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Astral Avenue 04
From Providence: The city that made 3/4 of the Talking Heads what they are
today!
it's....
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ASTRAL AVENUE
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Number 4 Feb 1987
BUMPER STICKER OF THE MONTH: "My other car is a piece of shit, too."
The 1st time, tragedy; the 2nd time, farce; the 3rd time, docudrama
CURRENT NEWS AND VIEWS
The Fortnight's Pen Pictures Illustrating the Dark and the Bright Side of
Civilization! The Search For Big Bucks
Reading time 11 minutes 35 seconds
Publisher's Note
At the Post Office, we mail our overseas copies of ASTRAL AVENUE as
"Printed Matter," to take advantage of cheaper rates. (Every cent counts
around here. Literally. We only finished out Christmas shopping by rolling
2000 pennies and cashing them in.) Are we lying to the postal clerks? AA is
produced, after all, on a Smith-Corona TP-II PRINTER, which makes it 'printed
matter,' right? But that's only stage one; after, the original is xeroxed...
Is xerox 'printing'? Or is printing only what happens at a printshop,
or at a Giant Conglomerate like Books And Sausages, Inc.? We suspect that
such questions are going to rapidly take on more importance, as desktop
publishing proliferates.
Today, semantics -- tomorrow, lawsuits!
AND NOW FOR SOMETHING COMPLETELY UNANTICIPATED
I had planned to subject you all to another of my stupefyingly cogent
essays, here in this space. But making my point required hunting down a
quote in COUNT ZERO, and when I couldn't find it after half an hour, I gave
up. Your reprieve is only temporary, tho. I'm still looking.
Meanwhile....
THE OLD SF THE NEW SF
-------------- -------------------
Frederick's of Hollywood..........Victoria's Secret
Elvis P. .........................Elvis C.
Ripple ...........................Bruce Juice
Popsicle .........................Tofutti
Mom 'n' Pop Store ................The Mall
Underwood.........................Laserwriter
Moon Landing......................Challenger
Eggbeater.........................Cuisinart
"Nerves"..........................Chernobyl
P. F. Flyers......................Reeboks
John Wayne........................John Waters
Marilyn...........................Madonna
Cadillac..........................Hyundai
Analog............................Digital
The Clap..........................AIDS
Einstein..........................Hawking
Vietnam...........................Nicaragua
Walter Winchell...................Hunter S. Thompson
"The Untouchables"................"Miami Vice"
The Crash of '29..................The Clash of '77
Hungary...........................Afghanistan
Velveeta.........................."Blue Velvet"
Stalin............................Gorbachev
Moxie.............................Slice
Nazis.............................Contras
Phlogiston........................Oxygen
Zap guns..........................Rail guns
Davy Crockett.....................Bernie Goetz
Valium............................Beta-Blockers
THE DEMISE OF YOUR BASIC ROCK LEGEND
1960's: Clapton is God.
1970's: Eno is God.
1980's: Prince talks to God.
Pet Peeve
I am going to share this with you because I am cruel and sadistic. Once
you are sensitized to this common grammatical error, you will hear it or read
it a hundred times a day. It will begin to drive you as crazy as it has
driven
me.
Pay attention.
The word "as" has many uses. One is to form similes. For example: "As
stupid as Reagan, Meese is more malevolent."
"As" can also substitute for "although." Consider the following
sentence: "Although he is stupid, Reagan is not THAT stupid." Make the
substitution, and this becomes:
"Stupid as Reagan is, he is not THAT stupid." The adjective moves up
front for emphasis.
No second "as" is necessary. There is no comparison being made. It
would be redundant to have it. YOU DO NOT NEED IT. DON'T PUT IT THERE.
TELL FRIENDS AND STRANGERS NOT TO DO IT. SOON, ENLIGHTENMENT WILL O'ERSPREAD
THE GLOBE....
Accepting The Award For Militaristic Propaganda Will Be....
It has recently come to my attention that the Cannes Film Festival
offers an award for "Supreme Intellectual Achievement." This is a marvelous
award. (I'm sure it sounds even better in French.) What I want to know is:
Why doesn't SF, the "literature of ideas," have such an honor?
What good do the Hugo and other awards do, even assuming they represent
honest polls? Novels with nothing in common are tossed into the same ring
and forced to fight it out. Why not establish different categories,
depending on the author's intentions and results?
Herewith, my divisions and
nominations:
SUPREME INTELLECTUAL ACHIEVEMENT: No award this year
SCALDING FEMINIST RHETORIC: Russ
WHIMSICAL LADIES' ROOM BANTER: Willis
SENSITIVE MALE INSIGHTS: Robinson (K.S.)
BIG COJONES: Pournelle
MOST TIMES THROUGH THE FOOD-CHAIN: Zahn
CLOSEST APPROX. TO ANTHRO. THESIS: Le Guin
LEGEND IN HIS OWN MIND: Robinson (S.)
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The Artist As RNA: Don't pro-scribe / Don't pre - scribe / Just tran - scribe
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***** CONTEST ***** CONTEST ****** CONTEST ****** CONTEST *
WIN embarrassing picture of The Publisher by being the first to finish this
story in 500 words or less, being careful to take account of Edward Teller
and of Jack and Neal driving through the test
range.
INSTABILITY
by Rudy Rucker and YOUR NAME HERE
Jack and Neal, loose and blasted, sitting on the ramshackle porch of Bill
Burroughs' shack. Burroughs is sitting catatonic in his orgone box, a copy
of the Mayan codices in his lap; he's already fixed H twice today. Neal is
cleaning the seeds out of a shoebox full of maryjane. Time is thick and slow
as honey. In the distance the shrimp-packers' noon whistle blows. Burroughs
rises to his feet like a figure in a well-oiled Swiss clock. "There is
scrabbling," he tells Jack. "There is scrabbling behind the walls. Bastards
made a hole somewhere. You ever read Lovecraft's 'Colour Out Of Space,'
son?"
"I read it in prison," says Neal, puffing up his chest with pride.
"Dig, Bill, your mention of that document ties in so exactly with my most
recent thought mode that old Jung would hop a hardon."
"Mwheee-heee-heee," says Jack. "The Shadow knows."
"I'm talking about this bomb foolishness," says Burroughs, stalking
stifflegged over to stand on the steps. "The shrimpers' noon whistle is
getting us all ready for WWIII, and if we're all ready for THAT, then we're
ready to be a great civilian army, yes, soldiers for Joe McCarthy and Harry
Anslinger, poised to stomp out the reds 'n' queers 'n' dopefiends. Science
brings us this. I wipe my queer junkie ass with science, boys. The Mayans
had it aaaaall figured out a loooong time ago. Now take this Von Neumann
fellow...."
"You mean Django Reinhardt?" asks Neal. "Or Wilhelm Reich?"
"William Bendix," says Jack. "Man, this is your life, their life, my
life, a dog's life, God's life, the Life of Riley. Von Neumann of the
desert, Neal, it was in the Sunday paper we were rolling sticks on in
Tuscaloosa, I got an eidetic memory flash of it, brother, just before you
nailed that cute Dairy Queen waitress who wanted to rim you with her
retrousse Joan Crawford nose."
=======================================
THANX, RUDY, for your contribution. We're sure that after our readers
ingest enough Industrial-Strength Brain-Drano, they'll be up to the
challenge. Results in future issues. Be there, or be square!
PEOPLE YOU NEVER SEE TOGETHER, BECAUSE THEY'RE REALLY ONE AND THE
SAME
Ed Bryant ..................... Father Guido Sarducci
Robert Heinlein ............... King Hussein of Jordan
Michael Bishop ................ Leonard Nimoy
Robert Silverberg ............. Martin Scorsese
ANSWERS TO CORRESPONDENTS ::: All inquiries on subjects of general interest
will be answered in these columns
BRUCE STERLING: ASTRAL AVENUE is your chance to offend your contemporaries
and coworkers.
-- We know Bruce speaks from his own tragic experience as Locker Room
Attendant under Vinnie O. of CHEAP TRUTH, but still we can't believe that
anyone would take umbrage at our harmless rag. The whole SF community is
one happy brotherhood of dedicated, selfless, joshing -- HOLY SHIT, someone
just crept up behind me and stuck a fuckin' machete in my back! Hold on, we
shall return...
COLIN GREENLAND: What's a quahog anyway?
-- We would call this a typical Anglo-American mixup, Colin -- except that
no one outside of the Northeast knows what a quahog is either. We're sure
that you were the only one honest enough to admit it. A quahog is a big
tasty bivalve indigenous to RI. It makes a great stew, or, if its guts are
taken out, cooked, mixed with a bread-stuffing, and reinserted into the
half-shell, a "stuffy." Its shells form nifty ashtrays or pseudo-gravel for
driveways. It is our pride and joy, kind of like the Queen's Corgis.
Several dozen stinking, dripping samples are on their way via mail to your
doorstep.
MISHA CHOCHOLAK (by the way -- it was just a flesh wound, folks) sends a
non-verbal response, consisting of a sheet of paper covered with gunpowder
burns, punctuated with bullet-holes, and bearing the name of this mag smeared
in what appears to be blood.
-- Thanx, Misha. We hope it's a compliment. (When they boost the reward for
her to $10,000, we have dibs.)
ORSON SCOTT CARD: ASTRAL AVENUE looks like it's going to be a wonderful
zine, but I couldn't find any information in it on how to go about
subscribing.
-- AA searches out people on its own, Scott, no matter where they hide, and
no amount of sweet-talkin' will get it otherwise. However, large sums of
money will secure it just fine.
YOSHIO KOBAYASHI: I like this kind of fanzine. -- And we like you, Yoshio.
We also like Yoshio's dot-matrix printer, which is really Hi-Quality.
MARC LAIDLAW ... a glimmer of light in the general blear! ... out of milk
here, but eggnog tastes just fine on shredded wheat... I would like to order
one of your reader's doze alarms altho fantasy does not strike me as the
greatest offender. I would reserve that position for ANALOG.
I don't buy the superiority of SF over fantasy. I think the two should
be considered not as separate entities, but as a ratio. We could talk in the
future of the F/SF ratio, and diagnose the field in these terms, just as a
doctor diagnoses one's immune status in terms of the ratio of helper T-cells
to suppressors....
Fantasy plays stupid, SF pretends to be a know-it-all. Each can be
equally irritating...
My personal favorite grafitto: METHADONE ZENSLAVES....
Your depiction of the timeshared world was dead-on. Authorship is a
lonely profession... Perhaps someday, on a computer net, half-a-dozen
writers can unroll the word-music from their fingertips simultaneously while
some Eno filters the sentences, weaves them together, and squeezes them into
mass-marketable little cubes. In that case, would you rather be the engineer
or the writer?
....Costello fan? Have you noticed the imagistic similarity of "Tokyo
Storm Warning" to Gibson's futuristic Japan?
The appearance of Annie Lennox on a Jo Clayton novel should hardly
surprise anyone -- I believe she's signed a contract with DAW to present a
showcase of tough feminist novels, "Annie Lennox Presents..."
... this trend in literature is simply the trickling down of corporate
advertising policies long apparent on TV and audible on radio... I truly
believe that one day soon we'll be wading through the latest Stephen King
by-product only to find that -- as the flashlight dies and the carbuncular
kid finds himself alone on the haunted path -- it's an ad for Duracell
batteries.
I'm hoping to get Emilio Estevez and Roseanna Arquette to star in my
next book, which will actually be an elaborate plug for Tiparillos.... MARC
LAIDLAW
-- Marc sent us a letter longer than the average issue of ASTRAL AVENUE, from
which we've excerpted. As to your points, Marc: I am an inveterate lover
and writer of fantasy, and have been the former for approximately twenty
years, long before the boom. I will let your ingenious analogy stand for my
feelings too. Not only has Costello doubtlessly read Gibson, but probably
also Mick Jones (cf: BIG AUDIO DYNAMITE's "Sony"). We look forward to
reading your sell-out novel, Marc. May we propose the title: "Desperately
Seeking Cash Before the Repo Man Comes"?
JOHN KESSEL: "Astral Avenue" should be on the Monopoly Board.
-- We are the property that pays low rents, throws noisy parties, leaves
empty beer bottles in the yard, and has a '69 Cadillac up on cinder blocks in
the driveway.
TERRY CARR: I thought the line "You can lead a whore to culture, but you
can't make her think" was sexist.
-- Terry sent a much longer letter, which will be featured next issue, but we
wanted to deal with this now. Terry, we generally favor Wit, Abrasiveness,
and Shock Value over Politically Correct Androgyny, but you've completely
misread us here. By "whore" we meant everyone from Eleventh Avenue street
tarts to Port Authority male hustlers, and we were using "her" in the
feminist sense of subsuming all humanity, just as "his" has been
traditionally used. So you see our little epigram was actually sly feminist
propaganda!
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ASTRAL AVENUE
Paul Di Filippo
2 Poplar Street
Providence, RI 02906
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