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Relentlessly grimy from start to (almost) finish, teeming with hardboiled lowlifes of every flavor, and plenty of location shooting that makes for a great little Brooklyn time capsule.

I’ve been threatening to get back into screenprinting for far too long, so this exhibition of prints pushing the medium far beyond its apparent limits seemed like it would provide a good nudge. Not a lot of the content really spoke to me, but this show was really more about technique, and in that regard, much of what was on display was astonishing. In all my years in the game, I can’t say I’ve ever… See more →

Among other things, I remain very appreciative of Lanthimos’s rare appetite for adventurous typography.

Just in time for this year’s Berlin edition, Beyond Tellerrand has launched a beautiful new site for its 15-plus years of events. A real web treasure both visually and structurally, it succeeds as both a marketing site and a deep archive of hundreds of inspiring talks from creative speakers in design, tech, and beyond. I’m honored to have done a few projects with Beyond Tellerrand but sadly have yet to attend. Someday!

It seems like a cliché for a drug dealer to be working his stash out of a Burger King bathroom, but I hadn’t personally encountered it before. Or if I had, the operation was more subtle than this guy’s.

Not that he needed to be subtle. The place was mostly deserted, as often seems to be the case for legacy fast-food joints in the 21st century, at least in the suburbs. When did people stop… See more →

Maybe the best thing you can say for The Forever Purge, which was originally slated for release in July of 2020, is that it cleverly predicts January 6th, at least until you remember that the loudest man on the planet had a global captive audience that year, not limited to his devoted cult of wackos, and anyone with half a brain cell could read the tea leaves.

In perhaps the series’s most ham-fisted attempt at… See more →

Like the other films in the franchise, The First Purge’s clear polemical ambitions are paved over by commercial ones. But this one’s blaxploitation revival is a bigger missed opportunity, because it might have really had something to say.

At the top, a montage of TV news talking heads gives us a cursory history of the rise of the New Founding Fathers of America, an autocratic political party whose introduction of the Purge, an annual… See more →

Gotta print some zines. Off to FedEx I go. The self-service printer/copier takes credit cards. I’m prompted to pre-authorize a payment amount. Look at the sticker on the machine with the printing rates. Recall my document’s page count and how many copies I want. Do the math in my head. Select an amount from the preset options. Pop my thumb drive into the machine. It won’t read. No problem, I have a backup. But that… See more →

I’m not having a good month, and these Purge movies are not helping. But will I stop watching them? Apparently I will not.

There’s a MacGuffin this time, an anti-Purge senator (Elizabeth Mitchell) whose presidential bid aims to upend the barbaric status quo, which of course makes her a target. After narrowly escaping an assassination attempt, she flees her home, and it just so happens the head of her security detail is Leo Barnes (Frank… See more →

I couldn’t find any indication that Jello Biafra was offered a cameo in The Purge: Anarchy, which seems like an injustice given that it’s essentially a film adaptation of Dead Kennedys’ “Kill the Poor,” albeit an adaptation whose 104-minute runtime is markedly less incisive than what the DK song manages to say in a mere 180 seconds.

Still, Anarchy is an unqualified improvement over the first Purge film, whose one-note home-invasion plot Anarchy upgrades to… See more →

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