Bat fish cluttered
J. G. BALLARD:The Illuminated Man, BF&SF:14 Her lashes fell over her eyes.I was on the hillside, she said. “By the smooth black barrier.” He started down the basement stairs and looked down just in time to prevent himself from taking the step that would have been his last. A cold sweat broke out on his forehead and his eyes widened in horror. There, on the next step, right where he would have put his foot down, was a banana peel. He could hear his skull cracking open on the concrete floor of the basement. He could see his brains oozing out. He showed them to me, Hitchcock said, because I asked him to. He was very co-operative, in spite of his contempt for them, which... he made absolutely no attempt to conceal. He said—almost in so many words—that you are doing everything you can to suppress them. He wasproud of it!” So what do you think? Marion was saying. You think theyd go well together?” The escalator seemed to be traveling more rapidly, the pitch of the steps to be more pronounced. But he no longer trusted the evidence of his senses. The program director, Alto and one of the comperes stood in front of her, banging on the rail and trying to attract her attention. But Madame Gioconda failed to notice them. Head back, eyes on the brilliant ceiling lights, hands gesturing majestically, she soared along the private causeways of sound that poured unrelentingly from her throat, a great white angel of discord on her homeward flight. Mr. Egan shares in the responsibility for the affair. Surely you dont deny the fact. Alto accepted the rebuke silently; he reproved himself as much as Mangon did for selling out to Video City. In his four years there his output of original ultrasonic music consisted of little more than one nearly finished symphony— aptly titledOpus Zero—shortly to receive its first performance, a few nocturnes and one quartet. Most of his energies went into program music, prestige numbers for spectaculars and a mass of straight transcriptions of the classical repertoire. The last he particularly despised, fit work for Paul Merrill, but not for a responsible composer. Except that they would get the credit. But that was how it went. Therapy, therapy, that was all the public thought about. How many articles in general publications did you ever see about test consctructionists? Let alone movies or TV.I do the work, others get the credit, Dr. Colles thought with some bitterness. You see, Mangon, Hector and I are very old friends. You know what I mean, of course? She waited for Mangon, who had swept out a thousand honeymoon hotel suites, to nod and then continued, How well I remember that first season at Bayreuth, when Hector and I…” A typical case is described by an Arizona gentleman who writes that he was recently notified by a machine of the Internal Revenue Service that he had not paid his taxes. In fact, he had paid his taxes and had a canceled check to prove it. And so, John said, you decided not to turn the Japanese girl over to the police.” Fine, Casey said. And whats that, under the stairway?” It is unfair but there is nothing I can do about it. I am aching to get my hands on them. When the twiddles circuits failed, I cracked. I fell apart, lost faith in it all. For I had just found what I thought was a basic error in theory. I died, I vanished . . . Take a word. Take two: The Media.Hollywood and The Networks and MadAve, Time-Life,PR, gold platters (and how presidents get elected). The British sometimes call it Admass. Above and below are two kinds of Media men. Tuli Kupferberg is a Fug. Harvey Jacobs is Public Relations Manager for ABC-TVs (satellite) Worldvision network— an Opinion Maker in the Executive Suite of the most assiduously Massaged Medium of them ally a veritable barterer of the Mechanical Bride, a subterranean stimulator, subliminally blowing other-directed minds all the hell over the Total Surround. The astonishing thing about Harvey Jacobs is thathe has not allowed his medium to become his message. He does not even wear shades: not even to watch TV. Or movies. But he did not say it. Thinking it to himself, he realized how futile it was to speak of fairness to these men. And besides, by what right could he ask for fairness—an ideal— from the real world?.
