THIS is the NEW GAMES JOURNALISM

An advertisement for Call of Duty: World War II shows a veteran with a traumatized stare.

We used to report on coincidences.  Now we report on happenings.

This is the New Games Journalism.

AMERICANGULAG Prologue

Daph and Xavier are home doing whippets and playing Pokemon Snap.  I've resigned myself to my life as writer and I'm trying to keep up with the phony pacing of their lives.  In an instant my angel is gone and I'm here transcribing narratives of disfigurement seen at a distance.  Hence Pokemon Snap.  Hence the whippets.

As a cigarette burns down you feel the pain of being homeless.  It aches in your bones.  "Get up to get down."

Luke's crashing a car zap bam pop and Tracy's filming it live on Super 8.  This is the most astonishing moment of either of their lives, I can just tell.
"Great!" I scream.
The wreck crawls backward, a reverse slow-mo shot.

The GULAG eats dreams. Don't sleep.

AMERICANGULAG

A novel by Kyle Bern.

Coming Soon.

Untitled

Once more, for Bebe Zeva

"Now I am going to throw up."

A cartoon hand extends a quarter into the bathroom.

Thanks!

Nicole admires the quarter, thinking it looks nice.

What does it mean?

It means one-quarter.

"I like it, Ziggy, but I want emptiness instead.  Can you do that for me?"

I'll try.


Ziggy is drinking heavily when the word "suicide" enters the frame, then leaves it.

"What happens out there?"

You don't want to know.

I came to this McDonalds for the wifi and from here I'm watching it all go down.

Ziggy is taking a birdbath in the Cherry Cola.  Then Ziggy is drinking heavily.  The bath is made of stone and cut marble.  What happens before is arbitrary, or maybe not.  Ziggy and Nicole are rape victims here for reprisal.  The dining area looks like Ziggy's living room.  Very foreign.  Aliens exist.  Ziggy's mother rapes him in his own dining room every day.  He's thinking now would be a good time to quit the "victim" habit.  Maybe he could if he knew this word "rape".  Unfortunately for him, I've redefined it.  Fortunately for me, it means great literature.

Ziggy sees images from Gummo (Harmony Korine, 1997) and he's thinking.  "Pain" and "suffocation" flash in his mind like lightning.  "Fear" lingers.  Being a child star he knows the feeling, not the word.  Now that he has a word to attach his feeling to he might feel better, he hopes.  Maybe not though.

Look, Ziggy.  I've deconstructed Catholicism for you.

He doesn't understand yet.  He will.

Knowing that fear is the crux of great art, I also know that I need Ziggy to keep being scared.

Fact is, Ziggy is scared because his mother uses fear to control what he eats.  And also when he eats.  And also how he eats.  When the mother's control fails society rises to compensate.

I want Ziggy to know he should go to a Chinese place and eat there.

I want myself to know I never wanted to be a writer.

For now.

For my 9th birthday my family got me a Nintendo 64 computer entertainment system (with Super Mario 64 (a videogame by Nintendo Entertainment Japan))

The year was 1999.

Let's just go ahead and call Nintendo the greatest computer entertainment platform developer of all

time.

This is a poem I wrote today

Hipster

Millennial aged children 

Broken fags

Art becomes void

Schoolyard losers so fucked they

 cant see anything more worthwhile 

than starting a band to get 

laid

For these priaprismic perpetual

Horny mongoloids "art" means

"Let me fuck you."

Hipster

Advance praise for Kyle Bern's AMERICANGULAG

"...kind of poetic genius...something very strong..." -- Matthew Stokoe

"The voice of a generation..." -- Bebe Zeva

AMERICANGULAG

A novel.

Coming soon.