MEDIA DIET
By:
April 6, 2026
A weekly series exploring the media “input” of a group of people — HILOBROW’s friends and contributors — whose “output” we admire.
Holly has been a valued HILOBROW contributor since 2019. Her first post was on the topic of ANGEL SANCTUARY. Her most recent contributions to this publication include: HOT SAUCE | MILQUETOAST | ROCK-N-ROLL VICTIM.
Los Angeles…
HILOBROW: Do you subscribe to any magazines or newsletters that you’d strongly recommend?
HOLLY INTERLANDI: As everyone does, I suffer from an overload of “algorithms” on digital news sites. You click on one article and the app gives you a million more exactly like it. You read a single post about a product and suddenly you’re seeing everything about that product ever written. It completely negates the aspect of discovery, of perusing publications only to stumble upon something you’ve never heard of that might become your new obsession.
So after I scan the headlines, I read my “Monocle minute”, which is the email soundbite version of MONOCLE, a magazine of news, culture, fashion, urbanism, politics, global affairs, architecture, opinions, curated cuisine, and comic book-style shopping guides. It’s a truly global publication in the sense that you can read one issue and get schooled on the rehabilitation of Johannesburg, the resurgence of leather shoemaking in France, the conscription situation in Lithuania, and the musical philosophy of a random nightclub in Brazil. You might learn about inflatable tanks that fool enemy scouters in Russia. You might make literary friends with the driver of an ice-breaking rig from Finland.
Whatever the content, MONOCLE will enrich your life, and it will give you stories you never knew you needed. So I subscribe, and you should, too.
HILOBROW: What music — genres, particular artists and songs — do you listen to during a typical day?
HOLLY INTERLANDI: On the way to work, I pick an album from my Bandcamp wish list to listen to. I’ve consumed music in multiple ways over the years, from tapes to CDs to mp3s on Winamp to audio streaming files and back to CDs, but these days Bandcamp is my go-to, and metal is my Zen place. Black metal, death metal, power metal, prog, hardcore, deathcore. Distorted guitar riffs accompanied by screams, grunts, and growls have been my solace since I was a teenager. Right now my wish list contains artists like Worm, Terror Corpse, Retching, Crypts of Despair, Glorious Depravity, and many others so colorfully named.
Occasionally it’s a bad morning and I put on the Jonas Brothers or Backstreet Boys, because boy bands balance my soul.
HILOBROW: What forms of media do you “take in” the most regularly/frequently, during a typical day or week?
HOLLY INTERLANDI: I work at a video archive slash rental store in West Los Angeles, so at work, we watch movies. In the morning my taste leans toward black and white horror classics. NIGHT OF THE LIVING DEAD is my all-time favorite. As the day goes on, my picks get more esoteric, more sordid. Surreal animation like HEAVY METAL, old TV mysteries from 1992, big rubber monsters — CARNOSAUR, GORGO, any manner of Godzilla. And after dark, anything goes: werewolves, cannibals, violent spaghetti westerns, grindhouse oddities, Eurotrash, creepy selections from our “Holy Fucking Shit!” section.
Occasionally a snafu occurs and a bunch of school kids walk into the store while I’ve got Richard Stanley’s HARDWARE playing. Whoops.
HILOBROW: What are your reading habits?
HOLLY INTERLANDI: After work, I read comic books. I visit my local comic shop every week to pick up my stack. Comics are my ride or die. And that does include Batman and X-Men, but also manga and indie books like Ice Cream Man and Toxic Avenger and horror one-shots about giant babies and sentient guitars and farmers infected with alien goo.
I love comics. I edit and write them and keep my finger on the pulse of the industry because there is nothing more powerful than the combination of words and art.
Before bed, I read books of short stories. Often horror stories and anthologies, because that’s what intrigues me and makes me sniff pages in anticipation. I enjoy Three-Lobed Burning Eye, Weird Tales, Asimov’s Science Fiction, ancient dilapidated copies of Fantastic Stories and Whispers, Time-Life Enchanted World books, H.P. Lovecraft adaptations… any old smelly paperback I can get my hands on. If it’s decaying and musty and contains fantastical adventures, I will read it.
I also read an uncanny number of books about forensic science, corpses, interpretations of Hell, the intersection of physics and art, dog psychology, and infectious diseases. Because I love learning, of course. But also, when I dream, I want it to be weird, so I can wake up and write it down and create something from it.
Between MONOCLE, metal, movies, comic books, horror stories, and gruesome scientific studies, I’d say I have a pretty good cocktail for dreams to pick from.
MEDIA DIET series: MATTHEW BATTLES | DEB CHACHRA | ADRIENNE CREW | HOLLY INTERLANDI | CAROLYN KELLOGG | MARK KINGWELL | ADAM McGOVERN | CHARLIE MITCHELL | TOM NEALON | PEGGY NELSON | ANNIE NOCENTI | GARY PANTER | LYNN PERIL | JONATHAN PINCHERA | HEATHER QUINLAN | NICHOLAS ROMBES | CARLO ROTELLA | LUCY SANTE | SETH | MIKE WATT | JUDITH ZISSMAN | & more to come! Visit the SERIES INDEX.