🦵🏼✨The Nexialist #0184

olympic outrage | dutch utopia | underground cities | public.work | recession pop is back | creative manifesto | tribbing & tribadism | how big?

Aug 01, 2024

welcome to another edition of your weekly cyber-psycho-physical zine, the nexialist

hey, you! i hope this message finds you in olympic spirit. this week the summer is finally summering in amsterdam, which gives us the pleasure of finding spots to sunbathe in and around the city. there is also a beautiful celebration happening today in my family, my sister gabriela is getting married to her dutch partner, sophie (welcome to the family, officially now!). such a nice celebration deserves this nice weather and all the love. other than that, i found some content to share with you in typical nexialist fashion, from outrage and art, to urbanism and pop art, to creativity and sex. keep scrolling, and i hope you enjoy it! 🫀✨

—Rodrigo Turra

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🍇olympic outrage

oh well… another day goes by where the lgbqia+ community doesn’t have a moment of peace, especially considering it’s pride season. despite the continuous rain, the opening ceremony of the olympics was filled with beautiful moments, including aya nakamura’s performance, lady gaga’s homage to zizi jeanmaire and celine dion’s miracle of a performance. but the christian conservatives are more focused in hating minorities then on enjoying the celebration of global unity through sports.

they cannot see a table with (queer) people sitting alongside it, and they think it’s about them, it’s blasphemy, a targeted mockery. while they think it was a reference to davinci’s last supper (forgetting the artist was most likely a gay man), it turns out it was not. (and even if it was, it is a pop culture icon that is referenced all the time, but we know the problem here).

the reference is actually “the feast of the gods,” by the dutch artist Jan van Bijlert in the 17th century, picturing the gods in the olympus, including philippe katerine paying an homage to dyonisus. after all, it is the olympic games we are talking about.

On Olympus, the gods are gathered for a banquet celebrating the marriage of Thetis and Peleus. On the left stand Minerva, Diana, Mars and Venus accompanied by Cupid. Flora, the goddess of spring, is behind them. Crowned Apollo, identifiable by his lyre, presides in the centre of the table. Further away we recognise Hercules with his club and Neptune with his trident. On the far right, Eris has placed the apple of discord on the table. Some of the gods are missing, probably because the canvas has been cut on the left side; the presence of Juno's peacock suggests this.

it’s yet again another moment that we realise how conservatorism is taking over, a reality shock. c’mon, calling it hypersexual, full woke dystopia and blasphemous… i would love to see this same anger directed at genocide. it’s another case of cosmophobia (tn#135): “this monotheist regime in which there is only one way of existence, inherent of colonialism.” it also made me think of phillistinism (tn#85): “the attitudes, habits, and characteristics of a person who deprecates art and beauty, spirituality and intellect. As a derogatory term philistine describes a person who is narrow-minded and hostile to the life of the mind, whose materialistic worldview and tastes indicate an indifference to cultural and aesthetic values.”

brainsparks: cosmophobia (tn#135), phillistinism (tn#85), corneliz cornelisz (tn#160)

🌆dutch utopia

talking about dutch art, i was impressed to see this video telling how the newest dutch neighborhood, the houthavens, was planned. the almost finished neighborhood is built on the old port where they would store the city’s wood. it mixes different architectural styles from the city, and also mixes luxury apartments with social housing. they also made sure to invest on a tunnel, so the neighborhood wouldn’t be isolated by the highway and connected to the rest of the city.

brainsparks: envisioning cities (tn#183), urban futures (tn#179), amsterdam green standards (tn#131), berghain (tn#169), brasilia, urbanism utopia? (tn#83)

🏗️underground cities

this week, nasa released this news: Cave discovered on Moon could be home for humans. my conspiracy mind immediately connected this to this ancient underground city of Derinkuyu. i say conspiracy because since my childhood (and after some sci-fi movies) there is parallel reality that we are aliens and probably lived in caves due to the harsh conditions from the that era.

it also makes think of phallocentricity in architecture and how this is the opposite, a mother feminine archetype in the built world.

brainstorm: underground cathedral (tn#173), vernacular architecture (tn#125)

🖼️public.work

i love to use old imagery or just get inspired by it. this amazing tool arrived to my timeline and i’m in love with it. i warn you, this is a rabbit hole. i just had to share it with you.

Public Work, powered by Cosmos, is an immersive search engine for public domain content. Explore 100,000+ copyright-free images from The MET, New York Public Library, and other sources.

brainsparks: encyclopedia — circle of knowledge (tn#177), flim (tn#25)

📻recession pop is back

recession pop: we basically have this kind ofpattern in popular music where every time the country goes through a big economic recession people start making bangers.

and apparently we are there again, according to blustre. and i couldn’t agree more, with all the bangers i’ve been sharing lately, and earworms that have been on my playlists. he also calls it escapist pop, which is timely with all the others modalities of escapism: clowns, horror (tn#181) or reality shifting (tn#176). it feels like the tools of distraction get more attractive and finely tuned as crisis emerge. what happens then when we’re in permacrisis?

brainsparks: the alchemy of pop (tn#182), time of monsters, clowns in mainstream (tn#181), permacrisis (tn#94), shifting realities (tn#176), the evolution of pop culture (tn#77)

🧑‍🎤creative manifesto

kris andrew small made this eye-catching illustration for wetransfer, showing sir john hegarty’s creative manifesto. the one that surprised me is “remove the headphones” as i can be the whole day wearing them, and also using earplugs to sleep. am i muffling my reality and my inspiration? 😭

brainspark: the most creative time ever (tn#183), scenius aka communal genius (tn#31), creative work (tn#165), the creative process (tn#87), creative effectiveness (tn#28), permission to be creative (tn#23)

🦵🏼tribbing & tribadism

i had never heard of tribbing or tribadism before and maría saldaña made sure to explain and cause brainsparks (as well as other bodily sparks) with this creative and democratic sex position/practice. recently, the term side emerged as a label/sexual preference on dating apps like grindr, adding more nuance to the penetrative imperative top/bottom binary. i think it’s great to see more terms like this coming from the queer world and getting recognition. a reminder that our largest organ is the skin, and for us to get over our genital-centric conception of sex.

Tribadism, or rubbing your genitals on your partner’s body, is one of many creative ways to explore pleasure without penetration and engage other erogenous zones instead.
If there’s anything I’ve learned in my many years being a queer ho, it’s that there are endless possibilities when it comes to sex. The specific act of scissoring often draws all the attention (and some controversy) — when it comes to non-penetrative queer sex, but the broader umbrella term of tribbing is not limited to direct genital-to-genital contact; grinding on legs, arms, and other body parts are all included under the umbrella!

brainsparks: age of pleasure, pleasure activism (tn#123), erotic intelligence (tn#1), queer the future (tn#5), sex mindset change (tn#150), how to have better sex (tn#130), future of sex (tn#21), good sex explained (tn#115)

🍆how big?

i love these videos from the cut, because we get so see so many opinions, reactions and different answers. in this case you can see how triggering this question is for many men, as you see many of them embarassed, ashamed and avoiding. it’s interesting to see that even though “size doesn’t matter,” most of them have measured it. also most of them admit being average. (also, if you haven’t yet, follow my other project, flaccid zine, where we talk about the taboo of the soft c*ck)

brainspark: the dangers of big d*** energy (tn#104), penis positivity (tn#167), measuring manhood (tn#125), bff nude portraits (tn#79), male objetification through the ages (tn#127), origin of war (tn#95), naked education (tn#115)

see you next week, olympians 💪🏼✨

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