🪭✨The Nexialist #0159

galáctika | sociophonetics | fio maravilha | tuta gold | hater’s anthem | the life span of loneliness | loneliness | his sweat

Feb 08, 2024

welcome to your weekly cyber hodgepodge of a newsletter, the nexialist

hey, you! i hope this message finds you well. this week i’m in the south of brazil, enjoying my parents and sister, my mother’s cooking (which is the best) and the almost boiling sun. as i’m writing, droplets of sweat are surfacing on my forehead, chest and back. i also just had a cup of warm coffee, don’t ask me why. i’ve been taking my fan everywhere and i have a hunch the fan is going back into the mainstream this year (i was going to say comeback, but the truth is that it never left: grandmas and the queers have been using it). so, enough of nonsense: get ready for a mesmerizing and nostalgic costume/make-up for this year’s carnaval, some knowledge and lots of music. enjoy 🪭✨

—Rodrigo Turra

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🛸galáctika

biancadellafancy

A post shared by @biancadellafancy

this costume for the vogue ball has been in my mind since it happened last weekend, for its nostalgic effect and excellence. i mean, just look at it. bianca della fancy, one of our brazilian drag queen royalties and make up artist did an homage to wagner bello, the actor/make up artist who played etevaldo on my favorite tv show as a 90s kid: castelo ra-tim-bum.

etevaldo, was a beloved extraterrestrial who would visit nino and the kids once in a while in this castle full of life, stories and characters. i get excited about it because this show was one of the main influences, shaping my interest in reading and discovery while growing up.

in university we studied its success and how it broke all rules of the kids sho’s show at the time, which thought repetition and predictability were the best formula. we never knew which of the dozens of characters would appear or what would happen. it was such a rich and diverse universe that fostered curiosity and imagination, mixing magic, brazilian folklore, sci-fi, art, music, and storytelling.

Wikipedia Plot: Nino is a 300-year-old boy who lives with his uncle, Dr. Victor, who is a 3,000-year-old sorcerer and scientist, and his great-aunt Morgana, who is a 6,000-year-old witch. The three live in a castle in the middle of the city of São Paulo. Being a sorcerer's apprentice, Nino never got to go to school, in special due to his unusual age for a boy. His parents left him in the foster care of Victor and Morgana, as they needed to travel on an expedition to outer space, taking his two younger siblings with them. Although he has supernatural animal friends in the castle, Nino misses having friends that are like himself, so he decides to cast a spell he learned from his uncle Victor, which ends up bringing three children who had just left school to his castle's doorstep. Free of loneliness, Nino then receives daily visits from the trio, in addition to special visits from other friends, such as the pizza delivery man Bongo, the flamboyant TV reporter Penelope, the folk legend Caipora, and an alien called Etevaldo. Dr. Abobrinha (Dr. Zucchini, also referring to the Portuguese expression of speaking senseless) serves as the main villain of the series, who is a real estate speculator who wants to demolish the castle and erect a 100-story tall building in its place.

brainsparks: indigenous + ETs (tn#67)

🪭sociophonetics

@oliversoxford I would listen to her teach anything 😍 #linguisticsmajor #linguisticstok #gayaccent

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recently i watched a couple of episodes of castelo ra tim bum and realized a some of the characters sounded gay (which, as a 6-8 year old, i had no clue). of course, i know it can be problematic to say this, but it turns out the actors which made my gaydar bleep did come out years later. it is also a children’s show, where the tone is more exaggerated and melodic, so i could have been wrong. but i wasn’t.

then this video appeared on my feed: erin broadhurst (some are calling her queen of linguistics) shared her linguistics thesis: is there a gay voice? she loves what she does, and that is so nice to see. she is also into sociophonetics: “phonetics is all about how people speak. sociophonetics is all about how sociological factors like sex, gender, class system, where you’re from, influence the way you speak.” her focus is the UK, so each place has their different manifestations, but it is interesting to see how she analyzes it. do gays just have a more precise and posh diction? she also says she could be wrong and academia is exactly for that. part 2 is here.

while i love what she is studying because it is a valid and interesting question, i can’t help but problematize what the findings can be used for (think gattaca’s dna discrimination). imagine ai being trained with “gaydar” algorithms to discriminate against gay people. or people modulating their speech to sound less gay, since they know exactly what gives it away.

brainsparks: polari, the queer code (tn#92), the yuppie handbook (tn#111), the gay number (tn#24), queer the future (tn#5)

⚽️fio maravilha

i was listening to bon entendeur’s new track and recognized it from somewhere. the song was composed by jorge ben jor in 1972, and it won the brazilian nationals at the international song festival of 72, sung by maria alcina (it’s worth watching it). the original payed homage to an iconic brazilian soccer player from that time, fio maravilha, and the lyrics are narrating the game like a sports commentator. i don’t like soccer, but listening to this song gave me chills.

i was also not aware that brazil took part in the international song festival, from 66-72, until dictatorship censored it. 72 was the last edition we participated. maria alcina’s performance was quite something.

Du ciel et de la Terre / Of heaven and earth
C'est la conspiration / It's the conspiracy
Ton père a fait un pays / Your father made a country
Qui soit l'enfant des chansons / Who is the child of songs

above the new lyrics. i hope they’re talking about brazil there.

brainsparks: ani kuni, appreciation or …? (tn#20)

⚜️tuta gold

talking about song festivals, the videos for this year’s sanremo have been released this week. this one by mahmood is by far my favorite. the video is beautiful, the dance, the song and… can you hear the funk carioca references? i got chills.

brainsparks: the beat diaspora (tn#125), apocalyptic pop / chemistry (tn#57)

🤬hater’s anthem

loving this ironic track from infinity song. i did not know them (i think all of tiktok does?), but now i want to: they are siblings, and this is cute in itself. and they are doing this kind of soft rock that i haven’t heard in a while. send this to your haters or haters that you know. maybe that would be passive aggressive? still, a sweet passive aggressiveness?

I love the way it feels to be a hater
Something so sweet about thinkin' that I'm better
Just to wake up every morning
Lay in bed and somehow never ever
Rise to the occasion
Or even hold up under pressure
But we all know that it doesn't even matter
If I waste away and no one thinks I'm clever
Just as long I've got my ego
And it tells me I'm superior
I could probably go a lifetime
Being barely mediocrе
I'd still convince myself evеrytime that I'm better

ouch

👤the life span of loneliness

on a more somber note, juan and i watched this weeks ago and it stayed with me. we see first hand stories, showing how multifaceted loneliness is: it doesn’t discriminate. it is heartbreaking and a reminder for us to reach out and take care of each other.

brainsparks: witches and loneliness (tn#98), the new rules of gathering (tn#37), bronfenbrenner's bioecological model (tn#85)

🏝️loneliness

pet shop boy’s new video is about that. directed by alasdair mclellan, the video is beautifully shot and has some homoerotic scenes, cruising moments, maybe connecting it the song to gay/queer loneliness. the song is very pet shop boys, and i’m happy they released something talking about this issue, asking questions:

Where you gonna run to now from loneliness?
(Loneliness)
Who you gonna turn to out of loneliness?
(Loneliness)
When you gonna not say no and make the answer yes?
Who is here to help you out?
Oh, tell me - can’t you guess?

brainsparks: rush (tn#130), plaskrul / pee curl (tn#90)

🥵his sweat

well… somehow the amount of sweat i’ve been producing here in brazil, and being triggered by pet shop boy’s video, made me think of this iconic video by matt lambert. it is nsfw and quite horny: first-hand stories of how sweat can be sexy. (not feeling that atm, but nice try).

brainsparks: nipples poem (tn#30)

see you next week, maravilhas 🫀✨

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