🧙‍♀️✨The Nexialist #0120

RIP Rita Lee, the jester of rock | thank you, no | two ways of aging | what is the contemporary | octopus time | missing link | just an illusion | ecology of wanking

May 11, 2023

welcome to another week of cyber-fooling around, the nexialist

hey, you! i hope this e-mail finds you ~~umwelt~~ well. this week we lost (at least) two important brazilians, rita lee, who you’ll read more during about half of this newsletter, and david miranda, gay rights activist and congressman. both losses were heartbreaking and touched me (and so many other brazilians). i’ll leave you today with some special rita lee moments/songs/quotes and some other great links that friends and algorithms sent my way. read until the end for some unexpected self-pleasurable content. enjoy 🫀

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🃏RIP Rita Lee, the jester of rock

this is the first time i actually cry (and more than once) for an artist’s passing —confirming a parasocial relationship (tn#47) i wasn’t much aware i had. being a singer, composer, multi-instrumentalist, writer, she has the title of queen of rock but said herself that it is quite tacky and dated. she’d rather be called the jester of rock. and i could not agree more. she did not take herself seriously, lived her life to the fullest and she always said what needed to be said (in her last concert, she was arrested for name-calling violent cops in the audience). she was always ahead of her time. i think i cried so much not only because i have so many memories attached to her songs but also what she means and how we need her kind of energy in the world right now. i think this mourning period also serves as a reminder for us to be authentic and unapologetic, which is so hard these days. Rest in Power!

On a fine day I decided to change / Um belo dia resolvi mudar
And do everything I wanted to do / E fazer tudo o que eu queria fazer
I freed myself from that vulgar life / Me libertei daquela vida vulgar
That I used to lead being together with you / Que eu levava estando junto a você

i’ll also recommend streaming her music and also the three new remix albums (rita & Roberto - classix remix vol. i, ii and iii.)

read: Rita Lee, Brazil’s undisputed Queen of Rock, dies aged 75 | Os Mutantes | The Guardian (see also tn#15 and tn#26)

🪖thank you, no

the year was 1997, and rita lee was talking about abortion, same-sex marriage and corruption in her new song and video, including ~~military~~ gays kissing. i remember watching this on tv very young and not sure what the fuss was about.

Legalize what is not a crime / Legalize o que não é crime
Recriminate the lack of education / Recrimine a falta de educação

🧙‍♀️two ways of aging

gqbrasil

A post shared by GQ Brasil (@gqbrasil)

thank you, gust, for sharing this. rita’s knowledge is being shared nonstop these days and i love it. this one stood out for me:

There are two ways for you to age. You either follow the way of the peruas [women who exacerbate vanity], or that of the witches. The peruas chase the fountain of youth and their greatest enemy is time. For the witches, however, their greatest ally is time.

👽what is the contemporary

gustnogm

A post shared by Gust Gustavo Nogueira de Menezes (@gustnogm)

Those who are truly contemporary are those who neither perfectly coincide with their time nor adapts to its demands. Contemporariness, then, is the relationship with time that adheres to it through a disconnection" —Giorgio Agamben

this is the perfect quote to share today, another one that gust showed to me (follow him if you still haven’t, everything i know about time i learned from him).

🐙octopus time

i have a bit of an obsession with octopuses—no wonder it’s one of my tattoos. they are fascinating and their ways of being can teach us many things (see my octopus teacher (tn#42) and donna haraway’s tentacular thinking (tn#46). so when i saw this title from aeon’s newsletter (can the liquid motion of the octopus radicalize our ideas about time?) i just had to click, and it fit like a glove in this brainspark. david bokerhagen’s essay is filled with references of how different human societies perceive time in an embodied way through language and brings mesmerizing examples. it’s one of those texts that brings us on such a trip.

It’s not only that our experiences of space are different. Our experiences of time are likely different, too. We think about the passage of time through our terrestrial experience of unidirectional motion through space – our metaphors of time are almost all grounded in the way our bodies move forward through the environment. Given this fact, how would an octopus, who can easily see and move in all directions, conceptualise time? Current research methods may be able to take us only part of the way toward an answer, but it’s far enough to consider a radical possibility: if we became more like an octopus, could we free time, metaphorically speaking, from its constraints? Could we experience it as multidimensional, fluid and free?

brainspark: nonhuman perceptions & umwelt (tn#86)

🪢missing link

i had heard of iniko before, but it was through a vocal coach on tiktok that this acapella performance grabbed my attention. i just love the kind of transcendental sci-fi lyrics and the way they deliver it, with their whole body. i got goosebumps listening to it. and then how uncanny it is that the lyrics could be representing an octopus?

I'm high
I'm from outer space
I got Milky way for blood, evolution in my vein
I'm gone
I've been far away, I'mma lumineer now, I make moves start waves
I've been dreaming about flying for a long time
I had a vision from the graves they wanna co-sign
Artificially intelligent New-AI
I'm your future past and present, I'm the fine line
Yeah, I'm a missing link of this illusion
I am not really here, I'm an intrusion
I don't swim or sink, I just float
I don't need gravity, I just need growth, (woah)

https://genius.com/Iniko-jericho-lyrics

👁️just an illusion

it’s the first time i see my shazam making a mistake. while listening to the radio on the last day of our trip, i tried to shazam a song and this song came up instead. of course, with this cover, i couldn’t help myself. no regrets. just a treasure in a glitch.

🤛ecology of wanking

wow, this text was a true feast for a nexialist. what started as an essay about masturbation turned into the cynics’ philosophy of self-sufficiency and took a turn into economic and ecologic manifestations. thank you M D Usher for the great content. in the part i feature below, it seems to be written from the past to many of us now:

In a dialogue attributed to the satirist Lucian of Samosata, an unnamed Cynic likens the god in charge of this world to ‘a good host’ at a dinner party:

He places before us a variety of many kinds of dishes so that we have what is appropriate for us – some things for the healthy, some for the sick, some for the strong, some for the weak – not so that we all may use everything, but so that each of us might use for ourselves what falls in our domain and, of those items, what we happen to need most.

‘Whereas you,’ the Cynic continues, addressing his interlocuter,

are exactly like a person who grabs everything out of greed and lack of restraint. You think it’s fine to use it all, including goods from all over and not just what you have close to hand. You don’t think your own land and sea are enough in themselves, but import your pleasures from the corners of the globe and always prefer what is foreign to what is produced locally, what is costly to what is inexpensive, and what’s hard to procure to what’s easily acquired … The many costly goods you think conducive to your happiness, over which you exult, only come to be yours through misery and suffering. That gold you pray so hard to get your hands on, the silver, the expensive houses, the finely tailored clothing, and all the accoutrements that go along with these things: how much do they cost in trouble? How much in human labour and danger, or rather, in human blood, death and destruction? Many people are lost at sea for the sake of such things, and the people who go in search for or manufacture them suffer terribly.

read: From the Cynics’ self-sufficiency to an ecology of wanking | Aeon Essays

see you next week, jesters🫀

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