The March 2026 Lurid Things

Bleatings and greetings, Luridians!1

This month, the United States has decided to engage in another illegal (and frankly immoral, though when is war ever moral?) war, and many of us are not happy about it!

(Are you interested in a monthly playlist? Leave a comment if so!)

Bloodlust and nuclear armageddon aside, are you happy? Are you well? Are you taking it upon yourself to yell at a child on behalf of an unknowing Chappell Roan? Are you banning her from Rio because you’ve always wanted to punish a woman for living outside of a heterosexual-oriented paradigm?Are you hiring bots to slander her online?

Do you hate lesbians?

Reader, let it be known I found it really funny, especially the slew of “I heard Chappell Roan was the reason reactor 4 failed at Chernobyl” jokes I read on Threads this past week. It always tickles me when someone entrenched in a paradigm tries to punish someone that lives outside a paradigm by enforcing the values of said paradigm, and Jesus Christ I’m already bringing critical theory into the intro, sorry!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

It’s been a month.

Merriam-Webster defines ‘lurid’ as:

Lurid: adjective (lu· rid) ˈlu̇r-əd1 a: causing horror or revolutionb: melodramatic, sensational2 a: wan and ghastly pale in appearanceb: of any of several light or medium grayish colors ranging from yellow to orange3 shining with the red glow of fire seen through smoke or clouds

March’s Lurid Things:

(Book) The Blue Sincerity of Alexis Hall’s Hell’s Heart

(Music) Opera Achings: Valencia Grace’s Debut Album, S!ut

(Art) Oh, the Shakes! The Meeting of Szilveszter Makó and Abodi Transylvania

(Science) One Mucosal Vaccine to Rule Them All: Stanford University School of Medicine Might Have Cracked the Ultimate Immunity Vaccine

(TV) A Fresh Smattering of Blood: Reworking the Classic Murder Mystery in Netflix’s The Residence

(Due to the current nature, scale, and prevalence of the word, there’s no lurid ‘object’ for this year’s Women’s History Month. There’s also no lurid ‘sensation’ because of my own competing interests. No, I will not elaborate.)

The Blue Sincerity of Alexis Hall’s Hell’s Heart

I’m ashamed to admit that I’d never read any of Alexis Hall’s work before my copy of Hell’s Heart arrived in the mail. I’d heard through the grapevine that they were damn funny, and yet I was still thoroughly unprepared for the level of snorting I did while reading their 450-page book.

Hell’s Heart apparently came about from a read-through of Moby Dick during the pandemic. Described as Gideon the Ninth (love) meets Moby Dick, Hell’s Heart is a futuristic, queer, Leviathan-shaped blend of humor and heart (and definitely the hell part of the equation). We figure out early on that this is a memoir written after the fated (though our narrator may argue fateful) events on the Pequod, and so the novel becomes a self-aware cutting back and forth between events and reflection, events and explanation, events and jokes, and of course, events and sex.

Our narrator, I (or as the opening line of the novel states while doing homage to Melville, “Call me…call me whatever the fuck you like.”), is a self-described “slut”: a former schoolmistress-turned-sailor who tries their best throughout the story to convince us (and perhaps herself) that she’s not a very serious individual.

“Sometimes, it feels like sincerity isn’t something we value anymore. And I’ll admit that in at least two of my previous rewrites I started this epilogue with Well, that just happened. Because it’s safer, in so many ways. To treat it all like a joke. Or like an adventure story. Or like an abstract exercise in philosophy.

It wasn’t.”

I found the world-building to not only be really fun but also terribly creative (whale-crab-like behemoths of a separate evolution on Jupiter, and monetized faith churches and extremists, oh my), and I really liked the choice to make the Old Earther (Terran) love interest, Q, speak in Latin. It gave me an excuse to trot out my thoroughly dehydrated, need-a-tetanus-shot-from-the-rust, high school Latin, which then pivoted into using a translation app (and then I found out their dialogue was beautiful).

And Captain A. Oh, A. The robotic-leg, mad seductress, death-obsessed captain, and the novel’s “Hadst thou see the Möbius Beast?!” to every hailing ship. A (the article) veritable psychotic (the Captain) that was a laugh to read.

Hell’s Heart is a hilarious and tender sci-fi romp of a debut, and I can’t wait to delve into the rest of their catalog.

You can purchase Hell’s Heart on Bookshop.org

Opera Achings: Valencia Grace’s Debut Album, S!ut

In our world, where society and technology box our daily lives into harsher, firmer outlines, Valencia Grace’s album is a bucket of ice water, and a welcome challenge. It’s a genre-bleeding, pounding pop opera that waltzes through your expectations so quickly that as soon as you’ve become acquainted with the feel of one song, she’s moved on to the next.

Much like how life used to be.

Grace, a Dorset native, became a TikTok darling during lockdown, and her first single “It Was You” signed her with Columbia Records.2 S!ut is a sharp departure from the sounds that made her go viral. Namely: its queerness. In an interview with Philthy magazine,3 Grace outlines the album’s opening single, “S!ut”:

Valencia: It comes with a crazy-bonkers music video! It’s just the most inclusive and uplifting queer song. I wanted to write a song that reflected what it felt to be pansexual, and I thought that the word “slut” was kind of a good way of explaining pansexuality and just loving everyone, but then also taking that word back and redefining what it means. It’s very empowering and dirty and fun.

Izzy: How do you feel like the song compares to previous music, the stuff that your fans already know of you?

Valencia: I think that as I keep going, I just dare harder and harder. I’m pushing myself a lot every single time I write, so I feel like “S!ut” is just the furthest I’ve dared to go, really.

My favorite song of the album is “Curtains.” It’s been a while since a pop song has made me see tableaux, and such was the interplay of her lyrics and composition, I did. In the song, Valencia sings the perspective of both female and male genders in the demise of an opera-influenced, heterosexual relationship. It’s a clever conceit, and at the end, we the listeners hear the last lines sung in the “feminine” perspective:

I think it's curtains
Baby, it's over now
Thank the cast and crew and give each other flowers
I think it's curtains
It's time to close it down
There won't be an encore
It's time to take our bows.

Did she end the relationship? Has this been her envisioning his perspective all along? Or, rather, has this been a cishet woman contemplating the opera box she’s been forced to perform for, a stage play in which the “female” roles are strict and the time to captivate engagement is limited and brief?

The song ends on her bare voice trembling without orchestration, a question still etched into the certainty of her vocals, then silence as the curtains finally fall.

You can listen to S!ut on Spotify and get more info about her tour here

(Art) Oh, the Shakes! The Meeting of Szilveszter Makó and Abodi Transylvania

I’ve been a bit obsessed with Szilveszter Makó’s work since his Rama Duwaji cover of The Cut back in December.

Influenced by Bauhaus, Dadaism, and Italian art,4 Makó creates photographs that are as laden with layers of meaning and imagery as surreal boxes, simultaneously eerie and childlike. The melancholy pose of his subjects creates pronounced-enough distance for the viewer to interrogate their own reactions and beliefs. His magic, I’ve found, is that with every photograph, he gives his viewer the option to opt out of further investigation into his proffered mysteries, to simply take the entirety of his photographs at surface value. It’s a level of complexity and organic, analog orchestration I haven’t seen in ages,5 and what I hope is representative of a long-overdue cry from the art world to revolt against literalism and oversimplification.

(Indeed, nothing screams this more recently than Makó’s work with the performance artist of representative complexity herself, Marina Abramović.)

But what shook me this past month, clinging to the wall the way you would when two giants get to their feet and finally meet with resounding thunder and lightning, was finding out that Abodi Transylvania had partnered with Makó to create a new campaign: “The Chronicles.”6 It might be (in my humble opinion) the single best marketing campaign in fashion history:

A Transylvanian fashion house embracing the camp that the Western world has flung for 129 years at its feet?7 Sheer brilliance.

Abodi Transylvania is a newer fashion house, formed in 2025 by Dora Abodi in an effort to create “wearable art” for the modern world.8 Abodi herself is descended from mythos: her ancestors were granted nobility in the 16th century by the infamous Báthori family. Though new, the fashion house has already made an impressive name for itself; its art has been worn by top international artists and featured by international publications.

I’ve had my eye on the Vampire Castle Bag:

You can learn more about Abodi Transylvania here

You can learn more about Szilveszter Makó here

(Science) One Mucosal Vaccine to Rule Them All: Stanford University School of Medicine Might Have Cracked the Ultimate Immunity Vaccine

Imagine, if you will, a future world in which the common flu, COVID, and allergens are gone, eradicated, a tragic conversation-starter that leaves your audience sighing over the backwardness of times past.

A beautiful dream, no?!

Dare to dream, nerds! A universal vaccine is exactly what Dr. Haibo Zhang of Dr. Bali Pulendran’s microbiology and immunology lab at Stanford University have purportedly achieved in a paper published last month in Science.9 Injected into the nasal passages of mice, the vaccine has proven monthslong resistance to COVID, SARS, staph, Acinetobacter baumannii, and house dust mites, or in other words: protection against viral, bacterial, and allergenic respiratory threats.

For those with debilitating chronic illness like myself, this development is like the piercing golden rays of the sun after a storm. Or the raft one clings to after hours spent Rose-like in the finger-numbing cold waters of the North Atlantic. Purple prose aside, this is capital B-I-G. To understand the mechanics (and why a universal vaccine has always been a bit of pipe dream), Nina Bai of Stanford Medicine gives a brief explanation of traditional vaccines and why this one works differently:10

Most attempts at a so-called universal vaccine have the modest goal of inducing immunity against an entire family of virus — all coronaviruses or all flu viruses, for example — usually by mimicking evolutionarily conserved viral components that are less likely to mutate…The new vaccine doesn’t try to mimic any part of a pathogen; instead, it mimics the signals that immune cells use to communicate with each other during an infection. This novel strategy integrates the two branches of immunity — innate and adaptive — creating a feedback loop that sustains a broad immune response.

The next step is a Phase 1 safety trial for humans. I’m crossing all my fingers and all ten of my toes until I blur into a different creature altogether.

(TV) A Fresh Smattering of Blood: Reworking the Classic Murder Mystery in Netflix’s The Residence

I love a good murder mystery. At the beginning of the pandemic, my husband turned to me after the seventeenth hour of an Icelandic murder mystery TV series:11 “You really like murder, huh?”

Yes.

The murder mystery genre serves many purposes psychologically for its viewers, but I’ve personally found their allure lies in watching terrible chaos and trauma unfold in a sealed, safe container. The fun part is solving the mystery against the rising, twisting, and impossible odds, something rarely (and unfortunately) seen or done in our daily lives.

The Residence presents an impossible situation: On the night of the Australian State Dinner, the White House Usher (Giancarlo Esposito) is found dead upstairs on one of the residence floors. Like a classic whodunit, the method, the means, and the motive are all missing. Or, as is the case in this genre, not at first glance. In comes bird-loving, I’ll-go-at-my-own-damn-pace-thank-you-very-much, private investigator Uzo Aduba playing the inimitable Cordelia Cupp.

It’s a well-baked, well-done murder mystery, with each of the episode’s titles tipping its hat to its genre forebears (with excellent art by Maira Kalman12). What at first glance appears to be the series’ central flaw (the many recaps and revisits during the committee hearings, like Netflix ordered the creative team to keep the attention of it’s half-watchers and avoid bad reviews) quickly reveals itself to be something a bit brilliant: Aduba’s character and her insistence on all fronts for the analog (not owning a cellphone becomes a bit when she makes use of the very expensive emergency satellite phone she’s given by Randall Park’s character to call her sister) turn into a meta-commentary on our attention spans. Perhaps we miss opportunities to bring about justice to things that seem too hard, too demanding, and too much not worth our while, and we are the lesser for it.

I thought the use of flashbacks to the night of the event fun, another stroke of brilliant self-awareness on how so many of us tell stories in these days of stunted memories and flattened affects. The story quickly dips and turns into a revolving, Rashomon P.O.V.13 of each suspected character through that fateful night. Just as you, the viewer, begin to think you’ve gotten a handle on whodunit, the series launches deeper into another character’s backstory and motives. The White House Christmas Celebration wasn’t just that. Oh no, it was a betrayal and an undermining. A slighted gingerbread house was not merely a gingerbread house. It was a motive for violence, nearly a year later.

As a former (and forever) bird girl, I appreciated that the show committed to Aduba’s character, then dug their heels in, and then dug in even deeper. She becomes a living metaphor for Anne Lamott’s philosophy,14 approaching each facet of the mystery, quite literally, bird-on-the-White-House-lawn by bird-on-the-White-House-lawn. Her counterpoint is Lily (played by Molly Griggs), the White House’s Social Secretary, who co-opts wellness to scapegoat her own responsibility.

I won’t give away the details of the ending, but I did find it amusing that in the great tradition of murder mysteries, there were no perfect, absolute villains, only intention and opportunity as Aduba’s character later muses.

I had a lot of fun watching the series, and I found a new personal devastation: years ago, I gave away my leather saddle bag, blazers, and tweed. Sigh. Is there nothing better than seeing a smart woman on TV wearing tweed with a worn leather saddle bag? Without an ounce of apology? Especially when that woman is Uzo Aduba? Is there?!

My favorite moments were Isiah Whitlock Jr.’s character quoting a Vogue article (rest in peace), and finally learning why J.B. fired the obnoxious hair guy. Oh, and fantasizing about a world where the most scandalous thing to rock a nation is the dissolving of U.S.-Australian relations, not a gay man and his husband living in residence at the White House.

You can watch The Residence on Netflix

That’s it for now! If you need me,

(Again, do we like this monthly playlist idea? Comment below.)

I’ll be here:

Watching. Waiting. Listening. Remembering.

All my love,

XOXO Lurid Lauren