When re-inspecting the more
polemic aspects of Bean Newton’s later works, one comes across such
as “Eat Shop Sleep Fuck,” a po-mo pastiche that may be an
early attempt at current anti-consumerist, anti-globalist screed. Or maybe
not.
--E.W. Wilder
Eat Shop Sleep Fuck
by Bean Newton
Jellybean trilobytes smack kippered steak against my window. Tonite,
oh breathless Deborah, tonite. The Drive-In amphitheater’s one
bad speaker crackles in the blue-fish dawn, elemental, my dear Watt’s
son, the steam from a million outlets sing Volta, the Teslonic gospel
told in the whistle and pop, the snappy dresser of electron-scanned
glory-a in excelsior diorama of infantilist Matchbox phantasy, cars
crushed into greased-out plastic city-scope, ice-cream melting in miniature
over the tiny streetwalker’s tanktops, right down to her 1/32nd
scale vaccu-form titties. That, my friend, is market saturation, the
suck and glow of a diesel engine idle beneath the clatter of a pancake-fed
aftergloom, grooving into neon. After the meeting at the IHOP, the night
has been descried from the gaps between the sidewalk tiles, slabs, actually,
abs, lab coats, scientifically proven to give you a six-packed mid-section
in the time it takes to say “corn-fed beef cubes and black mushroom
sauce." Anchor me, spanker me, tanker me too, I’m on coke
in a flying zoo: “We no longer appreciate the animal in the wild,
at one with its natural environment,” “Stacy” told
me over our fruit smoothies in Hell, an upscale juice joint downtown.
The brass fit the tumbleweed decor the way a paper bag fits a girl’s
ass. I didn’t wonder anymore, couldn’t with the theme song
from Gilligan’s Island pissing through my head like a
robot on Rohypnol, shackled with student debt and rolling on a dorm-room
floor. This is what I’ve worked for and fought wars over - the
freedom to roil, insensate, on vinyl tile. Even the top of the existential
heap succumbs to the same fucked phenomenology: blotter acid and bacon,
weasels in suits and full-fledged faggots in jock-straps slapping butts
on Sunday night Defbowl Jam Machine Spaceliner. I’ve seen better.
In fact, I’ve seen the best fags of my generation . . .
But they’ll never come out, too afraid of the state of their
balls in the locker room, their contracts blood-splattered and looped
around to form their numbers. What do you think bought you that mink,
bitch? Slap-happy homeyhands and churchgoing addicts. I gave at the
door, spank you very much. Mulch-headed freakshows gabbing on about
milkspots in your toaster ovens and screed-infested blackhole nosebleeds
and monster truck rallies on the moon. It’s all about modern selling
techniques: disappearing car ads and toothnail paste cream from problematized,
stigmatized areas I didn’t even know I had. You couldn’t
even show that on the air 10 years ago, but the air now, well, you can,
and that’s the important part, blast a light-stream at any given
of the sounds of clouds of protoplasmic fog. It’s all about creating
new life forms, like cyborgs or the house-sized roaches who’ll
soon knock on your door and tell you to turn the music down, some of
us have jobs. I’d like to crawl inside that one and creep around
for awhile, systemetizing my food route through the city with preprogrammed
randomness. Now they’ve built new robots designed specifically
to “think like a bug.” As if, in some minuscule parts of
our brains, we didn’t already. Cheaper by the billion, really,
rode the six dozen to the unchartered territory of the Northboast coast,
up by Nucrosoft, a pilgrimage we’ll make by day, health and war
of Billwilling. It’s peanut butter and Dr. Peeper along the way,
El Camino, the Tao, perhaps that crimson path all lined at the side
with greenbacks. I’ve sacrificed a lot to get me here, a deer,
a ram, a budding career in alchemy. Imagine my surprise when they said
they didn’t do that anymore. They said “We don’t do
that anymore,” just like that, like it was something over which
they had no control. But we know who makes the rules, shitting back
in their sleazy-chairs swaying slightly in the breezes that blow the
to and fro in the ivory towers. They’re the interrectual elite,
the high-dollar high-class jet set culture makers. They might even make
$40,000 in a whole year. Imagine that, when corporate America is barely
squeaking by with stock options and a new BMW in every pot. Promises,
promises. It’s medicinal, of course - for my glaucoma.
