Fishtank: Twice the Punishment is Nice, by Sean Kilpatrick

Counter-Agency affiliate and writer Sean Kilpatrick is totalized by Sam Hyde's latest situational delirium

Art is not the imitation of life, but life is the imitation of a transcendent principle with which art can put us back into communication – Antonin Artaud

Sam Hyde and Jet Neptune’s Fishtank arises just in time to combat an immense deadening, our era of quantity over quality, art for art’s take (imagine future museums full of framed opinion pieces), promoted guilt, Roald Dahl revisionism, talking heads discoursing ambidextrously politicized consumer polemics, inverted pyramid activism, AI rubrics by useful idiot hacks and sectarian offense-takers, some truly lugubrious beep boop, Saturn’s shat sons availing mounds of artistic casualties higher than anywhere else in history (the pocket pussy dark ages) – what this misfit team means to accomplish in general opposition (at the napalm apex of Hyde’s post-cancellation phoenix arc – his immortal “No! In real life!”) will revenge our last viscid decade of hooey, not to mention the nineteen-nineties downfall of MTV to its own Road Rule’d, boy-banded conglomerate viewer count, presenting an aposematic deterrent, a dolefully valiant, yet supremely excoriating sardonicism sans despair, an ecstatic, transformative, punk fuck you to those willing to betray the mastery of their craft, a rebuke of any apostate who can only operate by license. Raw virtuosos, rendering the zeitgeist with rubber gloves, set eight subjects in a McKamey Manor Wonka river defecated live, twenty-four seven, and dirty their hands extracting a hardscrabble bit of humanity from each archetype tarred across the internet with itinerant, dynamic meme machines layup-assisted by fans reinterpreting paraprosdokian garden-path hybrid realties time lapsed faction to faction, an art installation generating strata of symbolic moments (including a torturer in repose, posed like Matejko’s Stańczyk during a ball at the court of Queen Bona in the face of the loss of Smolensk / a seductress conspiring with a religious autistic becomes Signorelli’s The Preaching of the Antichrist / then there’s Full Metal Jacket dart gun Airsoft Fatty) already singlehandedly in the process of mending our hamstrung culture, an exigent tour de force, a momentous undertaking, a surveillance experiment not morally above (regenerative over degenerative) the source it satirizes, but perfecting the demented intention behind every Big Brother, Real World Orwell-with-a-UTI cow-chow television program, somehow magnanimously repairing that gap while bestowing challenges DJ scratched between They Shoot Horses, Don’t They? and Ballard’s High-Rise, The Truman Show meets early Polanski shorts, Squid Game via Trash Humpers, Titicut Follies as a Chuck Barris CIA reality show horrorscape only Lynndie England could jizz to, The Surreal Life in that word’s correct usage (wistful carnage), as morbidly poignant as a Kim Ki-duk film (and what was done to him) – all hosted by the lion-hearted Jason Goldstriker, our P.T. Barnum through hell, and, finally, these geniuses will pop the bells off their jester cap and choke us with them till a holoq holoq dick gag streams nonstop avant content transformed back into their brand of psychic driving, resuscitating an audience far healthier than before, the great millennial redemption trolled close as we can come to heaven, crawling out of the trash wrassle towards the first good ending (pure imagination) this generation’s turd-sucking game ever offered anyone. If our nostalgia is being renovated into a series of soft abominations, Fishtank subverts the subversion by turning reality shows good, a bulldozed illusion against the limp.

Let every reference be panned from my own upchuck at the recital, an organic and unplanned flow of assorted clips cherry-picked with an Artaudian slipstream self-eradicating thought itself, a labyrinth of trick endings presented with manic depressive aplomb. Hyde was the first to warp irony uniquely metaphysical, to make the laugh last until it hurt, introducing stakes to anti-comedy’s structure. Everything he does feels like an unhinged risk, sparring on a cliff, conceptual strike damage that lingers longer than most. After experiencing the first episode of World Peace, I had to turn off the lights and think. I had to configure each skit twice, waiting for my brain to become their eventual habitat. All the shows that came before gave me what they gave me mostly in the moment. Hyde lumbers in a notion, gathering you in its momentum. He’ll tailgate you past insomnia with an idea, quantum adrenochromatic dentistry, Schrödinger's cat melted robust. Recently, some Cranbrook professor (the school Eminem mocks in 8 Mile), looking like the pickled smirk of poltroon IDubbz yanked from an iron lung, addressed his own flak vest IQ with a torqued retarded misperception of Hyde’s alleged nihilism (nothing is more nihilistic than being a college professor at this date in time). He had interviewed a young Hyde and, we’re to believe, saved him from morphing into another smug Polonius, the diabetes breed of theoretical sap (Hyde was diplomatic regarding this sordid video, a generosity I am not strong enough to comprehend). It must be difficult for an academic to address the gnostic demiurges on each trembling shoulder. (In other videos, his daughter appears to be the one most fuckably lost, and I surmise the ole boomer may too avidly agree.)

 The twitter dunks that replace books will require a curator. Allow me to present a couple kidney stones of mine as an application. Jodorowsky and Arrabal’s Panic movement (MDE never dies, and neither will these two) gallops along openly dystopian options (an open refutation of its own ingredients) won by denial, a choose-your-own-adventure hive mind the winners get to live with. The great god Pan exits his dark phase into the baying populace and nooses a message (offering a free standup breakdown workshop no school could match, life advice between melees, winners nurtured career-wise, beyond the reward, exploitation flipped nice). Everyone’s been deputized by social media, their gum under the table spot lit. Texts to speech pump the Fishtank house day and night, a swapped loogie scroll, speakers blaring in every room. The message boards empty their best slurs and threats as if we’re on a banned forum from nineteen-ninety nine (occasional brilliant timing and one liners), followed by an elaborate, stimming twitch of sound effects anxiety attacked forever. The contestants arrive, a rhotacistic Andrew Tate fan, a fat gay, a wide commie bitch etc., bishops of the net. A dead-eyed Chinese girl / boy has written some camp counselor manual with kiddie diddle jokes (language / culture mishap or terminal violator?) that when repeated cause the other contestants to vomit at the thought of any potential underlying truths therein, a hysterical internet taboo youth reaction made halfway palpable by his odd demeanor and potential proximity to the subjects (feigned innocence?) of such a ghoulish theme. They awaken next to clones of themselves, coruscating night vision, cameras in the toilet. The house is demolished piecemeal (Hyde – appearing at random as Jason Goldstriker, eccentric host with a pressure cooker integrity, a stressed nobility – karate kicks a door in half; donning neon boxing gloves, he decimates a cupboard mid-conversation without acknowledging the reason or debris). They are told to play hide and seek while Hyde runs a weedwacker across the entire surface of their home (those who last endure forty-two days, a thousand hours), leaving without trying to find anyone, next time paying a crackhead picked up on the street twenty bucks to find someone. The looming threat of Frank Hassle builds its bar in a corner of the chat. Hassle, the action camera boogeyman, meme master slayer who took Coyle and Sharpe vox populi terrorization to its furthest extreme facing down an obese man’s gun without blinking, GG Allin of trolls, visits, dressed as a Hebrew Israelite, and removes a hammer from his pants. Freeloaders enter and exit, psychologically gaslighting. A producer named Ben steals the show with disdainful, demented Stephen Wright / Chef from Apocalypse Now campfire tales and mindfuck sessions. The set manager, Jet, sleeps in the basement, releasing Sharks, men in masks, to pour clam juice on people. The living room is Astroturf’d for a “camping” excursion, porta potty installed in a closet. A stoic Vietnamese comedian is introduced and breaks the tank with steel-nerved cigarette inflections (also rhotacistic). Hassle puts the house in ruins shy of three days, only to gloriously return weeks later, shaming and scaring off the fat gay (who over-slapped Airsoft Fatty with a weird, passive aggressive bloody knuckles maneuver) in under ten minutes. Shit is slid from cups into closets and investigated like a film noir with an equally existential outcome. Mattresses are severely pissed on. The Milkman pops up, singing about milk. A demon called The Entity prowls the halls at night. There’s an impromptu who-can-vomit-on-the-floor-challenge (multiple winners). Airsoft Fatty is examined on an operating table (kitchen counter). A baby goat is shoved into a room without explanation and stays around awhile, shitting pellets in the background. Chat pays to have beds removed, trashed dumped everywhere, specific screaming and gifts. My favorite: a spit-take challenge, with Hyde and the producers lurching goonishly from girl to girl, trying to get a genuine eruption from chat so a torrent can be expulsed and measured on their prisoner uniforms to see who won (sweepstakes at the morgue, I guffawed myself injured).

Four days in a room, the final hell: skinny little Letty – vamping for simps, willing to fellate the whole internet’s hate at eight frames a second, going hyper-menace like the end of Perfect Blue reran through a tactical pinup strut blue balling everyone in their hapless twenties, porta potty tease queen, some kind of mutant torso-exposer Lolita, now that childhood extends well beyond drinking age – is trapped in a marathon improv death competition with resilient Josie (note Hyde exchange a subtle, but integral look with his camera man during her self-deprecating essay), an orphically neurological set of bangs, an OCD virgin Plushie-clutcher, chill cutie mumble rap gesticulator, spawn of male obsession with the supposed innocence of the second sex. These contrasted icons of femininity break their necks together in a photo finish, destroyed by Hyde as he rips us through the Lamaze of a coughed-up culture, berating the measly viewer’s very participation and letting us sit in it, growing tense across our umbilical wallpaper on the same dark nutrient that must have sustained him far beyond driven, scratched off the blacklist and into self-made success, zero compromise. But wait, but then…“So shines a good deed in a weary world…” – the layers joyously deepen. 

The jester risks decapitation. The poet speaks from the wound where his neck was. Hyde squeezes bells from a split larynx until the rattle beguiles you.

ILLUSTRATIONS:
1. Sam Hyde
2. Eminem in 8 Mile
3. Panic Movement (Jodorowsky, Topor, Carrabal and others)
4. Satoshi Kon Perfect Blue

Sean Kilpatrick is an American writer and poet. Follow him on Twitter @Sean_Kilpatrick