🫈✨The Nexialist #0285

welcome to your weekly head refreshing newsletter, the nexialist

hey, you! i hope this message finds you well. i’m back to reality in amsterdam and full of catching up to do, so it’s a shorter than the usual nexialist. i will leave you to it 🫀✨

—Rodrigo Turra

⏮️ time-machine: best brainsparks this week over the past years:

80 year cycles, unthinkable futures, the technium, social change map, homo crustaceous (tn#233), time of monsters, clown in mainstream, rose of the winds (tn#181), merpeople, latin blood. blue mind theory, dirty words: community (tn#129), meta morphism , sophistry, el dorado, data as the new soil, not oil (tn#78). lil nas x’s digital fluency, social constructs, men in the media, relearning fertilization, spiral sperm, super industry of the imaginary, creative effectiveness (tn#28)

Buy Me a Coffee? ☕️

i’ve been meaning to read paul b. preciado’s pornotopia for a while, so i got myself a copy last time i went to brazil, and i could finally read it during these days off, when i devoured it. it has completely shifted how i look at masculinity and just how we relate to technology, sex and pornography today.

preciado walks us through the history hugh hefner and how his playboy empire created the new ideal of urban masculinity during the cold war by using architecture, surveillance, media, drugs and sex. the book has so much more than this but, for instance, his iconic rotating round bed was not only used to “play” with the bunnies, but it was also his office, and it was filmed and recorded, like a studio. also, he was fashionably hooked to amphetamines, so that he could work for hours.

it does seem he anticipated a few decades our current affairs: onlyfans and streaming intimacies, endless content production and surveillance, working from anywhere, anytime. this whole chapter was missing from how porn became the american dream (tn#278)

i was also not aware of pornotopia as a concept:

In critical theory, pornotopia describes an imagined space determined by sexual fantasies and dominated by human sexual activity, expressed in and encompassing erotica and pornography. The word was coined by the American literary critic Steven Marcus in his 1966 book The Other Victorians, deriving inspiration from nineteenth-century English literature on sexuality by moralists, physicians, and erotic authors.

brainsparks: the alpha male myth, colonial masculinity (tn#127), masculinity (tn#48), straight men kiss (tn#95), on heteropessimism (tn#174), male objectification through the ages (tn#127), heterotopia (tn#90)

john mcwhorter, professor of linguistics, wrote this and the subtitle got me: “euphemisms are like underwear: best changed frequently.” i always wondered how/why euphemisms keep changing, and this seems to be true everywhere, even it if the article is focused in the context of the united states. what would be called “cash assistance for the differently abled” could have been “welfare for cripples” back then.

What the cognitive psychologist and linguist Steven Pinker has artfully termed ‘the euphemism treadmill’ is not a tic or a stunt. It is an inevitable and, more to the point, healthy process, necessary in view of the eternal gulf between language and opinion. We think of euphemisms as one-time events, where one prissily coins a way of saying something that detracts from something unpleasant about it. That serves perfectly well as a definition of what euphemism is, but misses the point that euphemism tends to require regular renewal. This is because thought changes more slowly than we can change the words for it, and has a way of catching up with our new coinages.

brainsparks: makeshift signs (tn#280)

ok, i am part of the people who are obsessed with madonna’s new album/era. i don’t know about you, but it does feel like an invitation to leave the house and go party.

People think that dance music is superficial
But they’ve got it all wrong
The dance floor is not just a place, it’s a threshold
A ritualistic space where movement replaces language

another book i read during these days off was byung-chul han’s the disappearance of rituals, and i know madonna has done her research there too. there’s another song called love without words, an ode to electronic musioc.

He juxtaposes a community without communication — where the intensity of togetherness in silent recognition provides structure and meaning — to today’s communication without community, which does away with collective feelings and leaves individuals exposed to exploitation and manipulation by neoliberal psycho-politics.

brainsparks: confessions ii (tn#281),madonna-ology (tn#211)

by coincidence, i had this saved to share here a couple weeks ago. it’s a clip/remix taken from lucky people center international (1998) by johan soderberg and erik pauser (now in my watchlist).

somehow humans invented this trick, or whatever you might call it, of synchronizing group activity and the movements of each individual to a common pulse. maybe to a drum, maybe to hand clapping. maybe the original pulse was stumping on the ground. repetitive monotonous rhythms. the monotonous highly repetitive music… so we are the dancing apes.

brainsparks: electronic body music (tn#84), architecture ft. music (tn#15)

i’ve been following genesis awusu’s for a bit of time and i was loving his sound, but this is next level to my taste. it’s always strange to me when i’m enhoying a male artist, it’s when i realize most of the music i listen to is by women. love that such a camp reference is being used — and the guillotine.

I wrote this song when I was thinking about apathy. Living in the digital age of misinformation is genuinely brain-frying sometimes. So much global gaslighting, so much to cry and scream about; it’s easier to just flip the switch off and sink into base hedonism to feel human again. But it’s really important to care. You can party too. Care about the rights and freedoms that let you party. Care about all the people around the world who wanna party just like you. Keep fighting, kicking and screaming so the party doesn’t die

i was listening to it thinking it reminded me of something, and it was new order’s blue monday — and i just realized this is the first time i watched their official video — there are hand drawings and a dog, can we please go back to this?

brainsparks: stampede (tn#267), get inspired (tn#98), digital guillotine aka digitine (tn#173)

honestly, i was trying not to be so invested in this world cup, but i’m brazilian and my boyfriend is argentinian, so there’s no other choice. the gencup project by zeh fernandes makes super cool and soothing posters by using data of each game, combining football, code and graphic design. above is the blueprint, but i recommend going to the gencup website to see how each game is playes.

brainsparks: fio maravilha (tn#159), voice of brazil (tn#246), sportswashing (tn#96)

I truly believe innovation comes from bringing improbable areas together, and that’s why I called this project The Nexialist. Some sectors are known to be self-referencing and hermetic. Sometimes, teams are on autopilot mode, focused on the daily grind, which hinders innovation. As a Nexialist, I like to burst these bubbles, bringing references from different areas, and maintaining teams inspired and connected to the Zeitgeist. 

I offer inspiration sessions called Brainsparks, creative desk research (Zeitgeist Boost), Plug’n’Play deals for workshops and sprints, and other bespoke formats. If you want to know more about this, send me an e-mail with your challenge(s) and we can figure something out together. Check out my website and some work I’ve done below:

thenexialist.xyz