“It occurs to me that Anton’s poems have not improved in 10 years. But why should they? For him, writing is that same as repairing a motorcycle. Passing the time - except that he gets paid for his mechanical labors. But it’s all the same to him, as a matter of fact, he is one of that numbing legion who tells you about the butcher, the baker, etc. being the same as Leonardo. Some cabinet maker is like David Smith, etc. The chef as great artist. I don’t mind. This is commonly accepted swill in our time, much like astrology: harmless pastime for the frivolous.”

Gibert Sorrentino - “The Imaginative Qualities of Actual Things.”

No one with a pure heart wants to be Anton Hurley.

The challenge with an Ode to Delusion is to avoid wallowing in the delusional aspect, to be truly deluded is to be under a spell, to believe that Minnie Mouse is real, that your fantasies are better than the real thing.

Delivering something that is uncommon is itself a common enough event, but being able to convincingly convey that uncommon belief is very rare.

I read poems as a willing subject, but I can’t help reading them my way. All the poems are deserving of comment and praise, every one, but there were some moments which broke the spell.

There were 8 that had no breaks at all, or if they did by the time the weaker line appeared there was enough momentum to easily cross the gap.

appreciation, non censura

Universal Conch

by harley claes

Towering, glittering. Takes the towering trope of the young hero preparing for battle and matter of factly begins replacing words you expect with a glittering offering prayer that made me blush and applaud.

Vandalized Moons

by Alejandra Rubio

A 100% success of a poem that delights moving between scientific descriptions of phenomena and the form itself, then you realize it is because the form is giving a summary of the form as it is, describing itself as it also is itself: only a true genius could accomplish such a feat, previously thought to be impossible. Or maybe all women are geniuses? I’ll never know.

dreamer / web weaver

ny acacia h.

I loved this one right away.

Captures and expresses things you know but didn’t know you knew, its such a good poem like that. Had a total ‘wow’ moment with the line that ends:

the city stole a part of me for safe keeping

and what else is so beautiful is how the poem tells what NYC is by describing what she doesn’t have. Those hollows get filled in by the city, and if you’ve lived there you will recognize this feeling. When reading this poem I realized for the first time that NYC has a real personality - it’s the indefinable part of living there, almost like an invisible friend. This poem summons and captures the all-time city’s spirit and puts it on display like a real poet-wizard might.

Cheerleaders crying at the big blue

by Juliette Jeffers

So good at capturing something so blazing hot inside us that there literally is no way to describe it, yet she does by somehow putting it inside of something so cool.

First line is an absolute wow:

I think you made me that summer,

the rest of the other lines are really good too.

1821

by Yves Kirigaya

Made me actually sad for people in California, amazing way to demonstrate the weird side effects of our society, the dark side of perfection is that it is already fading.

wishing that the intimacy i guessed in your stare could be true

Ahh but maybe it’s the only true way to live - holding out for one more wave - rolling in the cosmic foam of relinquished inhibitions - throwing away chance after chance to come out of the water until it’s almost 4 o’clock.

Wild Things

by Rebecca Jale

When I opened my first issue of Delude magazine (this one), that’s when I realized what I had gotten myself into, and I felt that almost illicit excitement that comes when you discover something new, like I had somehow stumbled into the secret garden of girls and that I might as well make the most of it because soon I was going to be asked to leave.

When I was reading it I just consumed it and then realized after how classic it felt, and of course how utterly (to me) original. Bravo!

Jay Walker

by Iris Machado

I didn’t read it so much as fall down it.

You don’t feel the descent into madness right away, and as I was reading with an uncomfortable smile on my face thinking it was one thing, it revealed it’s insane designs and pulled me through the dark mirror with it to the other side where a silver jewel that contains this memory of me waits inside a wooden box for someone to pick it up and hold it up to the light and look inside.

Dolus Please Hear Me

Alexandra J.

I am the exit to infinity.

This line was so good it immediately made me stop and read the poem again.

As children my siblings and I watched it probably 100 times, nervously laughing every time Bastian dramatically stops himself from eating his entire lunch and decides in a super corny way to instead save it for the journey ahead.

In case you never saw it, the main enemy in “The Neverending Story” is The NOthing.

The Nothing is this formless cloud of darkness that is sweeping over the land and destroying everything it comes into contact with. The only way for Atreyu, the hero, can save the world is to find a cure for what ails the Princess, but he discovers that it’s impossible, that the only thing she needs, he cannot give her - the love and attention of a human child. After overcoming so many obstacles to reach the Princess, he is devastated to have still failed.

Ahhh. But that is where he is wrong. He hadn’t failed after all. The love and attention of the human child is the boy reading the book, and by believing in the Princess, by caring enough about her to risk his sanity Bastian bridged the gap between reality and fantasy, and Fantasia was born anew.

With the same mechanism, though Formfunction may die the “Moon Child” shall live.

FOUR

I was going to try and profile or write about every artist I met during the past year, but it would be so long no one would read it. So I am only writing about the first four NFTs I bought on Formfunction and the artists who made them, sharing my love for what they have done as a former human child.

1. Singpentinkhappy

This was the first 1/1 NFT I bought:

It’s called “Reality Is An Illusion” and it’s by Yahya Rifandaru, an artist who can never seem to fit inside any form, and who’s every work is bursting with what seems like some kind of primal goo from the mysterious processes at work in his brain.

In the whirl and fun of NFTs I ended up selling the one above, though I still have a three of his works and I always look forward to seeing where he goes, everything he touches turns to bright beautiful ectoplasm.

“NDASASU #19 - The Life Cycle”.

“Under the Shadows”

2. Metadreams

I first saw Metadreams work on objkt, on the tezos chain, and on Formfunction I bought this:

“Futura Salvation”. The detail is incredible, and the detail carries you with it down the path. If you want to see the piece in it’s original form animated with music, you can do it for a limited time here. I love the sure-handed lines and the strange, unique sensibility. It makes me feel a little like I’m looking at someone else’s dream. Metadreams has a talent for seeing the absurd all around us, for showing us that if we only just kind of tilt our heads a little to the left and imagine and squint our eyes we can see we already live in the world he is showing. It’s too strange and troubling to think about it too much, so you can look at something else, but the feeling stays.

3. Artsyryo

What did I know about art? Nothing. What is there to know? Either you like it or you don’t. However what I started to realize was how much sharing and borrowing there was between artists, which makes sense. I started to look for artists that were doing their own thing, that didn’t look like anybody else, that stole more than borrowed and I found artsyryo (though I guess his style does look a little bit like Moebius - one of our modern dream fathers)

I just thought this was awesome. The colors, the lines, the way his lines make each of the sections different but still part of the fabric of his world, the bizarre, tragic, fairy tale space story implied, the light, the snapshot of a desperate situation. I thought it was amazing and I still do.

4. Vhadel

The reason I started buying 1/1 NFTs in the first place was to make new friends. I started out messaging artists on twitter to see if they wanted to collaborate with me, but I quickly realized that I looked like just another spammer and possible scammer. Some wonderful people did reply though. People are the best.

Vhadel was one of the people who did write back, and he even provided me with one of the earliest plebs - the electric concept “Grandma’s Boys”. (don’t worry I’m still going to use it!).

What I ended up buying from him on FF was this piece (animated), which puts the viewer in an endless bright green technology funnel, watching a figure infinitely switch between masks that display happiness and sadness.

“Poker King” by MasroemX.

For a while Vhadel and I connected, we chatted and made jokes and planned for future collaborations. It felt like being a kid on vacation, making vacation friends and hatching all kinds of crazy plans with the other kids instead of being a responsible adult.

Then as the summer ended and crypto autumn set in we lost touch. I hope he reads this. I’m still working on my game by the way, it’s really almost ready to show to you :)

The Three Whos

I still honestly don’t know anything about NFT art. I don’t know why some artists are highly valued while others are ignored, but in that way the NFT art world seems a lot like the normal art world. Who knows? Are there any rules about who is allowed to have an opinion on art?

But an even better question is, who cares?

Who cares what people think about the art you like? Ok I do care. When other people appreciate the same things I like it makes me feel good in a fuzzy way. In a similar way to how show-and-tell made me feel. I admit to enjoying the positive attention, but it’s really the negative attention that holds people back.

When someone else doesn’t like what you like, it instinctively feels bad. It is worth asking: why does that matter? Either they can see something you can’t see, in which case maybe their opinion will enrich your aesthetic navigation system, or they have a temporarily incompatible worldview. In the worst cases people use your opinions about art to draw negative conclusions about you as a person, about your education level, about where you grew up. I think this actually happens in many cases and in many parts of the world, but fortunately the solution is universal and available to all of us when we really think about it.

Don’t wear someone else’s clothes unless they fit.

To recap, the '3 Whos' which are fundamental to understanding and appreciating art are:
1. Who knows?
2. Who cares?
3. Who gives a sh*t?

Art in an Abundant World

Just because now that there is so much art at our fingertips doesn’t mean it’s not amazing - it means that the way we decided art was good or bad has been wrong all along.

Yes there can only be 10 in a top 10, but there can also be a top 10,000 —

I understand and appreciate where things like the “Western Canon” come from. There is so much to read and listen to and watch and see that you quickly lose your bearings when you don’t have any guidance on what is good and what isn’t. It becomes overwhelming until you realize that just as the art multiplies and changes form and style endlessly so too does your budget of appreciation expand, in fact you realize that you don’t have a budget at all and that you are free to like whatever you like.

Of course maybe you already spend your likes freely and if so god bless but I realized how cheap I had been at times.

The truth is we can all judge art without any prior knowledge, that it’s ok if you have to explain a work of art to someone, but what you are explaining to them is how you see. It is incredible that we can show others to see as we do, it’s part of the joy of sharing the beauty and wonder we discover in the world. But we still open and close our own eyes.

We can experience art easily and directly. We can let art flow over us without filtering the thoughts it and feelings it creates. We can see the same thing on multiple days and see something different. There is enough love to go around. Let your love expand, let it fill your coffers and then spend it on everything you like.

This is how we stop The Nothing.

I think everyone at some level struggles with this. We all struggle to keep the parts of ourselves alive that society doesn’t seem to want. Friendships are wonderful because they give us a space to keep ourselves going, and let us love the weird and strange and beautiful in other people. But eventually adulthood comes for us all.

Adulthood is when things become serious, and when most of our time is spent working. Adulthood is when we look to find a mate and raise a family, when many of us lose track of the weird parts of ourselves. Old friends drift away, replaced by work friends who only know us from work, who have maybe only seen glimpses of our weird selves.

Life isn’t only work, life isn’t only responsibility and work, but those are the structures through which most of our energy is passed. But there are people who take a different path - the artists path.

The artist is the person who can express the weirdness inside them well enough to create their own reality. The artist can forge something new which can stand on its own, which doesn’t need society’s blessing to exist.

There is a marketplace for these creations, the land of entertainment, the land of play and that’s how most artists make a living. The vast majority of people who spend the focus of their lives working and tending to functions of the world love to visit the creations of the artists when they have time off.

Of course the dream factory is not run by artists. It’s run by managers, by merchants who are doing us all a service by financing and organizing the resources needed to create movies, shows, concerts books, etc.. Their vision is the scientific vision. The vision which looks for repeating patterns, which looks to raise up the weird to the level of a theory, which is how we end up with genres. “If you liked this, then you will like that”.

Genres are fine, but necessarily they are prisons. Their appeal is completely understandable, they are products and they hold the promise of a market for artists, but necessarily they sand down the weird edges.

I say all this just to point out why it is only the weird which is real. All of those things which contain some glimmer of new are the weird things. All of the art which seems familiar and comfortable is a copy of what came before. The real is original, it hits this world like lava hitting the air. Over time it becomes incorporated into society, copied enough times to become part our culture.

But it’s not enough to just be weird. You can be weird but in a bad way. You can be weird in an unappealing way. You might just be crazy. You can be too weird, you can be so weird that it’s impossible to build a bridge from where you are to the rest of society. You can be weird and suck.

Most NFT Projects Completely Suck

NFTs are weird, crypto is weird, and a lot of it sucks. I spent the last couple of weeks diving into a bunch of NFT projects and ended up completely exhausted and kind of depressed.

The art associated with most projects is not only bad, but somehow derivative and bad. So many dead smoking cat heads.

The ponzi vibe is so intense. The discords are absolute madness.

Projects endlessly hype themselves while people shamelessly dance like monkeys for the chance to be on a white list, only to sell the WL token for a quick profit, or have every intention of flipping the NFT on day one.

Most projects are outright copies of other projects. Even bad projects get copied. And yet some of them are weird but good.

The DeGods project definitely has the “David Bowie” vibe, though I admit I might not be cool enough to join. The Bōryoku Dragonz are “backed by a top team of NFT collectors, designers, community builders, and artists”, which somehow feels too exclusive for me not to mention too expensive.

Both of these projects have a whiff of the Bored Apes to them - something compelling which at the same time makes me feel bad that I feel compelled. I think it means they have been able to induce social anxiety in me through the internet. Maybe I’m just jealous?

Make Me A Copy

Tojiba CPU Corp project is pulling a cloak of weirdness over corporate jargon. You know it’s genuinely weird when you feel the urge to copy it. I feel that with Tojiba.

I am compelled by JFK’s brain to ask how can it be “Mimesis” when the newest things are also the coolest things? Is it because when we notice something cool and new we want to incorporate it into ourselves?

The feeling when when you find something you didn’t know you were looking for, but you immediately need to have.

Jump In The Fire

When you are young it is easier for something new and cool to take over your life, to become completely obsessed with it, to start to identify with it. As you age your daily routine gradually makes you immune to total transformation by a bolt from the blue, which is what makes web3 so fascinating. As I spent the last two weeks deep inside NFT discords, I was amazed at the breadth of people I met, from all over the world, from all walks of life. It felt a bit like I would imagine the frontier town of western America might have felt during the gold rush. All while working from home.

I was rubbing shoulders with people I otherwise might never have spoken with. I was joining spam rushes to raid people’s twitters and discords. The whole experience was thrilling and nauseating at the same time. The rush of jumping in with two feet is starting to wear off a little bit, and I can feel a slight melancholy taking its place. At the same time, it does feel like web3 and nfts are deeply new, new in the sense of a new paradigm new. For underneath all of the shilling and rugging and raiding and flipping and endless discord notifications there is something new stirring within the opened rift, something weird and something real.

(credits to https://twitter.com/shokkasmtc for the Dark Raviolis, https://www.jamesclapham.com for the office hell picture, and this is the url for the tojiba project https://tojiba.biz )

There were no shortage of experiments in the golden age of modern art. In painting and literature artists tried to use new forms and methods to capture the feeling of man at the end of history, of humanity in a disenchanted world.

In many respects these attempts to try and resolve, capture, express and represent man’s condition were commendable for their bravery and creativity. But it is possible to be creative and brave and also, still to fail.

Most of the experiments of modern art were failures, but they were feted nonetheless. Why is that? It is because they were appreciated for the content of their ideas rather than for their æsthetic power. In retrospect this was a huge mistake.

We don’t need a Jackson Pollack splashing paint to help us understand anything at all. We don’t need Samuel Beckett’s play about people in garbage cans to gain any insight into the human condition. The themes and archetypes they were struggling with are interesting, if obvious, but their execution is uninspiring.

These works should be re-evaluated, but it’s probably better to just move on.

Cargo Cult(ure)

When I was a kid I used to sneak fantasy novels into english class and read them under the desk while the teacher presented lower quality material. Flash forward to today and most kids don’t even read. The quality of media now is so high that it’s time to admit that many of the so-called classics simply cannot be read today.

Ivan Illich in Deschooling Society noticed that (in 1971!):

most people acquire most of their knowledge outside school, and in school only insofar as school, in a few rich countries, has become their place of confinement during an increasing part of their lives.

People are learning from the internet, from each other, from their families, from movies, from the lessons the economy teaches while the advice from official channels is largely endured and ignored.

Extrapolate that to society as a whole. Things are changing so fast that there is no way for cultural institutions to keep up, but that doesn’t mean they won’t try. And as they attempt to maintain relevance, as their grip on society slips away, inevitably newer forms, newer patterns and paths will come under attack.

Gaming, social media, crypto - somehow these are degenerate pursuits while reading Thomas Pynchon, attending the opera and playing chess are culturally enriching.

I slogged through Gravity’s Rainbow - it has some good parts but clearly needs to be rewritten. I’ve never made it through an entire opera without wishing it was over, without feeling like I was eating vegetables for long boring periods of time. Chess is actually awesome.

Everything Is Better Now

Writing, the phonetic alphabet specifically, is probably the greatest invention of all time. It allowed humans to freeze ideas and send them across time.

In the beginning there weren’t that many books and so good writers stood out more easily. There wasn’t that much to do so their faults were more easily overlooked.

Sentences could stretch on for entire pages, lengthly descriptions of what characters had for breakfast were tolerated, perhaps even enjoyed by the reader.

But all that’s over now.

Writing now needs to communicate directly. It needs to charm, it needs charisma. It needs to create a voice in the reader’s head they want to keep listening to and it needs to have something to say or be quiet.

It’s not that readers are too easily distracted — it’s that the world has gotten more interesting.

Concepts Are Not Art

And they never could be. Concepts are fun, Concepts are powerful, but once they are fully formed, they are communicable via words.

Art is something else. Art does not cooperate with the police (shout out to Nick Land).

Art needs to be appreciated in the æsthetic realm, without the baggage of ideas, and it needs a clean break.

NFTs and web3 are our escape from the schoolmasters, from the prison of their misguided frameworks. It’s better that it isn’t respectable. The longer it us consigned to the bucket of low culture, the better.

We are now free to decide for ourselves - “What is best in life?”

the symbols of the divine show up in our world initially at the trash stratum - PKD

The trash stratum is the perfect location for an insurrection HQ.

shout outs to Phil and JF at Weird Studies, Nick Land’s “Art As Insurrection”, Ivan Illich’s “Deschooling Society” found via Nina Power (found via Justin Murphy), and of course PKD’s Valis.

I could see that, yes, talented artists over time had painted and sculpted quite well, but none of it really spoke to me. I found more joy in the art of a comic book than just about every piece in the museum. If had been in charge, I would have acquired Frank Frazetta’s “The Death Dealer” and hung it at the top of the main stairs.

As I got older I came to accept that serious art and the art I liked weren’t the same thing. Prestigious artists somehow commanded the heights with bizarre mediocre work, while those not blessed by the inner sanctum had to leave the “art for art’s sake” world entirely and get by on selling their skills like the rest of us.

And if you went to the MOMA, somehow the work there was even less appealing than the Met. Modern art seemed like a huge prank being played on everyone. I spent years trying to understand and still failing to understand. I read books, I tried to make the ideas and the experiences transmute into beauty and yet I couldn’t shake an underlying suspicion that most of this stuff wasn’t that good. I mean, some of it is ok, but from a pure æsthetic point of view, most pieces feel like failures. Picasso kind of sucks. Warhol is a one trick pony, and the trick isn’t even that good.

And who was deciding these things? People I’ve never met, people more connected than me, people with special glasses allowing them to see the emperor’s clothes. I didn’t get it but thats just the way it was. Like everybody else I kind of moved on. I still liked going to museums, and I still looked for art there that spoke to me, I just didn’t expect to really find any.

All the while in the back of my mind was this feeling - was it all bullshit? I never even considered the alternative - that the people who decide what is the best art don’t know what they are doing.

Where The Hell Are We?

How did we get here? How did it happen that schoolmasters are now in charge of telling us “What is Best in Life”?

Five hundred years ago, the Renaissance was in full bloom. Humanity was for the first time in history breaking away from strict societal controls, powered by the new availability of information (printing press) and the wealth created by the initial escape of capitalism(Italian city states) (cribbed from Josh Rosenthal + Accelerationism).

It went from this:

To this:

Between then and today the paths available to everybody on earth have expanded massively. Each successive generation enjoyed more and more freedom as the arbitrary control structures of society were eroded.

Now that (nearly) everything is permitted the question of ‘what is best in life’ becomes even more important, as does the corollary question of who gets to decide. It turns out to be effectively a set of appointed judges.

A small number of influential organizations decide, or at least used to decide. For much of the 20th century these judgements were handed down with no possibility for appeal. No impeachment mechanism in place, even when it became clear the muggle judges are out of touch.

The barbarians are now making the coolest stuff. They probably were all along.

Who Cares Which Fork You Use?

All of this is what makes the NFT art emergence (explosion?) so sweet, so heartwarming and encouraging.

For years and years the path to becoming “an artist” was a narrow one. The percent of the population who would paint something on an 4x6 foot canvas, sell it and make a living doing so was incredibly small compared to the percent of the population with vision and talent.

Capitalism based on delivery of physical products had arranged a society that severely limited who could be in “the art world”.

And suddenly that is no longer the case. It no longer matters which fork you use.

The restrictor plate on art has come off. Art for art’s sake is back.

Pure æsthetics is back.

Beauty is truth, truth beauty–that is all ye know on earth and all ye need to know.

Artists, interested in building something cool? Check out us out!

This is me on twitter → @rightlingnod.