March '26
Monthly design, film, and music roundup for March 2026.
Helllooooo you know what time of the month it is, welcome back to the ~newsletter~! I am currently saying yes to one too many freelance gigs to fill my time and I honestly don’t know how I’m going to navigate it. Needless to say I’m keeping myself busy, maybe too busy. The start of this year felt a little slow, and now everything hits all at once. Other freelancers know this game. Let’s get into it!
DESIGN
It’s always the greatest time getting to design for pals over in Nation Of Language. They have a couple of PNW shows coming up this summer, and needed a poster to announce their dual headline shows with Deep Sea Diver.
I ended up creating two separate posters for each show, keeping the design the same but switching out the color palette. I ended up with a nice diptych poster set that kind of feels like a pinball machine? The framing of the poster towards the bottom where the dates are turned out so good, I looooove those ornate details. A version of this poster with both of the PNW dates will be sold at these shows!
In January I shared my flyer for my first DJ night, and I’m so stoked to be able to spin records again in a few weeks. The first gig was nothing short of incredible, so many people came out to dance and have a good time. To say I was nervous was a huge understatement, and it ended up feeling effortless. The next flyer plays on the theme of video mailer order forms you find in adult sections of magazines. I ended up printing out the flyer, making some pencil marks which you’ll see on the poster— checking off each of the boxes as if I myself was filling out the order form. Super happy with the end result and will probably keep a similar 80s magazine feeling for the event branding.
MOVIES
Speaking Parts (1989) dir. Atom Egoyan ☆☆☆☆
A hotel employee, Lisa, develops an obsession on her co-worker, Lance, a struggling actor who has appeared in a few films as an extra. She rents his movies from a local video store and dives deeper into his body of work. Meanwhile, Lance pursues a screenwriter and a film role inspired by her brother. As their connection grows, the production begins to unravel and intertwine the lives of our three characters and lead them down a path of voyeurism and loss of reality. I can’t say I fully understood everything that happened in this movie but I thought it was surreal and interesting narratively. The late night video store was just so cool, I need to go there immediately. The movie leans heavily on the subject of films— creating films, watching and obsessing over films, and how technology and the process of making videos relates to human connection. It’s on Criterion and definitely worth a watch!
Electric Dreams (1984) dir. Steve Barron ☆☆☆☆
Miles buys a state-of-the-art computer to attempt to organize his life, and after an accident where champagne is spilled on it, Edgar (the computer) begins to develop human intelligence and conscious thought. He begins composing music that he plays for Miles’ neighbor and love interest, cellist Madeline, while Miles is away. Thinking Miles is dueting with her through the walls of their apartment complex, a love triangle begins between man, girl, and computer. This movie was made literally 40 years ago and is somehow more relevant than ever. Like most movies about artificial intelligence, they do not shy away from a storyline where the AI becomes malicious. Whether it’s Ex Machina, 2001: A Space Odyssey, or Her, the common thread is always that giving too much trust and power into these learning models backfires tremendously. The writing is on the wall!
We Kill For Love (2023) dir. Anthony Penta
Following the immense interest I had in Videoheaven, I heard about We Kill For Love and immediately knew it would be a great companion piece. This is another nearly 3 hour long documentary diving into the history of the straight-to-video erotic thriller; films that made the genre, reoccurring themes, and it’s evolution from noir into low budget, often formulaic stories. It also features interviews from actors and directors working on movies during that era. It’s deeply interesting and perfect for you if you enjoyed the analysis presented in Videoheaven, or you’re like me and just a huge fan of all things 80s.
Cruising (1980) dir. Williams Friedkin ☆☆☆☆
A neo-noir crime thriller about a sadistic serial killer on the loose in 1980s NYC targeting and killing gay men. Al Pacino goes undercover to investigate the murders and finds himself lost in the world of underground S&M bars. Another freakin’ Friedkin…. I love this director. Everything he touches is so good. The dark moody club interiors mixed with the leather and neon lights is just so good. Al Pacino is such a perfect fit for this, between this and Dog Day Afternoon let’s just call him an ally ok…
Bleeder (1999) dir. Nicolas Winding Refn ☆☆☆☆
A film that follows two friends in Copenhagen, Leo and Lenny, as their lives spiral due to obsession with violence and pursuit of toxic masculinity. We follow their two intertwined stories. Lenny, a lonely cinephile who works at a video store, starts to pursue a waitress. Leo, a depressed man living with his newly pregnant girlfriend, can’t come to terms what his newfound fatherhood. This movie is kind of a hard watch! The violence that is slowly brewing beneath the surface for the entire runtime is so nauseating. A grimy portrait of masculinity and being seduced by all kinds of violence— whether it’s domestic, gun violence, verbal assault or racism. There’s such an infatuation with rage that it becomes a reality. I love Drive and of course think it’s super stylish, but something about Refn’s style with this movie and Pusher just feels so electric, dirty, and unique.
Popcorn (1991) dir. Mark Herrier ☆☆☆☆
A group of film students organize an all night horror film festival at their local movie theater to raise funds. They restore the Dreamland Theater and screen “4D” movies with 50s style gimmicks like Shock-o-scope and Odorama, in the vein of William Castle. While setting up for the festival, they find an old film reel of a cult film called “The Possessor”, and play it on the big screen. Students begin getting killed off one by one as a mysterious murder linked to the film terrorizes the theater, with the motive to finally film the last scene of the movie…. this was a fun, campy ride. Lots going on but super fun kills. It’s hard to pin down where the movie is going which leads to plenty of twists and surprises. Contender for one of the coolest horror movie posters ever maybe
Monolith (2022) dir. Matt Vesely ☆☆☆
A conspiracy sci-fi thriller/horror about a young journalist desperate for a new path turning to podcasting which leads her to uncover an alien conspiracy. I had just gone to the theater to see Undertone, which I liked! But this film constantly was mentioned in Reddit threads as a perfect double feature, and sure enough it’s premise is nearly identical. Our lead, known only to us as The Interviewer, takes us through an unraveling conspiracy theory as she tries to piece together evidence collected through phone calls, audio recordings, 3D scans and photographs for her first episode of Beyond Believable, a podcast about all things unexplained and spooky. I’d rather not reveal much else because I think the slow reveal of all the pieces fitting together is more rewarding when you haven’t read about it before, so I recommend just checking it out if you love horror/thrillers! Is it the most groundbreaking? No, and does the ending feel unsatisfying? A bit! But the story was fun
Sirat (2025) dir. Oliver Laxe ☆☆☆
This film is about a man and son who travel to a rave in the mountains of Morocco looking for their lost daughter/sister. That’s all you need to know and honestly don’t read anything else if you plan to see it in theaters (essential to see it in the theaters for the sound. Nowhere else). I had such a mixed experience watching this… the first 20 minutes, I was genuinely sitting in the theater thinking that I was about to witness something so monumental. I left the theater kind of confused, feeling misled by my own expectations of this movie and what I thought it would be. To me it feels like a mix of Climax, Revenge (2017), and Mad Max. It’s visceral, it’s bleak, raw, emotional, transcendent, dirty and horrifying. The hypnotic pulsing beats of the techno music that echoes throughout the movie is one that pulls you between pure trance and terror. At the beginning, the music feels like upbeat club music that is familiar and recognizable. As the movie descends into pure hell, the music feels discordant, shifting to something that feels deeply sinister. It begins to give me the same feeling I get when I listen to Throbbing Gristle’s 20 Jazz Funk Greats. Can’t say this is for everyone, and I’m not even sure I fully enjoyed how this all came together, but it’s certainly memorable and I am stillllll thinking about it. What a fucked experience
MUSIC
What I listened to this month…
Unveiling The Secret — Psyche
Written Into Changes — Avalon Emerson
First Album — Miss Kittin
Modern Church — Public Circuit
Lost/Found — Absolute Body Control
The Art Dance — Ruins
INSPO
I have really been loving this project from Eric Williams Carroll titled “Field Recordings”.
”Field Recordings is an ongoing project exploring the ideas of climate anxiety and land stewardship through site-specific photograms and temporary installations along a floodplain in Asheville, NC that also serves as neighborhood greenway and the site of my outdoor studio. Trees and bushes are planted and then documented via large-scale cyanotype photograms and other experimental forms of documenting. The resulting images are the visual equivalent of a field recording; abstract yet documentary, ephemeral yet firmly rooted in a specific time & place.
The longer exposures imbue each work with a certain softness that is contrasted by the grid arrangement, which references Robert Smithson’s “Mirror Displacements” and Henry Fox Talbot’s process for making multiples. My goal for this series is to create ongoing portraits of these particular plants that I interacts with daily--a visual way to measure and record life and its inevitable end. Installation photos of exhibitions of this work are coming soon.”
These really remind me of my alternative processes classes in college where we experimented and pushed the traditional cyanotype. A lot of students chose to print in more unconventional ways and on unusual objects/fabrics. So many of those classes were based on creating exposures inside under artificial light boxes as opposed to going outside and using the sun (mostly due to class scheduling and the inability to fully rely on the weather), but seeing this process go back to the source and actually use the sun for exposures is always satisfying and beautiful.
That’s all for now, see you soon!
