Now Playing: June 2026

Our June 2026 edition of Now Playing will get you humming Dreams & rethinking what it all means…

Audrey Jiggetts

 My recent obsessions have been Obsession (2026), vanilla soft serve, Geese, satire, my new glasses, Paralives, email, old Fleetwood Mac, and swimming in the river. 

Alexandra Dos Santos

The Dark Wizard (dir. Peter Mortimer and Nick Rosen) is the best documentary I’ve seen in years, maybe ever. On the surface, it follows the career of free solo climber and BASE jumper Dean Potter. But what it really was about, to me, was the close proximity of magic—our ability to access it if we sacrifice our ego. When you’re one slip from plummeting to your death, you develop a bird’s eye view on life. A feral, artful philosophy. Dean talks about breaking human limitations, becoming one with ravens and rock, finding meaning in physicality. Because whether we like it or not, we’re in these bodies and we’re on this earth. It may seem like inert, flat material—all function and no purpose. But Dean used climbing and jumping as a portal to the sublime. I truly believe you can go somewhere else while your body remains here. 

In the third episode, when Potter is in the throes of depression, he does a BASE jump in China for their national news. When he lands, a reporter runs over to him and asks him to score his flight on a scale of one to ten. Potter’s sadness is so palpable in that moment—like he’d just been with God and was dropped back to the land of man. “There is no scoring system,” he said. “This is art. This is spirituality.”

But of course he was only human, and the documentary shows how he wrestled with his ego, his competitiveness. I found it really inspiring as a writer, to try to remember that. To not get so caught up in publications and accolades, searching for external validation. That in the end, that’s not what will make you happy. The true gift of art, both creating and consuming it, is the ability to sense, maybe even merge with, the formless.