Out of everyone on the talented KRUI Online Content team, I am probably the last person who should be reviewing experimental jazz. I’m the stand-up comedy reviewer—it’s what I know best—and in terms of how it works as art, stand-up is probably the opposite of jazz. Stand-up routines are meant to be done in pretty much the same way every time, tweaked and tightened in small ways until the set runs like a freshly-oiled machine. It’s also an art form meant for the largest possible audience, as comics will often take the same set to different cities, states, even countries.

After listening to a lot of jazz over the past week, culminating in an amazing performance by renowned trumpeter Ambrose Akinmusire and the PUBLIQuartet last Friday at the Stop/Time Festival presented by Hancher Auditorium, I’ve come to the conclusion that most jazz isn’t meant for an audience at all. Instead, it serves as a forum for the performers to express themselves abstractly, turning pain and love into a confused, revelatory experience for audience members to hear, but never really understand. 

For Akinmusire’s performance, we sat on the Hancher stage in a small row of bleachers; I was less than five feet away from the nearest performer. The stage was bathed in a display of shifting, zebra-patterned lighting, which changed to a singular spotlight as poet and UI English professor Donika Kelly opened to the floor for a reading of her poems.

Kelly’s poetry was excellent, as expected, but what really struck me about this opening performance was the rhythmic, almost percussive quality of her delivery. Her first poem, “Its gone be what it is,” hops back and forth through familiar phrases like a record skipping. Kelly even incorporated snapping into her performance to punctuate certain moments—which, I later discovered, is written into the text. The poems were a beautiful way to ease into the performance that followed. Poems have more structure than jazz, but they still encapsulate that same spirit: art as a playground for the artist, rather than a product for the audience. 

After Kelly had walked off, Akinmusire and the PUBLIQuartet joined us on stage, along with several accompanying artists. Akinmusire and his band seemed totally in sync as soon as they entered, and would often laugh with each other in quiet, stolen moments during the show. It felt a bit like I was intruding on a secret conversation they were having through their instruments.

A highlight: drummer Elijah Revell, the heart of the performance, giving it rhythm with a steady beat and creative embellishments. Roughly halfway through, just as the concert was beginning to drag, Revell snapped the audience back to attention with a drum solo I can only describe as “sick.” When he stopped, Akinmusire could tell we liked it so much that he nudged him to keep going.

In fact, Akinmusire seemed to be radiating with pride the whole night. He smiled, laughed, and stared deeply at his fellow performers like he was coming to life. As pianist Sam Harris poured himself out onto the keys, Akinmusire would peer at him through the gap in the piano lid and nod to the rhythm, as if acting as an extension of the audience. When improvisational vocalist KOKAYI stepped to the mic to deliver fast and powerful rhymes, Akinmusire reacted to each new bar with a gentle contentment, full confidence in KOKAYI’s masterful wordplay and control of the beat. Players would often look to him as a guide to the song, making him the quiet leader of the show, but never in a way that overpowered or overshadowed anyone else. Even though he got top billing that night, I never got the impression that he thought of himself as the lead performer. He was just a fragment of the greater story.

The PUBLIQuartet gave the performance a raw, unfiltered feel. They did things to their instruments I had no idea strings could do until that day: sharp plucking, creaking, shrieking, and groaning. Usually cellos, violins, and violas automatically make a piece feel more classical to me; in this show, they actually made the music feel less refined, unrestrained in a way that complemented the rest of the music. In contrast, artist chiquitamagic lent the night a slightly psychedelic quality with their synthesizer and haunting backing vocals. The two styles may have clashed at times, but overall, the layering felt intentional, and added a new dimension to the sound.

But I know that I can only guess at what the meaning of the music actually was. KOKAYI’s vocals touched on anxiety and betrayal, and Akinmusire said before the final song that this performance felt like reaching the other side of impending doom. But watching these artists perform felt almost joyous, slightly muted, like watching a house party from outside the house. Akinmusire’s trumpet playing never formed a cohesive song; rather, he gave us short bursts of emotion that we could not decipher. Only he and the other performers know what he meant by his instrument’s passionate wails and moans. It was an experience only understandable by its creators.

The concert was not for me, but for them.

The post A Conversation Between Artists: Ambrose Akinmusire and PUBLIQuartet, Friday of Stop/Time Festival appeared first on KRUI Radio.

Or — and this is equally likely, especially if you’re a college student like me — you don’t.

The divide between older and younger patrons of comedy has never been more apparent to me than on Friday, February 6th at the Englert Theatre, while I watched Tom Arnold’s newest stand-up performance on his 50-city North American “My Crazy X-Wife Tour”. While most of the (primarily older) audience seemed to enjoy themselves during Arnold’s set, I came away from the performance with a different feeling entirely: not quite dislike, but not enjoyment either.

Before I get into my mixed feelings about Arnold’s comedy, I’d be remiss not to mention the positives of the night. Arnold has clearly been in the industry a very long time, and it shows in the quickness and wit of his comedic storytelling. His set is delightfully unpolished, delivered in a slightly rushed conversational style that keeps the jokes coming at a frenetic pace. And even when he’s not focused strictly on jokes, the stories he tells of his time in Hollywood are entertaining enough to keep the audience engaged.

In fact, one of the strongest points of the night was the instant rapport that Arnold had with his audience. He did, of course, attend the University of Iowa, which earned him automatic points. (He was also able to pull former Hawkeye women’s basketball coach Lisa Bluder up on stage to introduce him, which, of course, won our immediate respect.) It seemed like many of the attendees even knew Arnold personally, with a few shouting out to him during the show; he even pointed out his nephew sitting in the front. Arnold was not afraid to engage with the audience members who talked to him during the show, which greatly relaxed the room and made the stand-up special feel more like a family gathering.

In a way, though, I think the “family gathering” aspect of Arnold’s performance also speaks to what I found unpleasant about the show. Arnold opened his set with a joke about going to the Playboy mansion with Donald Trump, which made some of the older members of the audience laugh, but, in the wake of recent news, left me a bit shocked. He then proceeded to “wish [Trump] the best” on his current presidency. The show never got that political again, but I was left with a sour taste in my mouth. That remark colored how I interpreted the rest of Arnold’s jokes, especially those where he describes his encounters with famous men Hugh Grant and Arnold Schwarzenegger, who were both later exposed in sex scandals of their own. Listening to Arnold perform felt like having a conversation with my male Republican relatives: you want to like them because they feel like family, but you can’t ignore the opinions you know they hold, even if they’re not the center of the story.

I can honestly say that I don’t think Tom Arnold meant to make anyone in the audience feel uncomfortable that night. Most of his jokes were woven into lighthearted, silly celebrity stories, many of which did make me chuckle. But during the show, I found myself returning again to that moment at the beginning.

I may not recognize Arnold from his impressive list of achievements, but I did sincerely want to like him. I wanted to be part of the Iowa family he was speaking to that night.

And I guess, in a way, I was. But not in a way I fully enjoyed.

The post Comedy Review: I Was Not the Target Audience for Tom Arnold at The Englert appeared first on KRUI Radio.

We were wrong. But that doesn’t mean the description isn’t apt in a different way. Dan Soder, much like a golden retriever, is affably stupid.

This isn’t a dig at Soder; in fact, he said this himself multiple times during his routine. Several of his jokes hinged on his supposed stupidity, from him sheepishly admitting to the audience that he thought “the city” would clean out his grandmother’s house after she passed to mistaking Iowa for Wisconsin in terms of the latter’s considerable population of serial killers. He approached a wide variety of topics in this signature style, finding humor in everything from hair transplants to true crime podcasts to misadventures with his friend’s dogs. This approach to comedy — something along the lines of “confused, but happy to be here” — seems to work very well for Soder, and when he’s on stage, it’s patently clear that he is in his element. He had a very relaxed stage presence, often laughing at his own jokes with the audience. When one section or person in the crowd seemed to respond more to a joke than the rest, he often turned to them as if acknowledging them directly, a personal touch that definitely contributed to his “golden retriever” energy.

But what is to be gained from the comedy of a golden retriever?

As co-writer Bodhi noted upon walking into the theater that night, comedy is uniquely hard to write about. The only thing it really needs to do is make you laugh, so finding any nuance in a joke can be sisyphean, a futile attempt to be sincere in an ironic medium. The jokes were funny, sure, but what does it mean? Why does Dan Soder sell out shows? Why do people find what he has to say funny?

In 2016, one of the most popular comedians was Dave Chappelle. He’s since lost his goodwill with many, but it’s still possible to learn from his style of comedy. Back then, what he said was not only funny, but it also provided nuanced commentary on society. It felt like it was actually informing people, not only making them laugh. This is what makes a comedian stand out from their peers: the ability to speak their mind and tell an impactful story. In a way, a comedian’s punchlines are secondary to the messages they tell between their jokes.

Following this framework, Dan Soder, between the lines, is a reflection of his audience. Most of the people in attendance at the Englert that night were rural, working-class white Americans, and his comedy seemed to speak to them on a deep level. He talked to the audience as if we were sitting around a bonfire together, sharing a beer, telling funny stories. The plainness of his speech and his often crass delivery invited us to see him as a friend, not a performer. In the later parts of his routine, he touched on topics like animal abuse and alcoholism, living in a single-parent household, and growing up poor. He talks about his traumatic childhood so cavalierly that it’s almost as if he assumes you understand where he’s coming from— and a large part of his audience does.

Dan Soder may not have any great revelations hidden within his comedy, but he clearly still works as a comedian. He delivers his material in a way that makes him immediately relatable and likeable. You laugh with him because he’s your friend. 

Much like a golden retriever, his attitude is overwhelmingly positive, and we find him a net positive for comedy. He speaks to his audience in a way that fosters genuine connection, and he made every person in the crowd that night just a little happier— including us.

Co-written by Bodhi Brent and Bailey Vergara

The post Review: A Look at Comedy’s “Golden Retriever,” Dan Soder at The Englert Theatre appeared first on KRUI Radio.

From the beginning, Wang made it clear that age has given him a new perspective on comedy. He began with jokes about eating more antioxidants and losing his skill on the monkey bars, material that clearly resonated with the mostly older audience. Although he touched briefly on more juvenile topics like edible bras, most of his set relied on what I call “adulting” humor: jokes that lean heavily on the shared understanding that sometimes, being an adult can be a bit absurd. As a nineteen-year-old (and I suspect the youngest person at the Englert that night), I understand that I am probably not Sheng Wang’s intended audience. I did find a few of his deliveries to be a bit cringeworthy, but for the most part, his oddball humor struck a chord with me, even if I couldn’t relate to much of his material; I found myself keeled over in laughter more than a few times that night.

The rest of the theater enjoyed the performance as much, if not more, than I did; nearly every joke was met with uproarious laughter. Occasionally during the set, I would hear one woman sitting behind me whisper to her friend through giggles, “That’s so real!” Towards the end of the night, Wang remarked on the demographic of people that tend to come to his shows. He complimented the audience on being such laid-back, friendly people, and thanked them genuinely for their love and support. As someone who’d gotten to the show early that night, I was able to observe a little bit of that audience dynamic, and I think Wang is right on the money. Quite frankly, I can’t imagine anyone getting rowdy or irate at one of his performances; he exudes a cool energy that you just can’t help but be calmed by.

However, to me, Wang’s biggest asset is his creativity: he frames mundane events like jury duty as wacky adventures that the whole audience can enjoy. In one particularly well-received bit, he described his experience backpacking through a forest with one of his friends. As he relayed his journey to the campsite, he told us how, as a part of the backpacking experience, he had to abandon his car on the side of the highway and walk the remaining twenty-six miles to the campsite. Wang trotted across the stage, commenting on how absurd it felt to him to hike when he had a perfectly good car: “I’m a Subaru!”

Overall, Sheng Wang’s time at the Englert was well-spent. I thoroughly enjoyed his performance— as well that of his opener, Kevin Camia, who did a delightfully self-deprecating fifteen-minute set to get the audience warmed up. Both comedians delivered big laughs, but Wang’s inventiveness and whimsy were the highlight of the night for me. I’m looking forward to seeing what he does next.

Like he suggests, I think he’ll only be getting better from here.

The post Review: Sheng Wang Shines at the Englert appeared first on KRUI Radio.

Well, yes, obviously. Fish have pain receptors like the ones found in humans, and when they are injured, they act how you’d expect an animal in pain to act.

But consider this: we’re not fish. 

We don’t know what fish feel. What we can identify physiologically as pain in a fish’s body might not be expressed that way in their minds. Maybe fish pain feels different from human pain.

And consider this: maybe we don’t care.

Humans as a species have a reputation for treating other animals like playthings. We eat them en masse, experiment on them, dress them up and keep them as pets. We grind their bodies in large metal machines, keep them locked in cages and pens. We manipulate them as we see fit. 

Maybe, to a fish, we are a race of uncaring, unfeeling gods.

In How Fish is Made (2022, Wrong Organ), you play as, quite literally, a fish out of water who must make its way through a mysterious, pixelated landscape that walks the line between cold, unfeeling machine and graphic, fleshy human organ. As you traverse through the machine’s disgustingly rendered belly, you encounter other fish, who seem to have only one question for you: are you going UP or DOWN? You must answer every fish, but, interestingly, you can change your answer at will— the game doesn’t make you commit to your choice until the final room.

The mechanics of the game for the PC are relatively simple. You use your arrow keys to move forward and backward, your mouse to rotate, and the spacebar to interact with fish. It’s also a short game, clocking in at around 30-45 minutes to complete. But despite its simplicity, this game contains a surprising amount of depth. The environment, while pretty low-poly, evokes a visceral sense of discomfort and disgust through its depictions of disturbing body horror imagery. (The example that immediately comes to mind is the lotus seed pods, which have small, beady eyes instead of seeds.) And as you inch past your surroundings, your fishy flopping is accompanied by a score of mechanical whirs and fleshy squelches enough to make skin crawl. 

The game’s driving force is its NPCs: your fellow fish. When you first crash-land into the story, you meet a large fish who presents you with a choice — UP or DOWN — that will haunt you for the rest of the game. Every fish you meet afterwards will ask you the same question, but each one has a different perspective on the issue. One fish with a bent spine preaches the gospel of UP with a maniacal intensity, while another ensnared in a ring of plastic confidently declares that DOWN is the way to go. Some fish seem almost cartoonish in their convictions, while others act more human. A fish you meet will ask you whether they should travel UP with their family, or DOWN with their best friend. “I don’t want to choose,” they squeal, “if I can’t know exactly how it will turn out!”

At its core, How Fish Is Made breaks the human experience down to its most basic component: choice. And yet, when playing, you’ll notice that there are no humans in sight, only fish. However, there is a distinct human presence that remains unspoken. In one room, human voices play from distant recordings. The lights and buttons you find in the different rooms are fully functional, installed (presumably) by a human. In one of the most quietly disturbing moments of the game, you find one fish dead, trapped inside a condom filled with an unsavory white goo.

It’s interesting, then, that this game is about choice. As I mentioned before, humans typically remove most elements of choice from the life of a fish; we act almost like gods. So if humans are gods to fish, able to manipulate them at will, then perhaps the choices a fish makes in its lifetime are essentially meaningless. Whether it is eaten, used for testing, or kept as a pet, every fish ends up the same way: dead. Does it matter what the fish chooses to do in the meantime?

I fell in love with this game not because of its striking graphics, easy gameplay, or clever dialogue, but because of the way it considers the emptiness of choice. As soon as you are presented with the game’s central question — UP or DOWN? — you know that it doesn’t really matter which way you go. It’s not as if one path leads to death and the other salvation; this isn’t that type of game. You don’t get to choose if you die, you just get to choose how. You’re a fish.

In How Fish Is Made’s most memorable cutscene, a dancing parasite (I promise, this makes more sense in context) sings a song to you in front of pictures of decaying flesh and wriggling bugs. In the middle of his slideshow, he shows you a picture of a heap of dead fish in a cannery. On top, text reads: “Do Fish Feel Pain?” For the longest time, we humans didn’t think so, and we treated fish accordingly. But pain exists regardless of whether we perceive it or not.

When we picture a god of humans, we typically think of it as resembling ourselves. We draw them in human form, call them human names, and imagine that they understand human pain. But what if they can’t? What if the entities that control our fates, that make our choices virtually worthless, don’t understand the pain of deliberation that goes into making a decision? What if they exist only to use us while we live, harvest us when we die, and make our bodies into the filling of a delicious sandwich? 

What if they don’t know — or don’t care — How Fish Is Made?

The post Ethical Gaming: Choices, God, and “How Fish Is Made” appeared first on KRUI Radio.

I’ve been an active member of the Rusty Lake community for a little over a year now, and every time I play, I’m stunned by just how much depth the creators are able to fit into their games, which usually only take anywhere from an hour to four hours to play. Particularly, I’m fascinated by the games’ takes on environmentalism and mental health, both of which are central elements of the games’ setting and story. I’ve spent hours writing and theorizing, and come to the conclusion that the series lends itself as an ecocentrist, the perspective that nature’s needs outweigh human ones.

In an effort to ensure that my year long trip down the Rusty Lake rabbit hole was not in vain, I wanted to explain my thoughts on the deeper message behind the game series. There are spoilers ahead.

There are multiple interconnected plotlines within the Rusty Lake universe, but the linchpin of the franchise is the story of Dale Vandermeer, a detective investigating a death within the Rusty Lake Mental Health and Fishing facility, which sits atop the titular Rusty Lake. The deceased, a woman named Laura Vanderboom, died under mysterious and possibly supernatural circumstances. While attempting to investigate, Dale encounters a handful of chilling characters, including half-human, half-animal hybrids Mr. Owl and Mr. Crow, a parrot named Harvey, and a human-shaped “corrupted soul” with no name and undefined intentions. Later installments of the game allow the player to take on different playable characters and explore different storylines, some of which take place several centuries in the past.

One of the central plot devices of the story is the Elixir, a concoction made by alchemist Caroline Eilander in Rusty Lake: Paradise that created the human animal hybrids Dale interacts with in his games. The Elixir, created through the magical powers of the Lake, works only when two parties drink it. One dies, and one becomes semi-immortal, taking on the form of a hybrid. 

In line with the games’ ecocentrist themes, the Elixir seems to represent human corruption and the exploitation of nature for selfish ends. Not only was the Elixir made by harvesting the power of the Lake, an act that mirrors humanity’s own misuse of natural resources, but is also almost exclusively used without one party’s consent. In one case, that party was a dog, who James Vanderboom drugged in Rusty Lake: Roots in order to attempt to become immortal himself. This backfired on him spectacularly, as the dog ended up becoming fully immortal. This was while James kicked the bucket.

The way this plot point plays out reads to me as Rusty Lake’s satirical critique of human hubris. Animals have been around long before humans, and they will continue to exist long after we die. This may also explain why James’ dog is the only character that becomes fully immortal after taking the Elixir. Both Mr. Owl and Mr. Crow, who were once humans, express the desire to retake it at some point in order to renew its effects.

This isn’t even to mention the fact that “corrupted souls” as seen in Dale’s games, are later shown to be the remains of people who drink the Elixir and die. To me, this feels as if the Lake has corrupted their souls as a physical manifestation of the human corruption that led to their deaths. In fact, natural manifestations of human greed seem to be a recurring motif within the games. The ultimate example, the biblical Ten Plagues of Egypt, is used as a framing device in Rusty Lake: Paradise, which is also the game that introduces the Elixir.

The games’ ecocentric views also tie into its portrayal of mental health, which starts with Laura Vanderboom from the first games. Laura is shown to struggle with severe mental illness. She attempts to reconnect with nature at the Lake in order to regain some sense of normalcy, and the games frequently use nature based metaphors as an abstract representation of her depression. The game Rusty Lake: Seasons is entirely built around this concept, using seasons, as the name would imply, to represent Laura’s mental states and subsequent descent into depression. Laura is also often shown in pictures next to a cherry tree. This gains more significance in the game Underground Blossom, where Laura literally blossoms into a cherry tree. In this game, “blossoming” is used to represent a purification of the soul and Laura’s ascension from her mental turmoil. 

Laura’s story hints at the connection between the series’ views on nature and mental health. Laura comes to the Lake to mitigate her depression by engaging with nature, and the end to her story suggests that she ended up doing just that. Only by becoming a part of nature was Laura able to make peace with her trauma and escape her depression. 

Her story also marks a notable contrast between how the games treat engaging with nature in a mutually beneficial way versus doing it for one’s own gain. Laura never seeks to exploit the Lake in any way, just to engage with its aesthetic beauty in order to improve her mental state. James Vanderboom, however, seeks to misuse the Lake’s resources to gain immortality and ends up paying for it. Both within the Rusty Lake universe and in real life, there is a difference between enjoying an area’s ecosystem services and overexploitation.

There are so many other aspects of Rusty Lake that I wish I had time to discuss, but my space at the moment is limited. So, thank you for humoring me. I urge you to try these games for yourself, many of which are free to play. Feel free to come back with your own conclusions about the games and prove me wrong. As Mr. Crow would say: You know what to do.

The post The Environmentalist Message Behind “Rusty Lake” appeared first on KRUI Radio.