuck things up.”

Nevertheless, throughout their tenure as signators, they repeatedly clashed with an administration reluctant to let them take responsibility for events, and for a few years the gardens flip-flopped between student- and caterer-run. Outside contractors ran the Renn Fayre beer garden in 1999 and 2001, Nation ran it in 2000 and 2002. There were very few catering companies, however, willing to put their liquor licenses on the line for the infamous Renn Fayre, and those that were willing were both expensive and unpleasantly un-Reedie. As a Quest column put it, “when you start bitchin’ about your thesis to some steroid-head who’s on a power trip ’cause he’s wearing an EVENTS t-shirt, don’t be surprised when he says, ‘Thesis? Yeah, I had a thesis once but then I took some antibiotics and it’s all better now.’”

It took years of persuasion, but Regina Mooney and the rest of the administration eventually acknowledged that the Ministers’ promises to be tough and legally compliant were sincere, and that Nation’s permanent tavern license would make them liable, rather than the school. From 2002 onwards, the beer has been back in students’ hands, the liability on the signators’ heads, and the all-volunteer gardens saving us our student body funds. The only issue left: is there anyone at Nü Reed ready to break Jim Soto’s record of closing the Lutz 63 nights in a row?

Start Making Sense

One of the biggest surprises in our research has been how recent many of our most cherished Renn Fayre traditions are. It’s a cliché joke at this point to use “same as it ever was” as shorthand for nothing ever changing here at Reed — but did you know that the 5 a.m. Stop Making Sense, the emotional high point of the year, that moment of exhaustion and love and tears of happiness, is less than ten years old?

Reedies’ love for Talking Heads has lasted since the group was still topping the charts. While they never played Reed, they did play Portland during the ’80s, and after the show the Quest ambushed David Byrne in his hotel lobby for a guerrilla interview. Yet despite the decades of fandom on campus, no one threw a Talking Heads dance party until after the new millennium.

The first Stop Making Sense was in 2002, 19 years after the film’s release. The brainchild of Ashley Bowen ’05 and Harold Gabel ’03, the screening took place during Reading Week and was a huge success. It was repeated every year afterwards, before or after Renn Fayre, as a separate tradition entirely without a fixed schedule. It wasn’t until 2007 that anyone had the idea to run it again during the big weekend, but a few years later it was an indelible tradition.

Green Lodge didn’t appear until 2008. The White and Black Lodges had, of course, been named after their counterparts on Twin Peaks, but in the 2000s the show wasn’t quite as well-known at Reed as it is now in the era of streaming video, and “lodge” was just taken to be an odd bit of RF vocabulary. The founders of Green Lodge, a group of student DJs who played sets in the quad every 40s Night, decided to create a place that would fit their interests: “playing obnoxiously aggro dance music and smoking a lot of weed.” The first year featured dancehall, jungle and dubstep sets, live hip-hop, live greenery and bongs built into flowerpots. For several years the lodge was “an integral part of the dubstep scene on the West Coast.” Tastes have changed somewhat these days, but the idea behind the lodge remains.

Drop Dead

As new traditions grew, old ones began to wither. One casualty of the 2000s was the Woodstock Ball Drop. Jim Quinn ’83 has penned a short history of the event on his “Renn Fayre Visions” website, and in his account it began in the summer of 1981 when he and a friend bounced a few golf balls purloined from the Eastmoreland Golf Course down the steep Woodstock hill: “They didn't quite roll; the pitch was sufficient so that they bouncey-bounced all the way down. Most satisfying. We looked at each other, and right there and then a new Renn Fayre event was born.” All year, they collected balls at the fringes of the golf course, and late on Saturday night of Renn Fayre they dumped them at the top of the hill to cheering crowds.

Since it involved property theft and pissed off the neighbors, the Ball Drop rapidly became an annual game of cat and mouse with the police, which probably accounts for some of its longevity. One year, the cops were tipped off when they caught some students red-handed picking up balls at the driving range, and were able to intercept the crowd of Reedies after only one box had been poured out. Nobody was arrested, but after that, the organizers “thought about all the hassles inherent in the golf ball underworld” and switched to superballs instead—which had the added benefit of not being heavy enough to ding anyone’s car.

The ball drop ended with a whimper in the mid-2000s when, after several years of the cops actually intervening and being “harassed” by students, it was moved for RF2K5 to Botsford Drive. With a shorter, gentler slope and no frisson of danger, the Botsford drop was far less exciting, and the ball drop never returned—to Renn Fayre, at least. Those pesky alumni haven’t forgotten their tradition, and some of the original culprits reunited for a ball drop during the Centennial Reunions in 2011.

The series will conclude in two weeks. Spoiler alert: Renn Fayre survives once more. You’ll write the last chapter yourself.

 

Major Laser

Major Laser

“You can do a lot of cool shit with lasers,” said Evan Peairs ’16, a physics senior who is using a laser in his thesis. “Lots of science.”

In addition to being prevalent in Science Fiction, lasers have an astounding variety of real world practical and scientific applications. From laser pointers to CD readers, cataract surgery and measuring the distance between atoms in molecules, laser technology is used in all kinds of fields, including Reed’s physics, art, and chemistry departments. Physical chemistry professor Dan Gerrity said, “You can burn things, cut things, blow air up into plasma; all sorts of stuff. In physics they’re using lasers to cool molecules down and analyze their behavior at very low temperatures. There’s such a vast array of applications.”

The Complete History of Renn Fayre Part III: 1990-2000s

The Complete History of Renn Fayre Part III: 1990-2000s

The Fayre came under fire in its third decade. During the 1990s, Policy and Liability first came to Reed in a big way, mostly due to increased federal scrutiny. The administration of George Bush Sr. took a deep, intrusive interest in what was going on at universities across the nation. Bush’s “drug czar,” William Bennett, publicly referred to Reed’s Student Body Handbook as an example of the “decadence and decay of American colleges.” Like all schools receiving federal funding, Reed had to pass a Drug and Alcohol Policy for the first time, and over the course of the 90s the administration even took occasional steps to enforce it.

We Hear the Clock Tick in "4.48 Psychosis"

We Hear the Clock Tick in "4.48 Psychosis"

4.48 Psychosis by Sarah Kane, directed by thesis candidate Jordan Jozwik, opens Thursday, March 3 for a three-night run. The play was the last Kane wrote and the script is unconventional to say the least. There are no specifications about character, setting, stage direction, or even what is and is not dialogue. 4.48 Psychosis repeatedly asks the question, how can one dramatize blank spaces, a series of numbers, or words that tumble down a page?

Fighting Definitions

Fighting Definitions

The “apologizing factor. This is the term that Azra Ahmed ’19, a Reed freshman, uses to describe the imperative for Muslim Americans to condemn terrorist groups such as ISIS and therefore exonerate themselves from association. This apology is completely unnecessary, Azra explains, because “as a rational person, why would you have to condemn something so horrible? It is a given. Why would Ahmed, as a Muslim, be expected to denounce ISIS openly while I, a non-Muslim, would simply be assumed to feel that way? Why are the 2015 Paris attacks labeled as Islamic terrorism and not simply terrorism?

Not Repitition but Reimagination: The "Zero Project" at Reed

Not Repitition but Reimagination: The "Zero Project" at Reed

Looking back, I’m not sure where I expected Zero Project’s sense of communal mourning to come from, or how a collection of 25,000 photographs, a boxed model plane, and a set of minimalist instructions written by an artist residing halfway around the world would release the sentiments I had so neatly push-pinned into my perception of the exhibit.

Zero Project is about reconstruction, post-WWII communal healing, and grief in Japan. These were the themes under which I labeled the latest undertaking of Reed’s Cooley Gallery before even stepping through the door. What we received as a college from artist Katsushige Nakahashi was a formula, and our goal was to follow it.

Hauser's Hidden Histories

Hauser's Hidden Histories

The first thing that catches the eye when entering the bibliophile’s paradise that is Special Collections is a massive tome with frayed sheepskin binding lying on the table. Created sometime in the late sixteenth century, the book looks like something out of a Harry Potter movie. The book is an antiphonary, a liturgical book of music used in the singing of a church choir. The antiphonary is so massive in size because it was intended to be set in the front of the church and used by the entire choir at once. This is because of how expensive and labor-intensive such books were to make, rendering it impractical for every member of the choir to have his own. The cover is constructed of leather wrapped wood, with decorative brass decals studding the front. Inside, the pages are made of sheepskin and partially hand-illuminated. The quality of the pages changes depending on the side of the skin they are made from. The pages created from the inside of the sheep are softer and whiter, while the pages created from the outside of the sheep are coarser and more yellow in color. The manuscript is not illuminated in its entirety, which is most likely due to economic conditions of the monastery in which the antiphonary was created.