🐦‍⬛✨The Nexialist #0134

brazil’s barbie | afrodhit | kelela’s raven | muse | pretentious pronunciation | máquina culona | the cult of ugly aesthetics | let us be ugly & dumb | pupil diversity | periodic tables

Aug 17, 2023

welcome to another weekly cyber-pastiche of unrandom stuff, the nexialist

hello, cutie! i hope this e-mail finds you ~~looking better than this~~ well. this week i’m proud to announce my first-ever participation in a podcast: newsletter economy.

Paulo Emediato | Marmitex

and
Rodrigo James
conducted some interviews with brazilian newsletter creators (including myself). it’s an honor to be side by side with other creators i follow, so if you understand portuguese and are interested in this growing economy, give it a listen. to celebrate the launch of the podcast, i’m testing a 30% discount on the yearly subscription until the end of the month. now, about today’s nexialist: get ready for some stuff about paradigm changes, a new obsession, ugliness and new ways to see. enjoy! 🫀

—Rodrigo Turra

Buy Me a Coffee? ☕️

🛸brazil’s barbie

if you’re not brazilian/latin american, chances are, you might not be familiar with xuxa (or maybe you’ve seen this unreal moment in the video above, one of my favorites). xuxa (pronounced SHOO-shah) was one of brazil’s biggest tv stars from the 80s and 90s and still holds the status of a pop icon. at 60, she’s back into the limelight as a docu-series about her life was launched and she hosted a drag contest/show on amazon prime, caravana das drags.

in this nyt piece, you can get a grasp of the racial reckoning brazil has been going through in the past decades or so. “She Was Brazil’s Barbie. Now She’s Saying Sorry. Xuxa was once Brazil’s biggest TV star. Now many are wondering whether a thin, blond, white woman was the right idol for such a diverse country.” if you are part of my generation, xuxa’s mediatic presence was unavoidable. so, of course, it is impossible to detach xuxa’s career from recent brazilian pop culture, and its layers of insights and problems about race, diversity, representation, beauty standards, and feminism.

brainsparks: being black in brazil (tn#35), xuxa hits (tn#24)

💎afrodhit

talking about representation, i’m in love with iza’s new album afrodhit. when i see this level of production, it’s clear how Brazil has come a long way in representation and originality.

brainsparks: the beat diaspora (tn#125), iboru (tn#125), químico amor (tn#125)

🐦‍⬛kelela’s raven

this week i had the privilege of watching kelela (and the opening act, empress of) live in amsterdam. i got so many goosebumps caused by her divine voice (not exaggerating) and i was impressed: she delivered the whole thing by herself, with a microphone, a colorful led screen, a beautiful mesh dress and shiny boots. i left feeling like i just witnessed a goddess on stage. i cannot wait for the remix album, which she teased in the concert.

🌻muse

if you came to my house for a coffee/drink, i would turn on the tv and play you this, my newest audiovisual obsession. mette’s new song/video checks all the boxes: feel-good vibe, simplicity, styling, performance, dancing and all the personas she embodies. so beautiful, sexy, and playful. it’s also about a ~~obsession~~ muse.

I'm motivated by the way you move
Got me fixated on everything you do, yeah
Ain't no bussin' to the music without you
I could be Van Gogh, shawty, if you'd be my muse

👅pretentious pronunciation

author

Sophia Smith Galer on Instagram: “Is pronouncing words from other languages like they sound in those languages pretentious? Depends on who you are and what you’ve done maybe. Is language for communicating yourself or communicating for the benefit of others? #languages #pronouncing words 💭”

August 16, 2023

“is it pretentious to pronounce words from other languages like they sound in that language?” i always have this question, so i’m happy to see what other people think. the jokes about it are all over the place: barcelona or ibiza with the lisp are the ones that come to mind. inspired by mette’s pronunciation of van gogh, which let me tell you, in dutch is much different, i remembered to include this here. sophia has something to say and i think it’s a great answer. in a nutshell: if you spent time learning that language, maybe finding a halfway pronunciation between languages could be a way to solve this dilemma.

brainsparks: syncretism (tn#44)

👓máquina culona

i’ve been listening to this song since it came out. i just love this sort of experimental reggaeton with accordion (and everything else) that they did together. also, the uncomfortable weirdness of the video made me pay attention.

brainsparks: internet beats (tn#8), the beat diaspora (tn#125)

🧌the cult of ugly aesthetics

you’ve probably heard things like: it’s so wrong that it’s right, or it’s so ugly that it becomes cute. seeing value in the ugly is not new: there is even a french word for it, jolie-laide, or pretty-ugly (which could be updated to include all genders, not only for women). however, this rise of this “cult of ugly aesthetics” is the perfect countermovement to the unreachable filtered/plastic/ai-generated and perpetuated beauty standards of our times. in this article, they go back into the history of ugly and tie it to movements beyond fashion. one thing that helped me explain my feeling about the above video:

Philosophical aesthetics contemplates the “paradox of ugliness” — the contradiction of enjoying something ugly while simultaneously finding it displeasing. This mixed response of positive and negative feelings is at the crux of difficult aesthetic experience — which contrasts with easy encounters, like the simple beauty of a sunset — and is precisely why ugliness continues to intrigue. Nuance like this allows us to better connect with other qualities of humanity, such as humor and sympathy, and shows us that ugliness, like beauty, is for all.

and a new term which i was not familiar with:

Lookism — more commonly known as “pretty privilege” when discussed from the opposite viewpoint — is discrimination based on physical appearance, and it affects those who fall short of social beauty norms.

brainsparks: linear opposites or closely related? (tn#126), cosplaying as poor (tn#62), thriving in paradox (tn#109), modern paradoxes (tn#49), paradoxical relationships (tn#44), first-rate intelligence in opposing ideas (tn#117)

😤let us be ugly & dumb

kyle from The Trend Report™ is on vacation, but he brought a thought that syntonized with some of this week’s brainsparks and expanded from ugliness: let us be ugly and dumb. in a world that asks us to always be not only beautiful, sexy and charming but also well-informed and opinionated, we are craving the opposite:

Specifically, there’s a thread tying together aspects of feral culture (rat girl summer, girl dinner), anti-capitalism, and the general ennui of our moment: the world is longing for ugly people and dumb people. We’re looking for permission to not-look-good and to not-have-thoughts! There’s too much pressure, and these are means to alleviate things.

brainsparks: to be cringe is to be free (tn#73)

👁️pupil diversity

pupils in the shape of heart or a W? no, it’s not a cartoon; it’s in the nature around us. this fascinatingly cute 5-minute video is about different animals’ pupils, but made me think about perspective and how the world can be perceived in so many different ways.

Peering into the eyes of different animals, you’ll see some extraordinarily shaped pupils. But why? It turns out that pupil shape is a powerful indicator of what role an animal plays in its ecosystem. Pupils mark the hollow opening in the iris, the eye’s band of pigmented muscle. They’re the portholes through which light enters the eye, where it then strikes the retina and activates light-sensitive cells, setting the process of vision in motion.

brainsparks: nonhuman perceptions + umwelt (tn#86), my octopus teacher (tn#42), third eyelid + eye floaters (tn#26)

⚗️periodic tables

i had only seen two of these, and there are more than 1 thousand ways of seeing the same elements. again the connections we make change our perspectives and the way we see the world. it’s

Yet despite having an almost unanimous agreement amongst scientists on its composition, there are over 1,000 different periodic tables—and that number continues to grow. This is because the standard table does not highlight all of the existing relationships between the elements.
With 118 elements currently known, there are many different interactions and stories to tell. Here are some of the most remarkable, fascinating and bizarre periodic tables that we could find.

brainsparks: storytelling periodic table (tn#22), reworking, referencing, releasing (tn#125), transitional space (tn#78), the hidden networks of everything (tn#126)

see you next week, muses 🫀

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