From: jerod23@well.sf.ca.us (Jerod Pore)
Subject: ANSWER Me!
Organization: Whole Earth 'Lectronic Link
Date: Tue, 29 Sep 1992 19:31:28 GMT

This is it!  The choicest item I've received.  Posted 29 September, 1992.
Reviewed by Jerod Pore.  This document is ShareRight 1992.  You may
reproduce at will, as long as everyone else in the known universe is
allowed to reproduce this information as they see fit.  Extra credit
towards eternal salvation for citing the author and source.  Send your
zines to FactSheet Five   1800 Market Street  San Francisco CA  94102.
email jerod23@well.sf.ca.us. I posting this review everywhere because,
well, I feel like it.  YOU MUST KNOW ABOUT THIS PUBLICATION.


%Title:  ANSWER Me!     Volume 1  Issues 1, 2

%Descr:  I've had a hard time reviewing this zine.  I have this obsessive
need for everybody who can read English to read this zine.  That's right, I
mean *you*.  Run down to Tower Records, right this instant, or get out an
envelope and stuff it full of cash immeadiately!  There is no doubt about
it, ANSWER Me! is the greatest zine in the history of print.  Jim and
Debbie Goad, the husband-and-wife publishing team, *earned* the distinction
of the most ovary and balls laden social scientists on the planet.  Hell,
they even started a new and important branch of social science,
misanthropy:  the study of why people are so STUPID and why most of them
should die, soon.  Ask yourself if you are brave enough to go down Crenshaw
Boulevard in South Central L.A. to find Iceberg Slim and interview him?  To
spend the Fourth of July in Bakersfield?  To talk to the uzi-toting
Vietnamese gangs of Orange County?  To put interviews with David Duke AND
the Geto Boys AND El Duce of the Mentors AND Anton LaVey all in the same
magazine?  Could you drive for 24 hours up and down Sunset Boulvevard,
stopping only for coffee, pot, bad food, baseball and the occassional riot
and murder?  To print a photograph of one of Jeffrey Dahmer's carefully
disected victims?

It's no use.  My words are too lame.  I just have to give you some juicy
extracts.  First, from Issue #1 (with the pink, demonic cover).

"They [people] offend my five senses.  People SMELL.  They stink.  Their
offensive vapors disgust me.  Women smell of salmonlike vaginal odors.  Men
smell like moldy salami.  People douse themselves with perfumes and
colognes to camouflage their B.O.  This intensifies the stench.  Their
fluids repel me.  When they belch and fart in public, they demonstrate what
slobs they really are.
TASTE:  People have none.
TOUCH:  Don't come close and don't touch me.  No contact, or else."

"Yeah, I think, these people like big explosions and the concept of mass
destruction.  They celebrate America's killing capacity in a detached,
cinematic way.  They've been bombarded with violent images to the point of
insensateness.  But if they came face-to-face with some real carnage,
they'd spit up thier hot dogs and corn-on-the-cob.  Or at least they
wouldn't dig it so much.
"On California Avenue we encounter a dotted line of pink warning flames and
are forced to turn off.  We see fire engines and ambulances, but it ain't a
parade.  We park and investigate.
"Someone has been killed.  We mingle into the murky crowd which surrounds
the crash site.  The victim, whom the locals call 'Catfish,' lies crushed
and bloody under a convertible sportster.  People stand expressionless,
eyes fixed on the cadaver, while a tow truck is summoned.  We quietly ogle
for almost an hour, until it's ten minutes to midnight.  When workers
finally position the truck to hoist the car off the corpse, a group of
fireman lift canvas tarps, blocking the audience's view.
"Moans rise from the crowd.  'Shit! I can't see!' somebody whines.
"Three teenaged males crouch on their haunches, gazing at the wreckage as
if it were a TV screen.  A chubby Mexican walks past them and laughs, 'You
guys are really *into* this shit!'  They look up, smile, and continue
watching.
"This is the real thing, brains lying on the ground, and the spectators
love it.  I guess I was wrong.  They crave blood, whether sanitized on the
screen or warm and sticky on the concrete.  A human sacrifice delivered
them from evil (and boredom).  Staring at the dead body with passive
interest, we feel like true Americans.  That's what's so fucking scary."
[Two page centerfold of Catfish crushed beneath the car]

"_ANSWER Me!'s_ Twelve Steps.
"It's not my intention to make fun of people's pain, just their seeming
inability to get their shit together without social or spiritual crutches.
I consider all of these people better off now than when they were guzzling,
snorting, or slamming spikes into their arms.  I know firsthand that
alcohol is a MOTHERFUCKER.  It causes people to lose their inhibitions, and
from my experience, I prefer them with their hang-ups.  There's nothing I
hate more than a grinning drunk leaning in my face.  These slobs are
responsible for more than half of the fifty thousand yearly auto fatalities
in the U.S.  If one of you stewed creeps ever rams into *my* car, you'd
better take me out entirely, because I won't wait for the cops to get
there.  I'll bash your brains in with a crowbar.
"This is my main beef:  In its wholesale degradation of individuality, the
placement of 'principles before personalities,' the program decapitiates
the ego when it should be repairing it.  A sense of powerlessness and
avoiding responsibility is why most of these people became addicts in the
first place.  Instead of attackint the problem at its source, the program
merely substitutes one addiction for another.  Call it 'positive
powerlessness.'
"There's a distinction between healthy self-reliance and plain bull-
headedness which the Twelve-Steppers fail to make.  They view the human
personality in extremes, both of them lousy.  For them, it's either blind
defiance or total submission.  That's what _ANSWER Me!_ calls a 'fecal
duality' -- two shitty choices."

Issue 1 (mal)contents:  Interviews with Russ Meyer, Timothy Leary, Holly
Woodlawn, Kid Frost, Public Enemy and Iceberg Slim;  Articles about babies
being dirty; people ruin everything; chicks'n'cars; New Agers and Satanists
that show the devil as being as stupid as god; death and fireworks in
Bakersfield on the Fourth of July; driving more-or-less non-stop for 24
hours up and down Sunset Boulevard; masturbation in literary history;
Twelve Steps to Hell.  Fiction and funnier than hell filler.

From issue #2 (the eye-burning orange and yellow suicide cover):

"Men rule the earth.  They're in charge.  They make the important
decisions.  They're the bosses.  They call the shots.  They toss the dice
and collect the chips.  It's a man's world.
"That's why the world's so FUCKED UP!!!  Hairy balls cover the glove and
smother its potential.  Men flex their muscles and push us to the brink of
disaster.  They don't care if the world's in flames as long as they have a
beer and a hard-on.  What dicks!  What SMALL dicks!
"Look at my car!  Look at my gun!  Look at my guitar!  Look at the big fish
I caught!  Look at this big fat slab of aluminum siding!  PLEASE don't look
at my dick!"

"Who among us has not secretly desired to kill?  Murder is the ultimate
aphrodisiac, an icebreaker at parties.  To kill is to be fully alive,
conquering, dominant.  Wake up and smell the carcass.
"Murder makes the world go 'round.  We *need* murder.  Mathematicians
estimate that if current birthrates continue, in a thousand years each
human on earth will have less than a square *inch* of space.  Birth is more
harmful to the planet than death.  Given this scenario, sex could be seen
as more evil than murder, and TV programmers would have bewen right all
along.  In more enlightened times, killers would be called 'postnatal
abortionists,' 'anti-lifers,' or 'overpopulation police."
There follows 40 pages of profiles of the Goad's 100 favorite serial
killers and mass murders.  A handy legend is provided after each profile
with the proven and suspected body count, methodologies (strangulation,
stabbing and dismemberment, shooting, blunt instruments, arson,
explosivies, suffocation or drowning, slow torture), life history
(prostitute's son, animal torturer, postal worker, bed wetter), motivation
(Christianity, Satanism or Occultism, heard voices, cash) and post-mortem
fun (cannibalism, necrophilia, documentation of murders).  Includes many
icky photographs and, in the case of those who were executed, their last
words.

"This ain't Vietnam, it's Orange County, California, the USA's model
suburban jungle.  Widely considered the nation's most conservative county,
its numbingly faceless terrain is home to Disneyland, Rober Schuller's
Crystal Cathedra, and the Nixon Library.  Anti-homo evangelists and pro-
life terrorists are celebrities here.  Planes fly into John Wayne Airport.
Anaheim hosts the California Angels, owned by Indian-killin' buckaroo Gene
Autry.  Yippio-yi-yo-ki-ay!
"Everywher in Orange County looks like everywhere else in Orange County:
flat pavement, micro-malls, palm trees, and sunshine.  Hot, smog-glazed
boulevards stretch forever past trailer parks, gated condos, and beige
warehouses.  Dull pastels spring from nowhere and swallow the landscape.
It's a celebration of synthetic carpeting, plastic plants, and air
freshener.  Been to Denny's lately?  Then you've been to Orange County.
"Amid this conformist plendor live an estimated one hundred and thirty
thousand Vietnamese, the largest Viet ghetto outside of Vietnam.  Nearly
all are refugees, 'boat people' who fled after Saigon's fall.  They huddle
in the quiet towns of Westminster, Garden Grove and Santa Ana.  It's a
self-contained fishbowl of a world.
"Of course, Vietnam and America go together like soy sauce on a Twinkie.
This oriental-occidental clash sparks some weird fusions:  Buddhist
scriptures in hotel rooms, shaven monks at the laundromat, and giggling
Asian girls whizzing by in subcompacts with 'Are We Having Fun Yet?' bumper
stickers.  A home-grown music industry begets clumsy version of "Me So
Horny" and (what community would be complete without?) Elvis and Madonna
impersonators.  Free tabloids and newspapers, all in Vietnamese, scream
with headlines such as SAMMY DAVIS JR. KHONG THIEU NO and O TUOI 60, CLINT
EASTWOOD HET CON NGAU.  The Viet Vibe is strongest in Westminster's Little
Saigon, an explosion of fresh squid, herbal pharmacies, and laser
acupuncturists.  It's a briny stew to a Westerner, but admirably clean and
tidy.  Nice, bright, shiny and nice....
"Unless you count the sadistic, Uzi-Strapped street gangs.  Vietnamese
gangs differe radically from most street gangs.  They have a fondness, nah,
a *fetish* for high-caliber automatic wapons.  Second, they never calim
turf.  Member are free to leave or switch gangs at any time.  The only
condition for membership is a willingness to break the law."

"Four feet, six inches tall.  Punctuates words with fractured elfin giggle.
Unclear wheter Bushwick things he's a victim of society, family, or self.
No matter.  No social agenda, no slef-justification.  Shows little interest
in black history and the attendant dashikis or 'consciousness beads.'
Dismissed by other rappers as negative influence on community.  Could be
first dwarf with Top Thirty reocrd.  Lyrical topics:  copulating murder
victims, killing little girls, sexual prowess.  Threatens to shoot law-
enforcement officers.  Dangerous, rabble-rousing displys of bravado.  Pop
music's nadir."

Issue #2 Table Of Shit.  Gabfests:  Anton LaVey; David Duke; Al Goldstein;
El Duce; Geto Boys; Ray Dennis Steckler.  Diatribe:  The Family Must Be
Eliminated; I hate Women; I hate Men; The Underground is a Lie.  Verite:
Night of a Hundred Mass-Murdering/Serial-Killing Stars;  Ho Chi Minh's
Revenge; Mexican Murder Magazines.

%Info:   $4.50 ($2.50 at Tower Records) to Jim Goad  6520 Selma Avenue
Suite 1171  Hollywood CA  90028  76 and 100 pages, respectively.  No ads,
no typos, no bullshit!

Xref: sparky alt.zines:119 rec.mag:186 alt.flame:13136 alt.slack:2450 alt.stupidity:2758 alt.tasteless:10697 alt.whine:721 alt.evil:2601