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In Christian Ortega's newest collection, you will find the mask of social media lifted, revealing a mysterious play of time and space underneath, where life and art become interchangeable in a performance that turns itself inside out. In "Rants For Social Media", Ortega encompasses many angles and dimensions. This decade-long collection of social media posts made from the sights and sounds of autobiography, poetry, music, and performance, offers ways to live creatively and consciously in a predaceous technocracy. The early posts portray the author in a contemplative state, imbibing on cultural phenomena, then they gradually burgeon into full-throated rants that capture the life of a poet industriously engaged with the world. All the while, you see yourself in his journey: creative, frustrated, smart, angry, scared, and motivated.
In this social media culture, little effort is made to reach through an interface and touch the flesh and blood person on the other side: "The Ghosting Era: Let's share everything about us today so I can forget you ever existed tomorrow {Jun 19, 2020, 9:44 AM}". Electronic data communication promises anonymity and a risk-free relationship with others. Social media thrives in a platform of self-alienation, exploiting and perpetuating xenophobia, while you risk an atomized cloistered home life, with the outside world defined by your own "echo chamber" "INDIFFERENCE ANYWHERE IS COMPLICITY EVERYWHERE {Feb 24, 2019, 12:15 PM}". Ortega invokes Eros, the god of love, vivifying the pages of Rants with the warm breath of mortal yearnings. "IT'S JUST A PENIS: It was made to give and receive pleasure. It's not your enemy {Jul 26, 2020, 10:51 AM}". You experience these libidinal exhortations more viscerally than the other social matter. They awaken connections between the sex drive and the creative drive. The Nine Muses imbue inspirations while Eros lights the creative fires. You sow the seeds of your art, freeing creative expression from its psychical prison, giving it physical presence. "Rants" is just that, art plus desire seeking change.
Ortega seeks to free the captive mind from its technocratic cage. He offers "Rants For Social Media" as a simple template, a mindful DIY project. The need for expression will never be greater than in this time of Covid-19 lockdowns and social upheaval. The "source code" of "Rants" was inspired by "The Andy Warhol Diaries", edited by Pat Hackett, and also by Joe Brainard's "I Remember" and "I Remember More". Just like Warhol's Campbell's Soup cans turned a common object into a marvelous wonder; Ortega's brutally honest posts have turned online communication into personal epiphany. Writers can employ elaborate descriptive words but it's the Poet who writes for truth. "Rants For Social Media" is an autobiographical prose poem with no beginning or end. Life exists well beyond the last entry and before its first, both present and absent, full of ephemeral moments, ten years of a life tangibly represented in book form. Inherent in these moments is Ortega's voice calling attention to the immediate present, to the words right in front of your face. Ortega suggests that the goal is not ever really reached; it is the process that is most important.
