🎀✨The Nexialist #0130

playa saturno | salvaje | rush | drugs | super shy | hedgehog vs fox approach | how to have better sex | you knew | barbie’s authentic artificiality

Jul 20, 2023

welcome to another week of cyberflaneuring and phygital synapsing, the nexialist

hey, you! i hope this e-mail finds you ~~well.~~ this week i’ve been concentrating on work and deadlines, so the focus today will be on the main fuel for that to happen: some new music i’ve been listening to, layered with some readings and thoughts that i can’t stop myself from making (and lots of brainsparks, more than normal). read until the end for interesting, horny, chic (and barbie) content. enjoy 🫀

—Rodrigo Turra

Buy Me a Coffee? ☕️

🪐playa saturno

picking it up from last week’s seaside/mermaid theme (tn#129), i completely forgot to mention rauw alejandro’s new album, playa saturno. i have been playing some tracks, like ponte nasty again and again. i just loved the classic reggaeton references and sounds.

brainspark: the beat diaspora (tn#125)

👄salvaje

barcelona-based argentinian powerhouse, nathy peluso, just left us all speechless/gagging/drooling with her latest song/video salvaje. the walk, the looks, the dancing, the lyrics, the visuals, the sound. i think this video made me realize how much i love her chameleon quality.

Nathy Peluso aims to provoke; she thrives at creating characters and shape-shifting between styles, genres, and languages. Peluso’s bold debut album, ‘Calambre,’ blends crisp hip hop, sleek retro R&B, and a modern take on old-school salsa. Nathy Peluso merges styles, genres and languages across her artistry – visceral and vulnerable, sexy yet nonconformist, onstage and online.

read: argentine provocateur nathy peluso is savage on new single “salvaje” — numero mag

🍑rush

australian cutie troye sivan also delivered some great summer content for the gays. the video is very queer summer in berlin/berghain-coded, hanging out around the lake, after parties, chills, flirtatious and sexy vibes, butts and nudity, fun choreo. we loved these visuals. there was even a glory hole at one point.

social media, though, did call him out (and made memes) about the lack of body representation in the queer fantasy that rush brings: the body fat percentage was on the very low side. he said they didn’t think about it, that it was not done on purpose. it made me think a lot about how we are never immune to perpetuating these body ideals, even within the lgbtqia+ community, and we need to call out and start these conversations.

brainsparks: queering the future (tn#5), lesbian gaze | dyke camp (tn#12), bigorexia | how to feel better naked | body shaming stories (tn#79), male objectification through the ages (tn#127)

🍄drugs

so talking about berghain vibes, this video also came up in my playlist this week. it’s so nice to have songs longer than 2 minutes, that have different vibes within itself. this one feels fresh yet familiar, with synthesizers we know and repetitive lyrics. the video is quite simple, but i can see the red thread with this previous release, of this kind of democratic/accessible party, where everyone can party in their own way.

brainsparks: how mura masa makes internet beats (tn#8), allowed to f*** up (tn#116), the right to party (tn#7).

🙈super shy

thank you dimas from

Música em Casa

for this recommendation. i had not heard of newjeans before, and they seem to be the up-and-coming kpop group. they look so young, wow. the video is filmed in lisbon, so it’s nice to see a familiar place. and it sounds so chic with this kind of drum N bass beats (which later i saw is sampled from the powerpuff girls opening credits).

what made me uncomfortable were the types of comments some fans are making on youtube: who is best at moving, singing, dancing, and facial expressions. the kpop industry is known for its strict regime with the idols (as the artists are called), but seeing it come from fans in such a harsh/competitive way was quite shocking.

it made me think of brené brown’s quote: “if you're not in the arena also getting your ass kicked, i'm not interested in your feedback.”

🦊hedgehog vs fox approach

This graph is based on the Ancient Greek proverb: “The fox knows many things; the hedgehog one great thing.”

coming from the strict world of kpop (which i always catch myself wondering when i see the level of synchronization), this post appeared in my inbox. anne-laure le cunff'‘s the false promise of the 10,000 hour rule brings another layer to the generalist / nexialist realm. it’s a quick read.

Range over mastery: The learning strategy that has been used traditionally in school to teach students consists in focusing on one skill before moving on to the next one and is called blocking. But there is a better way: interleaving, which consists in practicing multiple parallel skills at once.
Research has shown that randomizing the information causes your brain to stay alert, helping to store information in your long-term memory. This means that the next time you want to study a new subject, you could benefit from switching things up. For example, a bit of coding mixed with a bit of UX design will work better than one long coding session.

brainsparks: what is a nexialist, reworking, referencing, releasing (tn#125), randomizing your research (tn#72), the hidden networks of everything (#126)

🫦how to have better sex

yes, here i come again with a big think video. they put together snippets of different interviews with esther perel, emily nagoski and shmuley boteach. something i keep reminding myself is that “desire is to own the wanting.” I recommend watching it. I’ll leave a part by esther perel that is quite inspiring:

Creativity is about going outside of the boundaries. It's about being non-linear. It's about expansiveness. It's about connecting dots that are not necessarily so obvious to connect, and then to create a whole new reality with it. And our erotic imagination actually plays along very similar lines. Animals have sex, and it is the nature. It is the primary urge. It is the instinct, it is procreative. We have an erotic life. We transform sexuality, we socialize sexuality through our imagination. And the central agent of the erotic act is our creativity, our imagination, our ability to renew, our ability to anticipate, to imagine ourselves in an act in which we may have a blissful time with multiple orgasms without touching anybody just because we can imagine ourselves in it. We can envision the act without having to actually enact it. And it is the cultivation of pleasure for its own sake, but I think modernity really narrowed the erotic into its bare sexual meaning. Whereas historically, the mystics looked at eroticism as that capacity of maintaining aliveness, vibrancy, vitality, life source, life energy.

brainsparks: erotic intelligence (tn#1), desire, i want to turn into you (tn#108), relationship anarchy (tn#6), love languages (tn#57), the age of pleasure (tn#123)

🎙️you knew

i know, i’ve have been sharing everything róisín murphy is releasing here, but also she’s doing it on purpose. everything she is releasing is just perfectly done, it tells a story, the sound is soul-touching, and her aesthetics are on point. and i’m here for it. also, her boiler room in paris was released this week, another great show.

🎀barbie’s authentic artificiality

it seems like barbie is one of the most commented films in a long time and i honestly cannot wait to see it. this video from letterboxd did something supercute and opened up greta gerwig’s ~~mind~~ references that inspired the movie. it’s nice to see her love for movies, the way she talks about these references. i subscribed to letterboxd’s youtube because this is the kind of content i want to see.

Well, "Wizard of Oz", I mean, obviously it's just an extraordinary movie and beautiful and beloved. But it does something that I wanted to emulate, which it's these incredible sound stages and these painted skies and this sense of, I say, authentically artificial, which I think is very beautiful and emotional.

see you next week, dollies 🎀

🫀✨thank you for reading The Nexialist. This post is public, so feel free to share these brainsparks 🧠✨

🔎If you want to see what I’ve already posted, visit the archive and use the search engine. Even I do that a lot.

💌I want to know what you think/who you are! Your feedback is highly appreciated; you can e-mail me or fill in this short survey. Thank you! 🙏🏻

🔌Let’s Collab?

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

The Nexialist