#99: Neha

We're joined by multimedia prophet and love guru, Neha, who tells us more about Daft Punk, femcels, V for Vendetta (1982), tarot cards! Fragrantica, and more.

Neha is a multimedia prophet and love guru who loves drawing and painting hot, plasticized divas. She really likes graphic novels, is very interested in femcels and also likes sparkly things like gems and stickers. Her favourite film is Alien!

We welcome Neha to The FRM Newsletter to share what she’s been into recently!

👃🖥 Fragrantica (my favourite website)

An amino user in 2015 introduced me to this. I love the idea of text and image evoking awareness of flesh and feeling. It’s the same with colors, numbers and tastes. I have synesthesia. I don’t enjoy certain accords like vanilla and malt, pear or pumpkin, freesia and star anise or it’s just licorice-y [ice, ice?] I opt for a good, substandard perfume once in a while like White Tea by Elizabeth Arden, or I’m practical and rely on Vaseline cocoa butter, and I’ve been allowed to share the YSL Opium eau de toilette [my mom uses it sparingly] so that’s as far as my pleasure surrounding scent goes. There’s something really liminal and jarring in seeing tiny pictures of the most basic form labelled as top, middle and base notes; a stock image - paired with Arial typeface which, for me, evokes a sense of stern rigidity through notes of civetone and dark patchouli. The same way an image of green sea foam paired with Papyrus font hits my nose like a scintillating marriage of ylang-ylang, buddha wood and maybe pomelo, something citrus-y. I just think it’s cool how our brains make these cute connections between image, text and our senses. Fragrantica is my favourite game to play when I want to think or feel certain feelings. If I can see a smell, I can taste it. It’s amazing how the pervasiveness of images and text on a screen can thrill the human body. If an odor profile represented me, it would be cascalone. Everyone should go have a look at the notes on Fragrantica, it’s so fun, and very useful.

🆓🥷 V for Vendetta (1982) (my favourite graphic novel)

My favourite comic-book film adaptation, and the only goodest, bestest one. “People should not be afraid of their governments. Governments should be afraid of their people” okay cmon anarchy! We burning the buildings tonight! Graphic novels and comics are to be taken seriously, guys! We hereby pledge to read more dystopian graphic novels that urge us to fall in love with the idea of radical community and freedom for all. [My partner knows me so well that they bought the official DC 2020 edition of the graphic novel for me for Valentine’s Day, so thoughtfully presented. So hot!]

🧛‍♂️♦️ Dracula (my favourite book)

I own 7 diff versions of the thing so far, the goal is to obtain as many editions as I possibly can for my future, kooky, bookshelf. It’s cheesy and classic. I always read it on the plane. The East is as real as it is obscure, and sickly apparently [Victorian men with wooden stake, garlic flowers and a rosary being scared of a New Age Woman with Eastern hysteria check]. The fear-mongering accumulated through Stoker’s audacious marriage of ‘monstrosity’ and ‘cultural encroachment is a fun way of discerning Man’s anxiety as a primitive reaction to people being themselves, and being unashamed of the ways of the flesh. I, for one, am of the flesh if I am not of the ether; my mood varies. As I am typing this I can smell the garlic on my fingers, despite washing my hands several times after cooking this evening btw. Bite me.

🗂🎨 ‘Cyberfeminism Index’ by Mindy Seu (my favourite online archive)

Is a digital archive featuring essays from feminist writers, exploring the connection between cyberspace, the internet, bodies, organic matter, phallic juices, monstrous longing and love, encapsulated in a void of academia trying to make sense of what makes a woman, a vagina, the concept of a woman and the myth of a vagina in a world of 1’s and 0’s. Digital interfaces are used as conduits in expressing the constant flux of bodies in a techno-cosmopolitanist world. The cyberfeminist works selected range from the 80’s until present, serving as a canon of modern-era feminine discourse. It features essays and writing from mainstay leading femme legends like VNS Matrix, Gash Girl, Gita Hashemi and Donna Harraway. The physical copy is one I’m after, an official documentation of the online index, which can be accessed online in its original form.

🃏🌅 Tarot Cards (my favourite handbag essential)

Esoteric white girls stop. Fly away! I like this thing. Tarot is a bit like mythical go-fish and I’m not surprised nor offended if anyone thinks it's silly. They feel like a lost relic, an ancient toy that has consequences only because your mind said so. I can obnoxiously admit that, yes, I do know things before they happen, and you’d think by now I’d be a lot more prepared but I’m a very confusing and, moderately, confused person despite how determined and blunt I come across, but that's only because everyone else doesn't know what they're doing. I like to pretend I am sure. I discovered tarot through a local gemstone shop where they sold me a deck for R200 which wasn’t that bad at the time. We all should own a deck of cards that tell you to remain #composed and #mysterious when times are #tuff.

📚🔮 Jean Giraud “Moebius” (my favourite artist, guilty pleasure)

I can’t say my love for science fiction is subtle. I discovered Moebius on readcomiconline.com. Fantastical worlds and faces both familiar and uncanny linger in microscopic detail and fluid linework in comics that transcend the graphic novel/comic genre, and delve into something deeply primordial and natural all the same. As if man’s first handprints were interpreted by a cyborgian. I would highly recommend his illustrative work for Marvel’s The Silver Surfer : Parable and The Eyes of the Cat.

👽📹 H. R Giger’s Alie (my favourite movie, Alien (1979), directed by Ridley Scott)

Girl okay listen, heavyweight, gunmetal greys and black sheen juxtaposed against the agonizing and obvious turmoil of a very problematic man; single handedly giving us the most dazzling, serene and terrifying creature in space. A diva, the diva of all time. There’s sickness that I love about his work; his butchering of the feminine body is annoying and unnecessary but raw. It lends itself to the majority of what the Alien eventually stood for; a commentary on women’s bodies, the perverse nature of reproduction, the vore permeating the destruction of humanity and the horrors of birth. So delicious, delightful, very yum. Btw we don't like Giger as a person. It's a complicated and sad relationship. Ridley Scott did an excellent job by landing Sigourney Weaver to carry my fantasies into reality, everyday I convince myself I’m a final-girl-action-diva.

💞🫶 Sticker gems! (my favourite tools)

Shiny little things! Tiny pebbles of sparkling joy and warmth! A glimpse into dream-land, a call to primordial soupage, silly stars and horse faces, it’s all so devious! Slap some in the shape of a heart on the backside of a car and call in sick at work. Drink them! Swim in them! Put them all over your face and your nipples and toes! Something something 2014 glitterati!

👱‍♀️👟 Femcels (my special interest and area of study)

I’m attracted to women who pretend they haven’t been touched and hate how huge my tits are. I used to be deep in the mines of 4chan and Reddit once upon a decade ago with a bunch of old friends I barely see any more. I don’t like who I used to be but adore the confidence and swagger I oozed when I was both playing into a kind-of gamer girl aesthetic and also bashing various young fellas online for trying to make me feel dumb about not knowing what the hell I was doing with my fanfiction, writing, discourse and agendas. My agenda wasn’t really radical but I was wading in knee-high Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles sewage water. I eventually found comfort on 2012 Fall-Out-Boy tumblr, as one does. Anyway, maybe it’s trauma or it’s a deep-seated nostalgia, but I love girls who fuck around as hard as boys are raised to do, like only the bad stuff. I really love women who are fucking around the same way, but are teetering on the edge of getting over their internalized misogyny and insecurities so they just come across as mean and scary. It's so hot, and I feel like a Mommy trying to ease them through the mutual envy we’ve been conditioned to throw at each other. I love making friends in the creative industry if I can smell a femcel in the crowd. These days I’ve given up a gamer-girl aesthetic and I’m just Neha who likes things and is things, with big big boobies. And I still love mean women.

🤖🎹 Daft Punk (my favourite musical act)

I crafted two original stories for a comic series to Random Access Memories. V cool. The New Wave served as their first demo, and is a must-listen, clocking in at 7 minutes and acting as a precursor for what would be an expansive and crazy musical career. Having Giorgio Moroder, DJ Falcon and Panda Bear on the same album is insane work but incredible. My favourite track is still Instant Crush, but a close second is the slow, needy, sensual, heart-centric Something About Us off Discovery (2001). Daft Punk turned down David Bowie’s request to remix a song lol imagine. There’s an entire subreddit of yaoi fanart of Thomas and Guy-Manuel making out. I didn’t like it but respect yk? There is also A03 fanfiction of Daft Punk as the Robots surviving until the end of time, and making music among the stars which made me cry. I’ll never get to see them live ever, ew, but TRON:Legacy lives on. It’s also widely speculated that LEGO is considering turning their Alive Tour stage-set as an official LEGO set. If anyone cares, please consider purchasing my art so I can buy this one day in the year 5555, Interstella (Thank you Leiji Matsumoto!) Maybe one day my graphic novel becomes a TV show featuring every Daft Punk song ever made. Do not quote this last part, it’s embarrassing, but that's what good French fellas can do to a girl besides getting her on a casting couch.