From Providence: The city that made 3/4 of the Talking Heads what they are today! it's.... ****************** ASTRAL AVENUE ****************** 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.) ------------------------------------------------------------ The Artist As RNA: Don't pro-scribe / Don't pre - scribe / Just tran - scribe ------------------------------------------------------------ ***** 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! ********************* ASTRAL AVENUE Paul Di Filippo 2 Poplar Street Providence, RI 02906 *********************