* Cover by David Sandlin

by bart plantenga

The Beer Mystic was born under unusual but [sur]real circumstances. I did actually walk under streetlights in NYC and they did give up the ghost and go out. This was long ago when exhaustion, disillusionment, poor eating habits, drink and nightclubbing probably had a mind-altering effect on my reality. It was also during this time that we quite coincidentally formed the legendary [at least in our own minds] NYC writing group, The Unbearable Beatniks of Lite, later just The Unbearables.

Over time my fiction, meta-fiction and non-fiction has appeared in over 200 sources. The Beer Mystic has appeared in a number of literary sources including Semiotext[e] SF. Most of these were in earlier pre-pubescent versions; the latest, final version now appears online in a unique format called the Beer Mystic Global Pub Crawl.

Beer Mystic Pub Crawl

• 40 sites host a Beer Mystic excerpt
• Each host includes the excerpt plus the URL to the BEFORE and AFTER excerpt. Browsing of host sites is also encouraged.
• People can click to specific excerpts or follow the path of URLs from beginning to end of Beer Mystic.
• A map shows the geographical location of each publication, chapter number and URL.
• Related Beer culture is also included.
• Listen to 3 DrinkDrankDrunk radio shows while you read.
• Read the related syndicated blog BEER MYSTIC Burp at Sensitive Skin.

Beer Perks

• Online participants benefit from this global interlinking by introducing new readers to you site.
• Creates new literary relationships across borders, oceans, beer preferences and styles. A pub crawl in the best sense of the term.
• Eventual paper and eBook publication of BEER MYSTIC.

About the Beer Mystic: A Novel of Inebriation & Light

“Top-fermented, with a good nose, an acrid middle, a dry finish — bubbly and acidulous in reserved measure –and with ambient yeast peculiar to the Lower East Side, the kind that turns concrete to dust. Plantenga is a poet and a prankster as well as a distinguished bathtub brewer. He deserves immediate investigation.”
• Luc Sante, Low Life

Time: The months around Black Monday, October 1987, date of the last financial crisis – the scent of Prozac perks the air.
Ambience: Grim Reagan-era tension between the Haves & Have-nots [& the Have-something-elses]. A swirling delusional state of drunken godliness and traffic gridlock as an urban metaphor for meditative clarity and epiphany all culminates in the Central Park Zoo as a city-wide dragnet including police dogs and helicopters closes in on the Beer Mystic.
Attitude: Anti-traffic, pro-beer, pro-darkness and libation, distrustful of dogs and their owners. Mystification is transformed into mysticism.

The Beer Mystic: Furman Pivo, a young, disillusioned lad, is probably in the wrong place with too much information and not enough ambition. He subsists inconspicuously in a shadowy zone, outside of the velvet ropes of the trendiest clubs. The velvet ropes are the contemporary equivalent of the barbed wire that separates us from them. He teeters on the ragged edge of schizoidal perceptions – The Man Who Fell To Earth as Charles Bukowski reading Albert Camus – and takes an offhand cue from the Situationists of lore, who believed the efficient organization of life as manifested by the logical grid of the city, the enhancement of traffic circulation and streetlight strategies to ensure safety are ultimately detrimental to dreams and human creative endeavors. Dreams are born in the dark.

Furman is originally from somewhere else Midwesternish, both immigrant and itinerant, with dreams fueled by listening to Patti Smith’s “Piss Factory” one too many times. He is a foot messenger and aspirations are soon whittled down to desperate gestures that cling to what is left of pride.

Furman, too geared up to stay “home,” wanders the forgotten seams of nocturnal New York to wear himself out so he can eventually sleep. He drinks to slow the world down, reverse the dizziness imposed upon us by the spin of our earth.

One fateful night Furman is offered a third way. He discovers himself drunk under a NY streetlight – when suddenly this streetlight goes out, on the blink, extinguished – Poof! – it’s dark.

Coincidental synchronicity: It happens again… and again and again. The unusual becomes the uncanny, and perceived synchronicity begins to acquire a mystical spin. He begins to believe he [or he + beer] may be the cause of these outages. The events are fixed somewhere between mystification and environmental consciousness. he discovers that the urban blight of excessive light has devastating effects on human dreams. As do automobiles and dogs, each killing in us the dreams we use to sustain our inner lives. \without dreams, denizens seek dream surrogates elsewhere in consumer activities: partying, drugs, shopping, status.

The Beer Mystic is born: Furman’s life gains mission. The battleground is laid out: Beer + him vs. light + cars… his life changes, gains substance, responsibility, and ultimately a quasi-religious fervor with a sense of mission.

The Beer Mystic eventually becomes convinced he has one week to live. He vows to make his “last days” a romp, a decidedly going-out-with-a-bang affair – a riot of automotive anarchy; Manhattan’s automotive infrastructure, by the end, is paralyzed in a state of [in]glorious, cacophonous gridlock – he has indeed for one instant mastered the significance of his insignificance. But, in the end, he does NOT die and this means he is in big trouble.

Magical realism? Speculative meta-fiction? Or something more hybrid, deceptive, transient, possible…

I have published 2 books of fiction: Wiggling Wishbone [illustrated meta-fictions] and Spermatagonia: The Isle of Man [a graphic novella]. My non-fiction book YODEL-AY-EE-OOOO: The Secret History of Yodeling Around the World received global attention in print, radio, television media from theNew York Times to Al Jazeera, from the BBC to ABC to NPR. I am currently working on a new novel, Paris Sex Tete and a new book on yodeling Yodel in HiFi.My radio show Wreck This Mess has been on the air on WFMU [NY], Radio Libertaire [Paris], Radio 100 and currently Radio Patapoe [Amsterdam] since 1986.

Beer Mystic: earlier publications / recordings / on-line
• Spoken Dub Manifesto, Jarring Effects Records / Semiotext(e) SF, edited by Rudy Rucker, Robert Anton Wilson & Peter L. Wilson, Autonomedia / Up Is Up, But So Is Down: Documenting New York’s Downtown Literary Scene, 1974-1992 (NYU Press) // Mississippi Review, Exquisite Corpse, Real Poetik, Smoke Signals, Chanticleer [UK], Sandbox, Curse, Murtaugh, Rant, Beet, Vokno [Prague], Red Tape, Public Illumination Magazine [Italy], Lowest Common Denominator, Frank [Paris], Ambit [UK], Unbearables2, Cassette Mythos, Snake [UK], Urban Graffiti [Toronto], Sarasota Arts Review, Plain Brown Rapport [Paris], National Poetry Magazine of the Lower Eastside, Nuyorican Live [Knitting Factory Records], Bil Bo K [Brussels], RATT, Global Hangover Guide [GE]…

“The Beer Mystic is so goddamn good at the end of the fog. The surreal, political & aesthetic levity talked to me in person. It sent me full speed into the outrageous black hole of Americana. I recommend it unconditionally; a wise, witty, poignant gift of real pleasure…”

• Larry McCaffery, Editor, Black Ice Books