contains mild graphic language

Welcome to my column, Too Glam to Give a Damn. This column will delve into everything makeup and beauty. I pride myself on being an avid lover of everything beauty related: beauty experts, beauty products, beauty queens, drag queens….if it involves makeup I’m probably fairly educated on it. This column will be dedicated to all things glamorous. I will share my thoughts and admiration about various aspects of the beauty community. Hopefully this column will show people that yes—makeup is indeed an impressive form of art. I especially love and highly recommend the makeup products from Islash Boutique.

Today we are reviewing the best TV Show on television, RuPaul’s Drag Race. For those unfortunate few who have never heard of this mystical show, let me give you a little bit of background information.

According to Wikipedia, RuPaul’s Drag Race is “an American reality competition series produced by World of Wonder for Logo TV. The show documents RuPaul in his search for America’s Next Drag Superstar”. So, it isn’t actually about drag racing. It’s about drag queens racing to become America’s Next Drag Superstar and win 100,000 and a shitload of makeup/clothing/a cruise/whatever else depending on the season. Which, in my opinion, is so much better than drag racing. Sorry actual car racing fans.

Last week, RuPaul wrapped up his second All stars season, which takes former queens from other seasons who did not win, and has them compete again to win a spot in the Drag Race Hall of Fame. IT’S SO EXCITING. Words can’t express how hyped I was, and still am, about All Stars season 2.

I probably should elaborate on how this competition works. In regular competition they have 9-14 drag queens enter the competition. This usually involves sending in an audition tape. Once they make it on the show, they compete in various challenges. These challenges can range anywhere from sewing challenges, dress up challenges, fashion challenges, impersonating celebrities….a plethora of talent is showcased during this time. During All Stars, as stated earlier, these are former contestants that are GOOD. Like they slay. Hard.

This seasons round of contestants is impressive, and if you want to read more about them, go here

There were several jaw dropping moments in this season. For instance….

1.  Adore Delano leaving the season in episode 2. The first contestant to ever leave the competition willingly. She cited emotional stress and Michelle Visage’s harsh critiques as a reason for leaving the competition

2. Phi Phi O’Hara ‘throwing shade’ at Alyssa Edwards….and Alyssa standing behind a mirror and hearing the whole entire thing.

3. Detox voting Alyssa off EVEN THOUGH ROXXXY HAD BEEN IN THE BOTTOM 2 FIVE TIMES AT THIS POINT.

4. Phi Phi O’Hara NOT showing up to the finale recap episode, and RuPaul CALLING HER OUT. ON TV.

Traditionally these kind of settings foster some rivalries and fights due to the high stress of the competition they are put through. I must impress upon everyone: Being a drag queen is extremely difficult and impressive. They transform themselves into women and brand themselves on that. They learn intensive makeup techniques and spend HOURS doing makeup and wearing afro hair extensions. They lip sync music in front of large crowds and perform difficult choreography to top it all off. They even glue there damn eyebrows down.

This competition has all of that, but to the extreme. These drag queens are the best of the best, competing against each other for a grand prize. There is drama, sass, one liners, humor, acting, modeling, impersonating, and fashion, sometimes all in one episode. If this kind of amazing thing interests you, you can watch all of All Stars here, for free. If you want to watch drag queens perform funny short skits, you can find them here.

I hope this review enlightened everyone about my deep and sincere love for female impersonators. Ironically, these men have taught me so much about makeup and how to be a lady. Please watch RuPaul’s Drag Race All Stars Season 2, it is worth an hour out of your day.

The post Too Glam to Give a Damn: Ru-Viewing RuPaul’s Drag Race All Stars Season 2 appeared first on KRUI Radio.

The first track on the album, “Axolotl” is intriguing to me. I love the emotion and chaos that the instruments bring to the song, and I think the vocals fit them perfectly. I was curious as to what “axolotl” meant and upon a Wikipedia search discovered that an axolotl is a Mexican salamander known as a walkingfish, none of which are still surviving in the wild. They are unusual because they mature into adulthood without undergoing metamorphosis like other amphibians. I wondered if this had anything to do with the song’s meaning.

This track is the only one on the album to have a music video released, and it confuses me in terms of lyrical meaning. I find the music video to be disturbing in a fascinating way, but it took me in a completely different direction than I thought it would. It features a man with a clear abnormality, which includes black sludge pouring out of his stomach and his mouth. This motif ties in with the album art, a portrait of a woman with what looks like oil paint pouring out of her mouth. Watch this music video below.

“A Bit on the Side” reminds me of another band that I cannot for the life of me remember. I think I hear something very familiar in the vocals because the music itself is very understated until there is no one singing. I do wish that the music wasn’t so repetitive. I think it sounds good in between verses and the chorus, but it can get a bit exhausting to listen to over and over again. I hope that the band isn’t as repetitive throughout the rest of the album. That being said, the first lyrics of this song is “hoochie-coo-mon-ami-oh-my, honey, honey” which is very satisfying to say so I’m into that.

“Low Lays the Devil” is a very AM-era Arctic-Monkeyian song. I can’t stop focusing on the guitar in this song, some of the riffs are beautiful. I don’t care too much for the lyrics, but I love “sure as inside the egg lies the yolk, I’m standing outside the gates of Hell, and I’ll keep singing ’til I croak.”

You can definitely tell that the band is trying to directly tell something to the listener in “King of Chrome.” The vocals are much stronger than any other part of this song. The voice sounds a lot like it did in “Axolotl,” so it is possible that the artists were trying to make us draw a connection between the two tunes. They were the two songs that represented the same types of things: a man that is lonely, and man that is turning into a monster, a man that can’t find anyone else that is like him, a man that seems very angry for reasons we can’t really see based on lyrics alone.

“Swimming with the Crocodiles” is my favorite song on Total Depravity so far. It makes me want to drive and it makes me feel very nostalgic. I think that nostalgia stems from the guitar’s crooning, which was a common motif in music my dad used to listen to as we were on road trips when I was young. This song’s lyrics are also very beautiful, but I wonder what the crocodiles really are. It would make sense for them to be harsh memories or people from the past. I could also see that the water represents the comfort that can come from dwelling in something, sad or otherwise.

“Here Come the Dead” is the most sudden contrast to the previous (very calming) song. The song starts very vacant with pregnant pauses in between lyrics, then starts with very harsh guitar. Throughout the song, the music goes from calm to harsh to relaxed to sudden, a back and forth pattern. I am not sure how I feel at all about this song, but I’m kind of put off because a few of the subtle sounds in the background vaguely remind me of Jellyfish Jam from Spongebob which is so not anywhere near relevant to this album and very unfortunate for The Veils.

“In the Blood” was a good way to calm the listener down after listening to “Here Come the Dead.” I loved the opening lyric “he holds your nightmares in one hand and your dreams in the other, but no matter which one you demand you’ll wish you would’ve chose the other.” It was a simple lyric with a simple voice and a simple melody in the background, which was great to calm my nerves after the whole “this song is creeping me out but also reminds me of Spongebob??” fiasco.

In “Iodine & Iron,” my favorite part of any album is featured. If you’ve read any of my other album reviews, you know how much my heart sings for a string element. There was a subtle orchestra in the beginning, and there were cello harmonics in the middle, and there was a lone violin in there, and the orchestra returned and I’m just very happy with it. The song as a whole had a lot more country elements than I would have preferred in the music, but I think that The Veils had a great balance between the different instruments and the vocals that I’m not really that upset about it.

I wish that there had been more diversity between “Iodine & Iron” and the next track, “House of Spirits.” The music is very similar, but the latter is a lot less country-esque sounding. I love the rhythm and the chill-ness of this song, but there really isn’t too much else to say about it. I feel like it fits in, but that’s all.

“Do Your Bones Glow at Night?” is a title that had interested me since I scanned the various titles on the album. It could be a love song, or it could be a person looking for someone like them. The second prediction would make more sense, as we have seen a man seemingly, possibly, looking for someone that is like him. (A truck driver driving for his entire life, perhaps looking for someone or something.) Both of my predictions were somewhat correct–the singer is looking for someone that is like him, but he wants to love that person. He hopes that if he finds that love it will lead him to something better and happier. The music and vocals aren’t my favorite by a long shot, but I think that the lyrics are a bit better.

“In the Nightfall” is second to “Swimming with the Crocodiles” as my favorite tune from Total Depravity. I do like the extremely relaxing nature of the song, but I like even more that it seems to tie in with “King of Chrome.” This song opens with the lyric “I stepped out to the sound of my radio on the right song.” It made me wonder if this entire time during the entire album, the trucker was telling his story through the radio he was listening to.

It would explain why there were so many drastic changes in the style of the songs; perhaps he was flipping through the radio stations. Sometimes there were songs next to each other that sounded similar, so perhaps that’s when he decided to stick with a radio station for a few songs. We can see him step into this truck at the beginning of the album during “King of Chrome,” and step out of his truck now after thinking for a while, during “In the Nightfall.”

The last song, “Total Depravity” seems like the perfect song to play during the credits if the rest of the album were a movie. The lyrics recap the story in some subtle ways, but the music itself serves as a great outro to the story. It feels like a sendoff, which is what I feel the truck driver/man looking for common ground really needs.

The album seems to be a tale or commentary on corruption either of an individual or of a group of people, but also of how it is possible to get out of it. In the “Axolotl” music video, first a man has black sludge dripping from his mouth until eventually all of the people around him also do. Perhaps it is about a man who is or thinks he is corrupting the people around him. Whatever the meaning, I will probably be listening to this album in the future, and have found a few new groovy tunes that I love.

You can listen to the album on YouTube here, or on Spotify below.

The post Album Review: “Total Depravity” by The Veils appeared first on KRUI Radio.

Bruce Harreld is a symbol in Iowa City– a symbol of plutocracy and ignorance. He lives comfortably atop his new throne, his rich voice reigning over thousands of people within our intellectual community, far away from its previous echo within the doors of IBM and Boston Market. Beholden to a belief system that seems to demand silence, this plutocrat is already complicit in destroying our democracy, and soon enough, our community will see funding cuts, more bureaucratic discourse trumping faculty and student rights, and a continued lack of social awareness on the behalf of administrators. We, the people of the university, will crumble underneath the University of Iowa’s house of cards.

Being in the top 1%, Bruce Harreld is a barometer for privilege and status– “give him a chance” and “he needs to resign” being the polar arguments into the plunge that is the heated controversy behind University of Iowa’s new president. In many of the articles written on Harreld, we witness facts and critical analyses, but one fact has been left out: Harreld doesn’t care about the people here, and he never did. Now he has to try, as it may cost him his $590,000 a year job (plus $1 million in deferred compensation over five years).

It isn’t about Harreld’s lack of higher-education experience or his background as a corporate businessman– no, these qualities aren’t inherently negative. What this is about is the people who look to Harreld to make positive changes– the undergraduate students– and they haven’t been fed a word of good news.

Amongst announcements of redistribution of funds, and Harreld’s “????” PowerPoint bullet in regards to the source of university funding, his internal dialogue was finally revealed. It’s clear that he wasn’t hired for his ideas, but for his blank rhetoric– “great to greater” analogous to “Make America Great Again.” He seems to be veiling ignorance, but cannot admit to it. Why doesn’t a president of a university have any solid plans for moving forward? What are his motives?

To the Regents, he may have come off like a man with a vision, and probably more, but a privileged, majority white bunch as they are, they don’t understand the needs of all people; look at their backgrounds. None of them were ever forced to confront the challenges of higher education. Remember, these are people that still force us to submit all of our input on their omnipresent behavior within an hour, onto a tiny camera in a small room. We can only sit and hope that one of the Regents listens to it later, let alone mildly acknowledges the points being made. Even Harreld, who won’t push for state funding or social issues on campus, stated in his recent town hall meeting that he doesn’t think this is acceptable.

But there haven’t been any changes. The Iowa Board of Regents continues to remain distant and inept, completely lacking community engagement and transparency, two of their “core principles.” They chose a president almost no one wanted, enabling him to speak on campus before anyone else. This is enough to show the court system their inability and dysfunction, proving them an illegal and illegitimate bureaucracy, leaning plutocracy. But who has the money and time to take them on? Democracy is being thwarted here, and until the law changes (or until a lawyer works on this) we have to do the only thing we can do: take down their iconic, undemocratic talking head, Bruce Harreld.

Regent issues aside, Harreld doesn’t make people at the university feel comfortable. Ultimately, the problem isn’t with what Harreld wants, because it doesn’t seem like he has much to offer. The problem is with what he doesn’t know, and what he continues to misunderstand. He has a lot of power, and without the knowledge or adequate care it takes to be a president of a university, he will be dangerous. He’s not only dangerous to issues of funding, but dangerous in that it could spell even further disenfranchisement of minority students [UI’s hidden past], international students, lower-class students, or anyone that falls outside the category of sports, where Harreld seems to have the most motivation. He seems blind to the idea of social justice, or increasing state revenue support to take the burden of heightened tuition off of students.

In 1981, state appropriations accounted for 77.4% of the revenue for Iowa’s public universities, while tuition only accounted for 20.8%. But in 2015, state appropriations sat at a measly 34.7%, while tuition peaked to 60.7% of the total revenue. The casual kiss of financial lines in 2009 went seemingly unnoticed– their intersected paths predetermined to grow apart again, this time in the opposite direction, resulting in a youth-draining effect: students are deep in debt. Some see this inevitable future and go out of the country for education that is nearly free. But here, our lack of state funding continues to be a detriment to the future of students’ finances. To some degree, students are willing to fight for its reversal, but this drastic flip in the source of revenue is too much for them to handle on their own.

To this, Harreld insists we need a “backup plan,” “B & C,” inferring he won’t be successful in pushing Rastetter, his appointer, to appropriate more funds for the university. Bruce Rastetter, Board of Regents President, continues to pit the universities against each other, and Gov. Terry Branstad, who appointed Rastetter, has been cutting public funding from the University of Iowa for years. To quote the book of John (or Bruce), “The Son can do nothing of himself, but what he seeth the Father do: for what things soever he doeth, these also doeth the Son likewise” (5:19).

In addition to this lineage of power, Regent Mary Andringa, one of the Regents that appointed Harreld, recently resigned from the Iowa Board of Regents after she failed to submit proof that she was a director of Herman Miller, a furniture manufacturer. This manufacturer recently won a multi-million dollar contract with the University of Iowa. What other corrupt regent activities are we unaware of? Why did the Regents pick Harreld?

While the other candidates for UI presidency climbed to the title of Provost, Harreld worked for Boston Market and IBM. Now, for some reason, he’s started at the top of the higher-ed food chain, with no fundamental platform other than trying to raise funds in a yet-to-be-decided way (remember, he needs ideas from you about this). We were lucky to get one public forum this year.

And there’s the rub. Harreld is lost; he’s completely out of his sector, and he fundamentally doesn’t connect with people on campus because he doesn’t understand the issues or adversity they encounter on a daily basis. His previous experience is capital and profit– now he’s living in a value and ethics world. And rather than someone like Joseph Steinmetz, or Michael Bernstein, Harreld has low favorability because, frankly, he doesn’t know what to do with a community that isn’t a business one. That’s why he has made his job ours, and we, studying, working, and largely unorganized, cannot actualize our ideas in Harreld’s “come visit me” input system, let alone “make real the promises of democracy” like Martin Luther King Jr. believed we ought to do.

Harreld has long ignored this; his “come and get involved” town hall rhetoric only shows his naiveté. When you’re electing a president, a fundamental leader in society, you would think that person would be highly motivated and excited to implement their idea of what a just and ethical institution looks like. But Harreld does not independently bring up issues that concern him, and even when the community brings forth issues, he doesn’t take action outside of his discussion with an advocacy group. Brief introductory meetings don’t change systemic problems; his vision is neglectful.

Why doesn’t he cut Iowa’s (well above-average) administrator pay to help offset other costs? Why didn’t he advocate for any specific issues past raising faculty salaries (a clear appeasement tactic)? Why won’t he raise the minimum wage on campus? Many universities suffer from the same systemic problems, so it’s not like the University of Iowa is absolutely unique in its faults. How has he show his awareness or care? He hasn’t, and instead, he’s resorted to supporting us through the carefully construed Iowa Now narrative. But it’s shallow and soulless. We get it Bruce, you like us, we’re great. But have you ever understood our community’s issues?

We already know the answer to this. That’s why we must fire him ourselves before our educational community is thrown into chaos with no plan for repair. The first public forum was a mess because Harreld asked us to do his job for him, but without the capabilities to actualize our needs. If he truly cared about the people here, if he truly cared about the gross number of sexual assaults on campus, if he truly cared about the rampant racism experienced by people of color, if he truly cared about any social or financial issue the university is having, he would have made a plan to begin with, or at least talked about these issues in length, outside of his secretary-written emails and speeches.

Harreld should be angry and frustrated like we are. He should have worn it on his face. But this is what plutocrats do: front our ignored issues in façade, while they bask in the comfort of their throne. All we observe from Harreld is confusion and obfuscation– the breadcrumbs of a socially ignorant, wealthy, privileged man­­– far from his core comfort zone of exploited labor and eight-digit profits.

The post Bruce Harreld: The Plutocrat That Cannot Relate appeared first on KRUI Radio.