July '25
Monthly design, film, and music roundup for July 2025.
Hi friends! Welcome back to the newsletter. July has felt like an eternity, which is maybe for the best since we’re at the midway point of the year and things are moving a little too fast…we’re about to experience ANOTHER heatwave in NYC and I don’t think I can make it through another week of intense humidity. If you’re on the East Coast, stay cool! Anyway I’ve got lots of design work to share with you.
DESIGN
A few months ago I started design work for my first poster for Modest Mouse. The show was in Jackson Hole, WY, so I wanted to incorporate some imagery relevant to the area. Mountain ranges, Castillejas, and Sheridan's hairstreaks, the state butterfly. I love how the type treatment and textures turned out on this one. If you’re interested, I have 20 limited edition APs of this poster, hand numbered and signed by me!
Moving on to merch, I had the honor of designing some pieces for the Rolling Stones summer 2025 collection. The Stones are one of my favorite bands, I still have a shadow box with the first shirt I ever designed for them sitting above my desk. To be able to give my own spin on their licks logo feels so special! This 70s psychedelic floral design is available on both a cropped raglan tee and a tote bag in their online webstore.
Finallyyyy sharing this merch line I made for Scowl to accompany the release of their new album Are We All Angels, available in their webstore and on tour all year. All of the hand drawn elements and stamps from the album artwork lend themselves quite nicely to be remixed from garment design. Some of these have been sold out for a minute, I’m still looking for one of the hoodies for my archive!
For this long sleeve tee design, I wanted the blue flies to overlay on the tracklist with some transparency, to really emphasize the fly stamps as sitting on top of the design instead of feeling seamlessly integrated. Instead of knocking out the black text underneath in my print file, I left the black so the light opacity of the blue allows you to see parts of the design.
On a roll with merch… this is a t-shirt I got to design for Durand Jones & The Indications in celebration of their new album ‘Flowers’, available in their webstore. This optical flower design is based on the abstract flowers found on the center labels of the record.
MOVIES
July was a record breaking month with 38 movies watched… however some of those were short films so maybe it doesn’t fully count. But regardless, here are some highlights!
Videoheaven (2025)
This month I went to the IFC premiere of Alex Ross Perry’s new documentary Videoheaven, about the rise and fall of the video store. Clocking in at 3 hours long, this is an extensive analysis starting in the 80s of the consumer’s relationship to renting movies, and how neighborhood video stores impacted both cultural and social landscapes. This isn’t a documentary interviewing former video store clerks, this is an essay featuring footage from every movie that has ever represented a video store on screen. It’s a thorough labor of love, one that took ARP over 10 years to complete, slowly adding more and more footage. Drawing on Daniel Herbert’s book “Videoland: Movie Culture at the American Video Store”, ARP mentions in the Q&A that the last chapter of Herbert’s book was intended to discuss the video store as portrayed in film and television. Since the ideas weren’t successfully landing without visuals, the chapter was cut. Videoheaven serves as almost a companion piece, the missing piece of Videoland’s lost chapter. IFC also decided to screen some of the movies featured in the documentary, including Body Double (Brian de Palma), Videodrome (David Cronenberg), and Video Violence (Gary P. Cohen).
Video Violence (1987) ☆☆☆
After seeing Videoheaven I decided to check out Video Violence, since it was one of the featured movies that I hadn’t seen. Considered one of the first entries into the shot on video genre, this horror B movie is about a couple who open a video store in a new town and discover the locals like to make their own torture videos. Since the movie is so low quality, both in visuals and actors performance, it genuinely feels like something you’re watching on a camcorder. Which partially feels connected to the crux of this film, which is complacency in violence and hedonistic desire. It’s not a good movie, but it is interesting to those curious with the genre and early shot on video films.
Dead Ringers ☆☆☆☆☆
Easily one of the best movies I’ve watched this month (well technically at the end of June but at that point I already wrote my June newsletter). This was a Cronenberg blindspot for me, and I genuinely feel like it’s one of his most romantic and intimate films?? It’s not grotesque like his others which I definitely wasn’t expecting, but it was so enthralling that I didn’t even miss it. Elliot and Beverly are two gynecologists who work at the same practice and share everything from girls (ew) to an apartment, and when Beverly falls for one of their patients, it sends him into a state of madness. Jeremy Irons plays both identical twins SO well that even just by looking at them you can tell them apart. This movie is so stylish….the production design is gorgeous, with sleek 80s chrome interiors and hues of blue and purple that kind of remind me of aquariums if that makes sense??
And instead of the familiar white/blue surgical masks and gear you would usually see surgeons wearing, it’s a stark red which feels super alienating and bizarrely intriguing.
I could go on about this one but if you’re interested in Cronenberg’s work but maybe not so much the body horror parts of his filmography, this would be a good one for you to watch.
Dark Water (2002) ☆☆☆☆
Another one that’s been on my watchlist for a while that I finally got to see. Directed by Hideo Nakata (the director of the original Japanese Ring), Dark Water is an eerie story of a woman and her daughter who movie into an apartment that has an active leak. With the boom of J-Horror in the 90s and 00s, the genre produced some creepy ghost stories (can vouch for Ring, Pulse, Exte, Cure to name a few), and Dark Water is one of the saddest and creepiest. Similar to Pulse and Cure, this movie has a lonely, chilling atmosphere covered in hues of yellow and green, shots of tube tvs, surveillance footage, and of course creepy kids. Without saying too much, it really reminds me of the Cecil Hotel story with Elisa Lam.
Vampyros Lesbos (1971) ☆☆☆☆
I’ve had this movie on my radar for a while, and the Roxy Cinema in Manhattan finally did some showings of the new 4k restoration. Gorgeous set and costume design, and unintentionally funny as hell. Or maybe that was intentional. Anyway this is an erotic horror movie about a vixen vampire who seduces and kills women for female blood. Beautiful uses of red throughout, similar to what I was talking about with Dead Ringers! Everything felt very intentional and bold. The film was shot in Istanbul, and features an iconic exotica lounge jazz fusion score that would play at full volume pretty much throughout the entire film and demand your attention. If you have no desire to watch the movie but want to hear this sick score, you can listen here!
Session 9 (2001) ☆☆☆
Session 9 always pops up on lists of “scariest movies ever made” so I gave this one a shot. Another shot on video film, S9 is about an asbestos cleaning crew working a job cleaning up an abandoned mental hospital that supposedly has a horrific past. It’s good for what it is (a low budget horror movie), however didn’t do much for me. The location really is doing most of the heavy lifting, and I think the setting combined with SOV footage is definitely nightmare fuel. The score is also extremely unnerving. Unfortunately takes a turn in a direction that I’m not a personally a fan of in horror movies, which is demonizing mentally ill people.
Shock Treatment (1981) ☆☆☆☆
Jim Sharman’s unofficial-but-kinda-official follow up to Rocky Horror, this time trading glam rock for new wave and Susan Sarandon for Jessica Harper. The story follows Brad and Janet who, now married, are experiencing relationship issues. To fix their problems, they go on the game show “Marriage Maze”, where it’s suggested that Brad be imprisoned in a mental institution. While Janet’s popularity begins to rise, she tries to figure out who these doctors are and what the secret plan really is…. yeah it’s a lot. Kind of a mess but a fun mess, and the set designs are of course stunning. But yeah lots of Brain Worms™ and Society™ going on here. The music is great! But I still like Rocky Horror more.
The Short Films of Cecelia Condit
In college I had a really cool film professor who taught a few of my film classes, and introduced me to the works of Cecelia Condit. This was in 2016/2017, long before I watched anything like….truly weird like I would now. I genuinely thank her for developing my tastes, because she introduced me to SO many amazing movies I like now— Liquid Sky, Possession, all things David Cronenberg, Richard Kern short films. Seeing Possibly In Michigan struck something in me, I was so unnerved and disturbed by this 12 minute shot on video short about a cannibalistic serial killer that I continued to reference it over the years and show it to friends. Her films explore the dark side of female subjectivity, often bouncing between the beautiful and the grotesque, and the psychology of sexuality and violence.
Possibly In Michigan (1983) is her most popular and most referenced short, it blew up on tik tok so the audio is everywhere. If that means more eyes on Cecelia, sure.
You can watch all of her work on Youtube— some highlights: Beneath the Skin (1981), Possibly In Michigan (1983), Not A Jealous Bone (1987)
MUSIC
Albums I listened to this month…
PORTRAiTS — PARKiNG
Bastard — The Wants
Reading, Writing, and Arithmetic — The Sundays
American Water — Silver Jews
Spooky — Lush
Slip In And Out Of Phenomenon — Liquid Liquid
INSPO
Some random inspiration for you this month, mostly posters and images I’ve saved to my camera roll! I am working on the next Computer Love newsletter so this section is a little dry right now sorry…
That’s all for now! See you next month
