Welcome to Body Language, a weekly dispatch of the music and culture I’ve been marinating in, plus wellness and yoga recipes for maintaining a grip on sanity in modern American life.
This is a newsletter for people who love music and tend to get a little spectrummy about their niche interests. Every dispatch includes two songs and one obsession, be it cultural, spiritual, ideological, or existential.
If you’re new here, I’m an LA-based yoga teacher, culture vulture, art slut, aesthete, and podcast host, trying to survive by whatever means necessary as we hurtle toward almost certain oblivion.
Welcome To My Terrordome.
Om Shanti.
For the past two years I’ve been producing my podcasts, This Body, and Night Blooming Jasmine, a love letter to David Lynch, but I’ve never held myself to a hard schedule. Episodes get done when they get done. I always deliver the promised content, but I’ve been told there’s value in putting yourself under the gun and publishing something on the same day every week.
Thus, Body Language.
Think of this as a home for the music, cultural curiosities, spiritual rabbit holes, and miscellaneous fixations that don’t always make it into the podcasts. This month, in honor of Pride, I’ll be revisiting queer cinema on This Body, with Gregg Araki’s Splendor, a dreamy, sexy little utopian fable from the dying days of the twentieth century. I think I might’ve died then too, and yet, I live. (Laura Palmer, The Return)
This June marks the one-year anniversary of my second podcast, Night Blooming Jasmine, a love letter to David Lynch and an exploration of the spiritual cartography of Twin Peaks and the wider Lynch universe.
In the words of Lulu, how do you thank someone who has taken you from crayons to perfume?
It isn’t easy, but I try. Happy Anniversary to us. I miss you babycakes.
Night Blooming Jasmine has become the work I’m most proud of, and, somewhat unexpectedly, my most successful project so far. I suppose that’s what happens when you hitch your wagon to a beloved genius. The themes in David Lynch’s work have been nourishing me since childhood, but starting the podcast ended up saving my sanity last year when I evacuated Los Angeles during the fires and fled to Joshua Tree for a calendar year.
I thought I was saving my lungs. I underestimated how much I would miss human contact.
I don’t regret the move, but it wasn’t easy. My little podcasts and my little journals kept me from spinning off into the vast openness of the desert sky. Along the way, I also received what I can only describe as visitations from DL himself, in the form of an owl that appeared on a power line outside my house almost every night for months.
I believe in signs.
2 Songs
I am a Lana Del Rey enthusiast. Every time I think I might reconsider—usually due to conflicting politics or cultural appropriation on her part (who could forget the Native headdress era, or her open letter “Question for the Culture,” in which she named seven Black female artists and argued, somewhat disastrously, that they were celebrated for sexuality while she was criticized for glamorizing abuse. Girl.) I get pulled back in by the sheer excellence of her output.
During the pandemic, she released Blue Banisters, which included Black Bathing Suit. A song that feels like exhaustion, dissociation, and the middle finger all at once:
“And if this is the end, I want a boyfriend / Someone to eat ice cream with, and watch television / Or walk home from the mall with / ’Cause what I really meant is when I’m being honest / I’m tired of this shit”
Lana was trolled online after paparazzi photos showed that she had gained weight. God forbid a woman nourish her body. Chinless dweeb Marilyn “Moonboots” Manson allegedly called her “Lasagna Del Rey,” claiming he had “dodged a bullet.” He should be so lucky.
As the entire world grappled with Covid, lockdown, and the most intense collective anxiety of our lifetime, Lana was afforded very little grace for the simple crime of looking like a woman in a body that was no longer being curated for the male gaze.
I took a lot of comfort in Black Bathing Suit, because just like Lana, the only thing that fit my Hershey’s Kiss of a body was also my black bathing suit. A body in a swimsuit, existing. Sorry bout it!
Fast forward to 2026, and Lana is no longer single and unmoored. Three summers ago she married Jeremy Dufrene in Louisiana, where he works as an airboat captain in the bayou. And I think it’s safe to say she may have discovered Ozempic.
I am against this hard swing back toward “nothing tastes as good as skinny feels.” And yet she does look lovely in this year’s video for White Feather Hawk Tail Deer Hunter. The aesthetic return is real: earlier sonic textures, a faint revival of those cartoonish Americana sound cues that made her early work feel like a memory speaking. 1930s Bettie Boop, Disney’s Fantasia.
It’s the music that keeps me listening.
I was almost ready to disembarked the Lanita train entirely when this video appeared earlier this year. The husband she chose wears Von Dutch caps and has also, at various points online, been described as holding views that feel… shall we say, structurally conservative. Not very Pride forward.
Still, I do love a swamp. I do love an alligator.
Jeremy is coming out, and I am, against my better judgment, willing to hold a little space for that evolution. His bayou energy suits being written into songs. The world is a swamp. And Lana, as ever, is just standing in it, singing.
Paid subscribers of This Body Podcast will recall I recently missed a Rilo Kiley show in the desert, but instead closed the loop with Riley Keough at my local hole-in-the-wall café. Or rather: I saw her in passing, which in Los Angeles terms is basically an encounter with the divine.
Riley holds a place in my heart as one of Earth’s angels. Don’t ask me why. I don’t know her personally, but she has aura. She has grace under pressure. There’s a lightness to her spirit that seems impossible given what she has lived through.
The suicide of her younger brother. The death of her mother, Lisa Marie, whose potential as an artist was never fully allowed to resolve itself into a coherent legacy. And then, a public and emotionally exhausting legal fallout with Priscilla Presley that played out like a Southern Gothic inheritance soap with a comments section.
And still, Riley feels unbroken.
She blew my mind in Zola, and again when Chanel had her sing When Doves Cry at their Spring/Summer 2025 runway show, suspended inside a giant white birdcage at the Grand Palais in Paris.
“Maybe you’re just like my mother/ she’s never satisfied”
Chanel itself is in a long, low-grade flop era since the death of Karl, but I remain deeply attached to this version of When Doves Cry. In my head, it has temporarily surpassed the original. Not because it is better, but because it arrived with the right emotional frequency at the right time.
One Obsession: Steadfastly and studiously ignoring current affairs.
I live in Los Angeles, where this week the military conducted a training exercise in Pasadena. Pasadena. A place densely populated by people who have only recently experienced the devastation of the Eaton Fire. Get ready for some big explosions and simulated gunfire, everybody. God Bless America. Except the land, the animals, and the souls who live here.
At the same time, reality succubus Spencer Pratt is running for mayor. Honestly, I wouldn’t be remotely surprised if he won. It feels a lot like the beginning of Trump’s first campaign, when everyone assumed the joke would end before it got serious.
Evidently not.
Spencer hates LA, and if he doesn’t win the election, he’s moving. God Willing.
So, back to me, ignoring things.
At this point, staying informed feels akin to electrocution. Every morning, every minute, every day. The day Trump threatened to annihilate civilization in the Middle East was the day I stepped away from the news. It pushed me right to the edge while the stock market rose and fell like a Tahitian swell, making a few rich people much, much richer.
I fell into the trap. I became utterly destabilized. Gutted. Destroyed.
Even without the hourly news abuse, I am still tired, wired, and scared.
Every day I try to turn down the velocity on the fight-or-flight dial. Lately that has looked like hiking up to the Observatory in Griffith Park, rubbing James Dean’s bronze nose for luck, and listening to sounds from the 1980s, when I was young and optimistic, dying for life to begin.
The 1980s were a long time ago.
But what am I supposed to do? Kill myself? Please. I’m not ready for that kind of comedown.
So I hike. I swim. I do my little yoga routines. I do my Transcendental Meditation. I record my little podcasts. I keep things niche.
And now I’m writing to you.
Maybe that’s all any of us can do: keep our lives small enough to notice what is beautiful, and large enough to contain what is frightening.
If grace still exists, I suspect it arrives quietly, somewhere between a birdsong, a swimming pool, an owl on a power line, and the next apocalypse news alert.
See you in the by and by - same time next week,
Love,
Sofia xxx
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