🧻✨The Nexialist #0182

sardegna couture | closest language to latin | the bidet | fruity men | brat reaction | the alchemy of pop | loving your friends | medium friend

Jul 18, 2024

a warm welcome to your weekly dose of mind cyber wandering, the nexialist

hey you! i hope this message finds you fresh and clean. i just got back to amsterdam after beautiful ten days in sardinia (thank you andrea, friends and family for all the driving and curatorship of the countless incredible beaches in the island). i even had the honor of going to the breathless pan di zucchero, or the sugar loaf of sardinia. i left the 38 degrees sensation to the flop summer of amsterdam, around 20 degress, and i will not complain. i will leave you to it, because the flight was delayed, the luggage delayed and the train back home too, so all i want to do now is to enjoy my house before starting my routine. enjoy! 🫀✨

—Rodrigo Turra

Buy Me a Coffee? ☕️

🇮🇹sardegna couture

thank you, juan, for sharing this. since the first time i came to sardegna i was taken by and curious about the beautiful traditional costumes. i’ve never seen anyone wearing these costumes in person, but i kept seeing photos and illustrations all over the place, from museum folders and old adverts to kitchen towels and souvenir shops. seeing the sardinian tradition being taken to the catwalk in such a grand way is quite beautiful and since i’m just back to amsterdam, it’s a nice way to close this vacation season.

brainsparks: nuragic civilization, sa sartiglia (tn#83)

👅closest language to latin

juan also sent me this, which also came out while i was in sardinia. the timing of the sardinian content seems to have been synchronized with my visit. i love linguriosa, not only because she has so much passion for languages, but because even if i don’t consider myself a spanish speaker, i understand close to everything she says.

what i didn’t know is that sardinian is the closest language to latin: it maintained similar pronunciations and conjugations. the fact sardinia is an island makes it ideal to form a conservative language, since the innovations that come up elsewhere in the roman empire, didn’t arrive there.

another fun fact: the first time i came to sardinia, andrea’s family told me my last name, turra, is a word in sardinian: ladle. the deep spoon which we use to serve soup.

brainsparks: language maps (tn#20)

🧻the bidet

growing up i was lucky to have been exposed to bidets: my grandparents house had it in every bathroom. in holland, it’s not common to find them, and i miss them dearly. whenever i come to italy, it’s a blessing to go back to the bidet way of living. also, the fact you get a bidet towel along with your shower and face towels makes it feel so organized. so i went looking for some historical facts about bidets and found this video from weird history. btw, italy has a law since 1975 that requires every new building to have a bidet, which explains why it’s such a big part of italian households.

it turns out bidets were a complement to the chamber pots. they are a french invention from the 1600s, and it means little horse. back then, the english saw it as a luxury, connected to the french aristocracy (they called it the french pony), and that rejection carried over to the us. in the us, it was also a taboo to talk about bidets since they were commonly found in brothels in europe, so even talking about one would suggest some adventures.

what stood out for me is how these moralistic views keeps the us still today away from this revolutionary technology. maybe now it will change, as high tech washlets, like the famous japanese models, are being adopted and going viral. who knew there would be so much to learn about bidets.

The bidet can keep your downstairs clean in a few ways, and one of them is helping with women's menstruation, which, in the day, was a little taboo. […] So when it was invented, the bidet had great utility to help women freshen up a bit better, but since the bidet was often, primarily associated with women cleaning their unmentionables and the subject of menstruation was not a polite topic, men were less likely to install one in their own homes.

brainsparks: why do we have butts? (tn#27)

🍒fruity men

talking about butt hygiene reminds me of the yearly talk the internet has about how many men do not wash between their cheeks, maybe because that would make them a little gay (i struggle to believe this is true, but unfortunately i have read this with my own eyes on reddit and twitter).

this brings us to this post from dazed, by halima jibril, about how more women are gravitating towards “fruity men” or soft boys — not that having basic hygiene habits makes anyone fruity, but just men being comfortable with their own version of masculinity. i talked about heteropessimism (tn#174) recently, and this seems to be a counter trend to that movement.

As author and video essayist Alice Cappelle writes in her new book Collapse Feminism, “an increasing number of male celebrities, influencers and fictional male characters reject the dogmas of heterosexual macho masculinity, and it must be said that women and queer people love to see that.” Over the last few years, men seen as effeminate have been lauded, criticised and heavily debated within our culture. From soft boys, Tiktok’s sassy men apocalypse (a trend which saw men express quippy attitudes that many associate with femininity), to “fruity” men, each one of these phrases has similar definitions, describing men who are considered to be effeminate and sensitive because of their behaviours and aesthetics.
[…]
Long live the “fruity” boy! Hopefully, one day, we can live in a world where your identity doesn’t need a label. A world where, as Capelle argues, a man’s identity can be formed “outside the constraints of masculinity and outside the constraints of a fixed definition.”

recently i saw a headline from a canvas8 report (which i don’t have access to), but it gave me hope about new manifestations of masculinity, fruity men being just one of them:

How women are fuelling new archetypes of masculinity: From himbos to daddies to bisexual heartthrobs, mainstream ideals of masculinity are evolving, partly due to cultural shifts and social movements influenced by women. How can brands tap into these changes and create more nuanced and inclusive products and services for their audiences?

brainsparks: the alpha male myth, colonial masculinity (tn#127), masculinity (tn#48), straight men kiss (tn#95), on heteropessimism (tn#174)

🟩brat reaction

talking about fruity men, i might have a crush on this guy. if you didn’t get brat, this reaction from troy (hthaze) will help you. he explains why it’s sonically rich *aggressively digital,* while he pays attention to the lyrics and i mean, he dances like no one is watching and even cries in a couple of songs. who would have said a straight man could help us understand this queer album.

brainsparks: this is how you listen to music (tn#162)

📻the alchemy of pop

kesha had lost legal rights to her own voice and it took years to gain them back, in a very public dispute. her tedtalk is quite a vulnerable moment, where she explains how songwriting is a way to channel truth (otherwise, it sucks). also, she invites and inspires us all to express our feelings through art.

What else in the world can change your mind, can change your mood, can change your entire energetic frequency in 3.5 minutes? For me, that's pop music. And for me, that's alchemy.

brainsparks: the evolution of pop culture (tn#77), from pop puppet to indie icon (tn#8)

👯loving your friends

everything is romantic, one of charli xcx’s fan favorite brat tracks, apparently is not about what people expected, but actually something else. after sharing a video of her vacation with her friends in italy saying “this is where i wrote it,” fans were saying the song is an ode to queer friendship.

recently, james factora wrote for them “There’s Nothing More Romantic Than Falling in Love With Your Friends: What a powerful force friendship is, that it can alchemize an emotion like heartbreak into something that makes life feel as though it’s tinged with magic.”

after seeing these two signals on the same day, it made me feel like in the midst of this loneliness pandemic, we are giving new interpretations to our relationships, romanticism and love in line with relationship anarchy (tn#6).

brainsparks: relationship anarchy (tn#6), the lifespan of loneliness (tn#159), witches and loneliness (tn#98), queering the future (tn#24)

🥂medium friend

lisa miller wrote for the nyt “The Vexing Problem of the ‘Medium Friend’ : They’re not our besties, but they’re more than just acquaintances. How much of ourselves do we owe them?” it’s interesting to realize how we lack vocabulary when talking about friendships and what different levels of friendship means, so this post help us imagine that.

Some social scientists and even philosophers suggest a different vision of friendship, in which friendship is conceived not as a ledger of emotional debits and credits but as an organic creation — an artwork — built by the friends themselves. Conceived in this way, friendships are not ranked or stratified along a bright line from BFF to near stranger but are instead a perfect mirror of two people’s investment, reflecting their enthusiasms, commonalities, differences and limitations.

brainsparks: the pandemic has erased entire categories of friendship (tn#6), culture of proximity (tn#6), new rules of gathering (tn#37)

see you next week, friends 🫀✨

🫀✨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