I’ve been making a deliberate effort to try to read/listen to books that are not political theory/history related, fiction if you will. Perhaps it’s a little... self-interested of me to be doing this in an attempt to try to improve as a writer but it’s also true that I miss my childhood romps with Nancy Drew. After all, I owe my development of reading comprehension to her—literally.

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If you’ll remember, back in June I made a post about getting around to tailoring some of the pieces I’ve thrifted over the past year. Well, nearly three months later, I finally have an update (!!!).

Then back in July, I wrote a little about Alice Rohrwacher and Loredana Buscemi, who are very much still on my mind, and as I was documenting my tailored finds, I realized that I have the perfect “$7 dress to go with my $300 shoes” so to speak.

The latter post mentions how I used to go into the Maryam Nassir Zadeh store that was around the corner from my old apartment in New York. Of course, I could never afford anything (and still can’t), but a girl can learn a lot from window shopping—it’s true!

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Let me explain.

We watched Obsession last night. No, not De Palma’s Obsession with the spellbinding final shot that is seared into my brain. The other completely unrelated Obsession from this year that I’m sure is outperforming De Palma’s. Ya know, there’s nothing like a mediocre film, lauded for reasons that are beyond what I am able to understand, to remind me of my latent delusions, of which I’ll mention two.

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Jordan‘s Ode to Aqueducts:

“It’s stunning ancient engineering. And many are still standing! A gorgeous gravity-fed water supply system - the aqueduct. The arch was the strongest & largest shape available. They repeated and stacked the shape when large valleys or other obstacles needed to be spanned. All the while the precise grade of the route was maintained. I’ve heard the ancient Roman concrete is stronger than ours and has properties in its chemistry that can “self-heal” cracks in the structure. The Ferreres aqueduct in Tarragona was a magnificent structure to behold and traverse in person and enjoy with friends. The late afternoon shadows lit the arches brilliantly when we were below and cast long dramatic shadows beneath us when we stood on top of the structure.’”

It really was that lovely.

Before meeting up with everyone in Barcelona and then heading to Tarragona, Hobbes and I went to see Sean Nicholas Savage here in Madrid, and we asked him after the show where the band was off to next and well whaddayaknow, they were off to Barcelona the next day too. Sean was kind enough to invite us to that show and it felt serendipitous to be able to share that experience with our friends. I love when the stars line up in such sweet ways.

Please ignore the incorrect dates in the corner 😅

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I’ve found all of these pieces somewhere between 5 and 10 bucks. Any advice on styling would be greatly appreciated as it’s my biggest weakness when it comes to putting an outfit together.

1. Starting off with this silk dress. I’d decided I wanted to wear more of this color as a redhead and so it shall be ! I love the double bra detail. I probably wouldn’t wear it with a slip as I’m not very modest but we’ll see how bold I feel. It’s a little wide on the bust so hopefully that won’t be too complicated of a fix. I’d like to wear this with a bright neon yellow bra. We’ll see if I can find something like that.

2. The second piece is this dress with the most insane Vasarely-esque print. She’s too large and too long but I couldn’t not try to make it work. I just know I’ll treasure her forever.

3. I’m debating if this is my favorite find or the Vasarely dress. I’m usually really not drawn to prints. Like, it takes really special prints for me to fall in love with them. But THIS print on THIS silk feels divine. We watched Alice Rohrwacher films last month and I’m OBSESSED with their costume design. I’m convinced that Italia from La Chimera would have worn this. She’s a little wide in the bust and has a small tear, but not to fear all can be mended :)

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I’d wanted to share these photos back in late April, as we went to Poland for our 3-year wedding anniversary. I shot three rolls of film on a new 35mm camera that Hobbes had just bought us for the trip. Just my luck, the camera was broken, the seller refused to refund us, and all of my photos from the trip were out of focus. I cried because we just can’t afford the 35mm camera that I want. I swear I opened the folder of photos from this trip a hundred times hoping that it wasn’t as bad as I’d thought. Oh, but it was. Fortunately, we have the photos from her digital camera and though it’s not the same, not all moments are gone forever. We also shot some things on our 90s camcorder that we will eventually share. I know I’m being a baby about this whole camera thing I just treasure our physical albums so much and I have a strict 35mm policy with those.

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Between then and now:

• We rewrote and reproduced our first essay on The Holdovers

• I did some photos that will be out in a magazine next month (I’ll share it when it’s out !)

• I did some photo work for a friend of mine who’s an up and coming artist (I’m excited to have one of my photos be a part of the design of an album cover ✨)

• I did some photo work for a friend of mine who designs clothing

• We completed designs on 4 poetry books that we’re so very proud of

I decided this year that I’m gonna give myself the permission to do creative things for fun again. Doing YouTube is fun. We take the work and our audience seriously but it’s also fun.

And as everything has settled down, we’re back at it ! I’ve been going to my favorite study hall to research and write 3 times a week. I’m not sure when it will be out (my guess is May) but I promise I’m working on it.

Anyway, here are the books we worked on and where you can buy them:

DEAD BOYS IN SPACE

SARAH YOUNGBLOOD GREGORY

THE MIRROR IN OUR MUSIC

FRED L. JOINER

Disfigured Hours

B Batchelor

21 Birthdays

Kennedy Gisege

A self-portrait I did in the session of photos that will be published next month
(The self portraits won’t be in the issue that’s why I’m sharing this lol)

We’re doing a month of Brian De Palma so I’ll follow up soon with some writing on that. <3

Hobbes and I have several rolls of film from the past year that have gone unprocessed. I’ve taken the initiative to start dropping one off each month for developing. This month, I cheated and dropped off two rolls and, by coincidence, happened to pick the rolls from our birthdays <3

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As many a millennial before me, I’m always reminiscing over the interwebs of yesteryear and this interminable yearning has been the catalyst for me to try Substack as a means of eventually getting off of Instagram. Here’s to a world where blogging and YouTube (intrinsically Millennial activities) can save me. If I had to guess? The only thing keeping many of us on IG, at this point, is probably the immediacy of our friends. This current nostalgia spell has been brought on by the fact that I’ve been trying to motivate myself to do a print sale for the past 8 months. And for the first time in my life, it’s felt impossibly hard to find people to photograph. Harder yet is finding the motivation to edit—and worse to share.

Forced by a recent drought of subjects who aren’t caught up in their own “Personal Brand” and love fun for the sake of it, here are some self-portraits from last year. To be clear, self-portraits are often a last resort brought on by the unfortunate and inevitable circumstances when the material is all too personal, you’re out of friends, or in this case, both.

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For Erica, one of the sexiest and most imaginative people I know, and the person from whom I’ve learned the most about this Performance.

In the beginning of 2020 I put down a deposit on Burlesque classes that were to have started March of that year.

Along with my deposit went my dreams of becoming a leggy dancer. Despite the overwhelming depression that took over me, I made a self portrait about solitude, lockdown, and the role of playing dress up in my life.

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When I was between the ages of 7 and 11, my favorite color was pink and, naturally, I lived in a bubblegum room with white polkadots. I later spent all of my teenage years and into my mid-20s telling everyone, including myself, that my favorite color was blue. I wore a lot of navy and in college, I described my style as being that of a “9 year old French boy”.

Despite this, when Hobbes and I started dating, she wasn’t buying it. According to her, there was no way this was true and (reminded of her own infatuation with yellow) it was “obvious” that my favorite color was pink, perhaps of the salmon / blush / coral variety. She was right.

I keep thinking about this because I find it curious that I’d spent years telling myself one thing and ignoring the empirical evidence produced by no one other than myself. I mean, my heart skips a beat at the very sight of a warm pink. How could I have missed this?

I’m sharing this anecdote not because I’m trying to write about my favorite color but because I’ve recently been reminded, through the process of writing these video essays, that favorite things are often hidden in one’s choices.

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This mini-review has been adapted from my original notes written in my ig stories on October 12th. This review is free to the public and an example of the mini reviews you’ll be receiving as a paid Substack subscriber.

We watched Weapons (2025) as part of our yearly Scary Movie Month in October where we try and watch a spooky movie every night. Some years are more productive than others, hahaha. Hobbes and I try to strike a balance between watching older films and her forcing me to watch contemporary movies so as to keep up with the Discourse on twitter. She’d been seeing consistent positive comments about this movie which historically hasn’t boded well in this household. Weapons was, unsurprisingly, no exception.

Much like Zach Cregger’s previous film Barbarian, which we watched during Scary Movie Month 2022, Weapons suffers from a bloated, directionless script jammed full of hamfisted, hollow ideas. The contemporary genre of the “elevated horror film” is often too preoccupied with delivering a message to make a scary, or even engaging, cinematic experience. Weapons delivers neither. What lies beneath its surface is truly beyond me. There is a smattering of aesthetic signifiers pointing towards commentary on gun violence, children’s safety in the modern age, the nuclear family, Americana, ostracized women, hero cops, mindless violence and more that are used to no effect other than bizarreness for the sake of it.

Cregger’s strange obsession with a veneer of mid-century American aesthetics as a depiction of evil feels lazy and incomprehensible. Though he attempts to bring these visual markers into the present day, his films don’t meaningfully engage with the inherent evil of America’s legacy and his filmmaking style can’t carry these aesthetics in a coherent way. If you’ve watched my Devil Wears Prada essay, this might sound familiar but Aunt Gladys is reminiscent of the Fabulously Evil Woman™ whose entire existence is predicated on misogynist prejudice against women whom society deems other.

On top of that, her costuming and performance lack any of the camp and charm that has offered dignity to other characters like this in the past. Though camp and charm would be completely out of place in a movie that’s this self serious and, like so many other contemporary films, smug about what it thinks it’s done. This smugness is made even more unbearable by the fact that the filmmakers are seemingly incapable of properly lighting the night scenes that make up the film’s central conceit.

38 million dollars may not be a lot to make a movie but if you’re fortunate enough to receive 38 million dollars in this economy, I would hope you’d have more respect for your audience.

My apologies for starting off the mini reviews with such a negative one, but I feel like this movie captures a lot of the problems I’m seeing repeatedly with recent releases. These types of movies make me sad but we’re hoping to cultivate a more demanding audience with this channel—there is hope yet.

Spooky movies that I did enjoy this season were The Vanishing (1988), The Others (2001), and Bones and All (2022). These movies were genuinely pleasurable to watch with thoughtful costuming, gorgeous cinematography, and (spooky) atmosphere. If you only watch one of the three, let it be The Vanishing.

OLIVE RATING: 0 paws! She refused to watch despite being a horror lover.