🏛️✨The Nexialist #0098
metaflop | beach party genre | life in the buff | roman baths | witches and loneliness | gaslighting | la manada | welcome to my island | la sustancia x | get inspired | wishy-washy
welcome to another week of content bytes cyberweaving of The Nexialist
hello, folks! i hope this e-mail finds you running naked in the woods well. this week you’ll get a lot of beach parties (a flopped meta one), baths, butts, bops and witchcraft (hence the gif above). bring your beverage of preference and come enjoy it with me 🫀
1 year ago » 🏢✨The Nexialist #0048 : Anthropogenic Mass | Year in Search | Ancient Computer | Memories from the Future | Samba em 3 Tempos | Heavenly Samba | Political Aesthetic Change | A Matter of Luck | Dunes
😬metaflop
Any gathering that no one shows up to is sad enough. The European Union investing $400k into a 24-hour metaverse "beach party" full of "music and fun," only to attract less than ten guests who all peaced out in less than an hour? That's downright depressing.
ouch… i was cringing when i read this news. i’ve shared before that i have this feeling that this metaverse agenda is being pushed down our throats, but maybe i’m just not the demographic. but news like this show i might be right. of course, i know it is more complex than that, and there are other layers, such as a good communication/ community strategy, which i’m pretty sure they lacked.
read: man alarmed to become only guest at $400,000 metaverse party - futurism
🏖️the beach party genre
talking about this meta beach party, this came up in one of my favorite newsletters: messy nessy’s 13 things i found on the internet today. the beach party genre was huge in the 60s, and even if you haven’t watched one, there is probably a scene in your head of teenagers (or very adult actors) moving their bodies on a beach with cute swimwear.
see, this wasn’t the world of james dean and marlon brando. these weren’t films about finding your identity or battling through teenage angst. and they didn’t feature characters with names like holden cauldield. for all intents and purposes, these weren’t really films about teenagers so much as they were films SOLD to teenagers.
something i learned from this video as my jaw dropped was about the peter pan syndrome strategy, which might still be used today. it bothered me because it explains so much about who entertainment has historically been made for and the normalization of marketing to children, which is very much still on today.
A) a younger child will watch anything an older child will watch;
B) an older child will not watch anything a younger child will watch;
C) a girl will watch anything a boy will watch
D) a boy will not watch anything a girl will watch
therefore to reach the greater audience, you zero in in the 19-year-old male
🍑life in the buff
Annebella Pollenis, professor of visual and material culture at the University of Brighton, UK, and author of Nudism in a Cold Climate (2022) writes about the historically complex relationship between photography, nudity, and humanity. on one side, nudism and naturism were normalized by communities as a health movement in magazines with thousands of subscribers in the UK and Germany in the 1930s, but at a cost: the photos mostly showed white, young, and fit bodies, purposefully. on the other, the moral panic and pornographic accusations of such imagery. it’s quite an interesting read that shows how, almost a year later, humans still haven’t come to terms with naked bodies.
While undoubtedly assisting with magazine sales among non-nudists who eagerly embraced the new opportunity to devour images of naked bodies, looking at nudes was argued to have improving effects on mind and body. Model bodies – always slim, white and young – offered templates to live by. They encouraged the unhealthy towards fitness, and held up an instructive mirror to non-model bodies. Early nudism, for all its egalitarian claims, was founded on eugenic principles about ‘good’ and ‘bad’ bodies, which led to discriminatory statements about those who did not live up to its ideals. Parmelee, for example, felt that those with fat stomachs should look and learn: ‘This unwieldy mass of flesh, sometimes containing folds and creases, and shaking jellylike with the motion of the body,’ he observed, ‘is one of the most unpleasant sights in gymnosophic circles.’ He argued that nudism ‘is the most effective measure for eliminating this monstrous distortion by spreading an ideal of human beauty and shaming those who fall so far short of it.’
read: a history of the pleasures and powers of showing the nude body | Aeon Essays
🏛️why did roman baths disappear?
New research contests the myth that it was Christianity’s opposition to public nudity that led to the decline in large-scale bathing in the late Roman Empire.
as a nudity lover, a question that comes to mind is why did Roman baths disappear? or just in general, when did we stop with this social nudity and why? of course, when this post appeared in my inbox, i had to click and share it with you. turns out it was more than just Christianity destroying things:
Although many from the Enlightenment onward may view the migration away from large imperial bathing venues as a signifier of decline, it is instead a cultural shift influenced by many factors: environmental, social, and fiscal. Rejecting the overly simplistic idea and false argument that Christianity simply killed certain Roman, “pagan” practices such as bathing is key to understanding the complex truth behind the late Roman Empire, Pickett’s and others’ work on late Roman bathing also underscores that environmental history, when understood alongside other factors such as financial constraints and socio-political tumult, can also reveal new insights about the so-called “fall” of the Roman Empire.
read: why did Roman baths disappear? by Sarah E. Bond - HyperAllergic
🌝witches and loneliness
i had this post saved for a while. i translated it from Petra Costa’s Instagram (she’s the amazing director of The Edge of Democracy and ELENA). i translated it because i could not find an official translation in English. i think there is such a beautiful message of what can emerge from loneliness and solitude. and more, a reminder of how women have been guardians of knowledge and have been demonized for that.
“Michelet says that witches came about that way. During the Middle Ages, men went to war or the crusades, and women in the fields were completely alone, isolated, for months and months, in their huts, and it was like that, out of solitude, a solitude unimaginable for us today, that they began to speak to trees, plants, wild animals, that is, to enter..., to..., how to say?, to invent intelligence with nature, to reinvent it. an intelligence that had to go back to prehistory, to rebuild it. and they called them witches, and burned them. […] it was in the forest that we women spoke for the first time, that we uttered a free speech, an invented speech; all that I told you about Michelet, that women began to speak to animals, to plants, is their speech, which they had not learned. it is because it was a free speech that she was punished, it is because, because of this speech, the woman gave up her duties towards the man, towards the house, precisely. it is the voice of freedom, it is normal for it to provoke fear.” (Marguerite Duras & Porte, 1977, p.)
🕯️gaslighting
Merriam-webster released their most looked-up words of the year and gaslighting is at the top. i just love how they already bring different definitions and how it has been changing since hitting the spotlight a few years ago.
When gaslighting was first used in the mid 20th century it referred to a kind of deception like that in the movie. We define this use as:
: psychological manipulation of a person usually over an extended period of time that causes the victim to question the validity of their own thoughts, perception of reality, or memories and typically leads to confusion, loss of confidence and self-esteem, uncertainty of one's emotional or mental stability, and a dependency on the perpetrator
🌳la manada
this video showed up as i was writing this edition, and i cannot keep it to myself. beautiful song and video about sisterhood and the collective power of women.
🏝️welcome to my island
i cannot wait for caroline polachek’s new album. this song gave me chills, 80s chords and synthesizers with a story. she’s such an artist, also with this cover.
🥥la sustancia x
thank you, Fatima, for showing me Antillano Villano. her new album came out last friday and i have been completely obsessed with it. it goes from trap, 2000s reggaeton and by the end more pop sounds. if you understand Spanish, pay attention to the lyrics because they are so good. stream it now: La Sustancia X
💡get inspired
this song played in a bar saturday night, and shazam helped me find it. Genesis Owusu is a Ghanaian-Australian singer, whom I didn’t know, so I have his 2021 album to discover next week (smiling with no teeth). it belongs in my sweetheart playlist of the moment: 👨🎤you upload yourself to San Junipero and go party at The Quagmire🤘
🐿️wishy-washy
“Music video for "My Idea" directed by Kailee McGee and starring Alex Karpovsky as a motion capture actor struggling with the disconnect between his performance in the studio and how he is seen by the rest of the world—as a cartoon meerkat in a children's movie.”
i just love a good song that makes me giggle because of the words and the sounds, and this one was love at first sight. i mean, who can put wishy-washy in a song and make it so fun… it made me dance by myself in the living room 🕺
I’ve gotta rehearse my idea
I’ve gotta rehearse my idea
All my ideas
Everybody with a pulse
Is chewing on my head of course
And everyone who’s not around
Was eaten by the background
Feed me to the background!
Wishy-washy (10x)
i always thought YACHT was “just” a band, and just now, i found their website and it’s full of other cool projects that they participate in.
see you next week, cuties!🫀
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