"MTV created a space where we felt like we all went to the same school, and I like to call that school MTV high. We might have been different classes and been in different cliques..."

"... the hair bands, the punkers — but we all were aware of each other and have an understanding of each other. Every time see a teenager walking down the street in an MTV t-shirt, I feel so proud because I know they're picking up on the passion and the energy that got MTV off the ground."

Said Martha Quinn, commemorating the beginning of MTV, 45 years ago today.

Everyone always likes to say the first video was "Video Killed the Radio Star," but what was the next video and the next? I found out:

"So much of what we take for granted today — from our meritocratic rat race to our gentrified neighborhoods to our culture of overwork, fitness training and foodie obsession — was born in the yuppie-made 1980s...."

"After the Carter and Reagan administrations loosened the regulations governing Wall Street, finance began to generate a greater share of profits than manufacturing or services. Investment banks and law firms now shaped the fates of the corporations they had once served. As America hitched its fortunes to finance, those banks and firms began to chop up, spin off, merge, offshore or otherwise squeeze short-term value out of the nation’s legacy corporations. But to do it, they needed legions of employees to handle the grunt work: the proofreading, drafting and document review that kept the takeover machinery in motion.... Once they were hired, aspiring yuppies were expected to work more hours, often on smaller and less intellectually demanding piecework. They were also given less meaningful training, all for narrower chances of promotion to partner. As the professional world was beginning to diversify, it became an increasingly miserable place to work.... The exhausting meritocratic contest that furnished them with nice apartments and private-school tuitions had real psychic costs. Between the long hours and the constant pressure for upward mobility, few yuppies actually felt triumphant. They felt burned out. Yuppies were the first class of young people to be drawn into the sweatshop of the meritocracy. Now is the time to rethink the bargain they made...."

Writes history professor Dylan Gottlieb, in "How Yuppies Changed America" (NYT).

"She rekindled the relationship at the funeral" — for his wife of 56 years — "They started spending time together.”

From "Iran-Contra figures Oliver North and Fawn Hall secretly marry 40 years after scandal: report" (NY Post).

Hall had been married Danny Sugarman, the manager of The Doors, from 1993 until his death in 2005.

"There wasn't, like, a moment in the '80s that wasn't super cool to be me. And then dark music."

"Bum, bum, bum, bum... I lost control of my anonymity, and it was devastating. I don't want to come off like a victim in some way...."

"How ’70s Rockers Rebooted for the ’80s... The stars who’d made it big the previous decade had to embrace new instruments and MTV or risk being left behind."

This is a great article in the NYT by Ben Sisario, and this is a gift link so you can get to all the many fine elements of the article, which I will hint at with this excerpt:

“Everybody wanted to sound more modern,” said Trevor Horn, who produced key ’80s albums by Yes, Grace Jones and Frankie Goes to Hollywood. “And drum machines and synths sounded more modern.”... Yes hired Horn... to produce... the band its first, and only, No. 1 hit.... 

That single was “Owner of a Lonely Heart,” with a sharp-edged guitar riff and a dreamy irresistible hook. Horn was intrigued by the short synthesizer interjections on the demo version by Trevor Rabin, the group’s newest member; Horn used the Synclavier keyboard — then the cutting edge of studio tech — to turn them into jarring multi-layered sonic goblins that seem to leap from the shadows.

The 3 phrases in boldface can be clicked on, at the article link, and you'll hear exactly what they refer to. Unlike the link on the song title — which goes to the music video on YouTube — I wasn't able to copy the code and make it work here. So please click on the gift link if you want to know what counts as "sonic goblins" in the mind of Ben Sisario.

"People went around saying, 'He who dies with the most toys wins'.... People said it in a way that suggested they didn’t really believe it..."

"... but it wasn’t clear then what they really did believe. The culture didn’t seem to be offering many alternatives. You can dispose of discretionary dollars in various ways. If you were a yuppie, you spent them on yourself. You consumed conspicuously. That’s what the yuppie-haters hated most about the yuppies. You bought things you didn’t need and paid extra for the brand: Sasson jeans, Frette linens, Cross pens, Rolex watches, Perrier water, Aprica strollers. Faux high-end imports emerged—Grey Poupon mustard (then owned by RJR Nabisco), Häagen-Dazs ice cream (invented in the Bronx).... Food became a highly cathected consumable.... The more entrepreneurial yuppies colonized abandoned row houses and warehouse loft spaces, and used some of their leisure time to work out. Fitness and self-care were big.... The yuppie strode forth from the economic wreckage of the nineteen-seventies: two oil crises, mortgage rates at thirteen per cent, a huge loss of manufacturing jobs in major industries like steel and cars, a stock market in the doldrums. When the economy recovered, in the early nineteen-eighties, it was easy for people to feel rich without feeling guilty. They had seen what it was like to worry about money. Spending it felt liberating...."

From "When Yuppies Ruled/Defining a social type is a way of defining an era. What can the time of the young urban professional tell us about our own?" by Louis Menand (The New Yorker).

"Biden seems bright, tough and bold. Also very, very scary. One might even say terrifying. He has Rod Serling's upper lip..."

"... which is no shortcoming, but suggests maybe he should only be president of the Twilight Zone.... The candidate appears to be overadvised and suffering from excessive consultitis. Worse, he comes across on TV as someone whose fuse is always lit. Unless we ditch television for the remainder of the campaign, Biden will never be president...."

Wrote Tom Shales in a July 3, 1987 Washington Post piece called "The Diverting Democrats."

I'm reading that today because I was rereading parts of Richard Ben Cramer's book, "What It Takes" (commission earned). We were talking about plagiarism and trying to remember the details of Biden's problem internalizing the rhetoric of Neil Kinnock, and I knew the answer was in that book.

"If you lived through the 1980s there’s a decent chance that, at some point, you crossed paths with raspberry vinaigrette, pesto, and arugula."

"By the end of the decade, they had become part of the atmosphere hanging over American society, like a giant cloud of Aqua Net holding up so many teased bangs. Many loved these foods; many others derided them as pretentious yuppie garbage. But the source of their popularity, at least in home kitchens, was all but undisputed: The Silver Palate Cookbook, originally published in 1982, more than 2.5 million copies sold. The cookbook was a product of its time and place: New York’s Upper West Side in the late 1970s and early ’80s. A world synonymous (at least in the mind of the average moviegoer) with Woody Allen and then Nora Ephron. You can bet that before they were forced to play Pictionary at that dinner party, Harry and Sally were fed salmon mousse and chicken Marbella or maybe osso bucco. (Ephron was a Silver Palate fan.)"

From "‘The Silver Palate Cookbook’ Changed Home Cooking (and Pesto Consumption) As We Know It/Published in 1982, it brought verve to entertaining and taught a generation of American cooks to trust in bold flavors, fresh herbs, and the joys of improvisation" (Eater).

Yeah, I had 2 "Silver Palate" cookbooks on my kitchen cookbook shelf for more than 30 years. In fact, they made such a permanent impression on my eyeballs that I just went over to look at them. But no, they're gone. Some time in the last 10 years, I realized I hadn't opened them in more than 15 years and gave them the heave-ho. Maybe it was back in that year when we were all looking at things and asking if they "sparked joy." You can ask if it's time yet to oust that sparking-joy book, but that was never anything but a Kindle text. 

Here's the Kindle text of the "Silver Palate Cookbook." It's only $3. Eat like the 80s.

What to watch from the Criterion's "80s Horror" collection?

 

You can see the huge set of titles here. 

We chose the one where Hugh Grant says "I hear you're having trouble with a snake."

Pagan vampires, a two-hundred-foot worm, and a profusion of phallic imagery collide in Ken Russell’s typically outré take on Bram Stoker’s most infamous novel. On an excavation in the English countryside, an archaeologist (Peter Capaldi) uncovers a mysterious skull that he comes to believe belonged to the D’Ampton Worm, a mythical snake-like creature thought to have been slain long ago by an ancestor of aristocrat James D’Ampton (Hugh Grant). The strange presence of the enigmatic Lady Sylvia Marsh (Amanda Donohoe) and a series of unexplained disappearances soon hint that the legend of the D’Ampton Worm may be far from dead.

Did we laugh? Of course, we laughed!

Why didn't I see it back when it came out (in 1988)? I loved Ken Russell. "The Devils" was on my list of 5 favorite movies. And, as a law clerk, I'd worked on the case about "Altered States." But I was influenced by the reviews of the time. Which ones, I can't remember, but Roger Ebert wrote:

People expect something special from Russell, whose inflamed filmography includes such items as “Women in Love,” “The Music Lovers,” “The Devils,” “The Boyfriend,” “Tommy,” “Altered States,” “Crimes of Passion” and “Salome’s Last Dance.” Every one of Russell’s films has been an exercise in wretched excess. Sometimes it works. Russell loves the bizarre, the gothic, the overwrought, the perverse. The strangest thing about “The Lair of the White Worm” is that, by his standards, it is rather straight and square. 

Not enough wretched excess!

"A poor town in an empty part of Texas. A famous artist with a prominent following comes to town, buys up old buildings and cheap land..."

"... and builds museums full of crushed cans and boxes, scattered over concrete floors, inside buildings that are forever 1984 like Michael Graves in formaldehyde. Money comes in, the wealthy, the celebrities. There are pilgrimages to visit empty glass sculptures resting inside overheated warehouses surrounded by dry, hot grasslands. The artist dies, filled with resentment and anger, but somehow leaving behind a legacy, with a lot of debt, which will someday turn into hundreds of millions and enrich foundations, museums, his progeny. And the silent objects (also called ART) wither and decay, much like the state and the nation that surrounds it, a place of guns, oil, fanatic politics, speculative housing and the worship of junk as meaningful art."

So writes a commenter named Harding Dawson at "What Would Donald Judd Do? The artist turned the remote town of Marfa into a cultural pilgrimage site. Three decades after his death, the foundations charged with preserving his complicated legacy are debating how to move forward" (NYT).

Somebody else says: "I say surrender it to the elements. I would love to visit when nature has won out. It's gorgeous desolate landscape and didn't need Judd's imposition."

Here are my TikTok selections of the day. 8 of them. Let me know what you like best.

1. A demonstration of skill.

2. Sister Monica — an Episcopal nun — describes her mother's Southernisms.

3. He's got a message for architects.

4. The paradise that was high school in the 80s.

5. When a Gen Z person is kidnapped.

6. "If you're not in medicine: Try reading this...."

7. A straight man who just wants to wear high heels and a skirt.

8. "Hey, bear. It's okay."

I especially like the 1991 segment — mixing the "hello"s from "Smells Like Teen Spirit" with Uncle Leo's "hello" and the "hello" from Jerry's girlfriend's bellybutton.

"The Seinfeld Theme Mixed With A Hit Song From Every Year Seinfeld Was On TV": 

"As an indoor kid at heart, it took me a while to warm up to being outside all day every summer."

"I could easily fill an entire day reading library books, creating new outfits for my Barbie out of candy wrappers, or practicing crochet chains with the giant ball of yarn my grandma gave me. Inside was full of wonder, mystery, and the life of the mind. Outside was a hellscape of insects, rusty nails, and scraped knees.... Wildness can exist indoors, but it’s not as fun.... Indoor creativity pushes the boundaries of parental patience far quicker than outdoor wildness. In the past year, as we received the indoor-kid dream directive to stay inside, I’ve never felt lonelier, less focused, or more anxious.... I’ve started to look back on those childhood summers with more fondness, making promises to my future self that I would recapture those fleeting moments of freedom whenever possible.... I’ve watched enough true-crime documentaries to want to keep my goddaughter heavily chaperoned until she turns 50, but after the year we’ve all had, I hope there’s some room for kids to take a cue from the 1980s and explore this summer."

From "Those Were the Days of Our Lives This generation will never know the true freedom — and neglect — of being an ’80s kid" by Danielle Henderson (adapted from her memoir "The Ugly Cry: A Memoir").

Take a cue from the 1980s.... 

Now, people who grew up in the 80s are talking about it the way we Boomers have been talking — since the 80s — about growing up in the 50s.

One day the Alphas will look back on the 20s, that golden age of freedom. I hope. But they've got to get outdoors, now, before it's too late.

"We've been educated, we've got liberated/And had complicating matters with men.../Oh we burned our bras and we burned our dinners/And we burned our candles at both ends..."

 

"K.T. Oslin... has died, according to a statement from the Country Music Association. She was 78. Oslin became the first woman to win the CMA Award for song of the year... for '80 Ladies.'" (CNN). She won the award in 1988.

You can read the full lyrics here. 

"I get your point, but fresh and Joe Biden are two things that just don't go together."

Says mezzrow, reacting to my reaction to Blogger telling us about its new interface and saying it has "a fresh feel."

I'd said: "Rereading this I paused to visualize 'a fresh feel.' Somehow Joe Biden was in the picture." I was picturing his various old-mannish gropings of women and girls. (This one is fake.)

Mezzrow continued: "Does anyone use 'fresh' as a synonym of 'boorish and handsy' any more? I understood immediately, but then Althouse and I are in the same age cohort."

That makes me old enough to remember 1985, and this is as fresh as ever:



Wikipedia: "The song introduced a new meaning to the word 'fresh,' meaning 'good.'"

The top definition for "fresh" at Urban Dictionary is "This word originated during the 80's hip hop era in New York hip hop culture. It was used to describe something new or nice." So Kool & the Gang's usage is also historical.

But Urban Dictionary does treat "get fresh" like part of the living language: "The act of a guy or girl, (commonly used when describing a guy) making (or attempting to make) covert advances towards the object of their affection, typically to illicit sex later on, or 'test the waters' for further advances, typically physcial [sic] in nature." ADDED: I think they meant "typically to elicit sex," but you might elicit illicit sex.

1986.

I've got to thank George Conway for his "There is no one to stop Trump now" WaPo column.

I've never given a damn about George Conway and his predictable anti-Trumpism, and, in fact, I have yet to read "There is no one to stop Trump now." But I'm delighted with his column, because I read the title and said "What's that song? Nothing's Gonna Stop Us Now?" And 2 seconds later, I had my memory refreshed: "Oh! It's Starship!" And I was mesmerized by this trip back to 1986 (replete with stuff from the romcom "Mannequin"):



It's a festival of 80s hair — wet and dry. The notion that nothing is going to stop women who are mannequins is... interesting. I've never seen the movie, but in the video, the love of a man brings mannequins to life. One of the women is Grace Slick and one is so good looking that I thought Grace Slick should have had the clout to demand that in her videos there can be no woman who is better looking than she is.

Researching the underlying movie, "Mannequin," I see that other woman is Kim Cattrall (familiar to me only as Samantha on "Sex and the City"). I guess the movie came first and Grace was going along with a package deal. I see: "At the time, [the song] made the 47 year old Grace Slick the oldest woman to have a number-one single in the United States, surpassed only by Cher, who was 52 when her song 'Believe' reached #1 in early 1999."

Imagine the thrill of achievement to be in a place where you are surpassed only by Cher.

Imagine the thrill of achievement to be George Conway.... Wait. Let me skim this thing so I can get out of this post quickly now that I've had my 80s-retrospective fun.

When the subject of Attorney General William P. Barr comes up these days, it’s hard not to think of John S. McCain. Not the late senator, mind you, but the USS John S. McCain, the naval destroyer named after his father and grandfather.

That's hilariously nonsensical. Of all the things I find hard not to think about when I think about Bill Barr, the USS John S. McCain is nowhere on the list. Anyway, that turns out to be about how the ship was once kept out of Trump's line of sight, not because Trump demanded it, but "[a]nticipating Trump’s narcissistic whims and desires." So, you get it, that's what Barr must be doing.

I thought this column was going to be about how the Democrats have no one who can stop Trump from getting reelected. I was surprised to think Conway would concede that. He didn't. Now, I will go back to my original position of never reading Conway columns.

"President Trump’s political operation headed into 2020 with nearly $200 million on hand..."

"... according to party officials, giving him a financial war chest that vastly outstrips the resources of his Democratic opponents weeks before primary voting begins. Trump’s reelection campaign, the Republican Party and two joint fundraising committees together raised a record $154 million in the final three months of the year, party officials told The Washington Post, a massive haul they said was fueled by backlash to the House impeachment of the president. Of that, more than $72 million was collected by the Republican National Committee, driven in part by big checks from wealthy donors — a sign of how much of the moneyed class that shunned Trump in 2016 is now embracing him. Small donors also continued to give to the party and to Trump’s reelection campaign, which pulled in $46 million, far outpacing leading Democrats vying for their party’s nomination. Among them, the biggest fundraiser last quarter was Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.), who raised $34.5 million. Since the impeachment inquiry began in September, the president’s campaign and RNC gained 600,000 new donors, officials said. In all, Trump and the RNC together scooped up a staggering $463 million in 2019, party officials said. In comparison, then-President Barack Obama and the Democratic Party raised roughly $220 million in 2011, the year before his reelection."

WaPo reports.

The news this morning is making me think of 1984. Not the book. The election. Remember that?



Biggest difference: The ex-Vice-President who got his party's nomination to fend off the hated, show-biz, imposter President... was so fresh-faced!

By the way, that man still walks the face of the earth, and he's not all that much older than Biden.

ADDED: Elizabeth Warren has finally revealed her 4th quarter number — $21.2 million, down from $24.6 million in the 3rd quarter and less than the others in the top 4.

When you say "Bud."

I'd like to know the story behind that commercial. Were they trying to do for beer what "I'd like to teach the world to sing" did for cola?



Why did I dig up that old Bud commercial? I was reading last night's "café" comments out loud when I came to some ravings about me, including "When you say Althouse, you've said it all free speech-wise."

Meade mused: "What is that commercial?"

I said: "When you say... you've said it all... When you say... Schlitz???"

Meade seemed to think I'd nailed it, but Google says, no, it's Bud.

It's such an absurd concept: "When you say Bud, you've said a lot of things nobody else can say. When you say Bud, you've gone as far as you can go to get to the very best. When you say Bud, you've said the word that means you like to do it all."

From a 2016 NPR interview with the artist behind "When You Say Bud," Steve Karmen:

KARMEN: I wrote the entire lyric. I did the orchestration. I'm, you know, a composer. I do my own productions, my own orchestrations. And that went on the air. And it ran for eight years with that lyric. (Singing) When you say Budweiser, you've said it all. And then the agency rewrote the lyric. (Singing) For all you do, this Bud's for you. And that has been on the air, basically, ever since in various different forms.

SIEGEL: How do you feel about that? I mean, this is your creation. This is your song. It's also a beer commercial. Do you feel as protective of it as if it were an aria in an opera that you did?

KARMEN: I do. I do. You know, the difference between a symphony and a jingle is symphony writers use more paper.... It's just as hard to write a jingle.

Karmen lets us know that the lead singer in the Bud commercial is Valerie Simpson — Valerie Simpson of Ashford & Simpson: "Valerie wrote 'Ain't No Mountain High Enough,' 'Let's Go Get Stoned,' 'Solid As A Rock.' I mean, Valerie is a most prolific songwriter. But this was - you know, this is how she made a living before she did that."

Ah, let's remember "Solid":



I love the 80s styles in that — mullets and all. By the way, "Is the mullet coming back...?..."

BONUS: When you care enough to give your very best...



Karmen sued (and won).

"She is standing slightly behind him, considerably more sombre. In buttoned-up black, her long, dark locks tumbling in abundant waves, she is Botticelli’s Venus as channelled by Elvira, Mistress of the Dark..."

"... an icon of the Calabasas Renaissance. Her pose is stiff, her jacket sleeves pushed up in a gesture of can-do, eighties-style power-dressing."

A description of Kim Kardashian, in "Kim Kardashian Meeting Donald Trump in the Oval Office Is a Nightmare We Can’t Wake Up From" by Naomi Fry in The New Yorker.

I blogged that because when I read it I got a twinge of envy from the realization that if I'd wanted to write a description, I wouldn't have come up with those details.

Great meeting with @KimKardashian today, talked about prison reform and sentencing. pic.twitter.com/uOy4UJ41JF

— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) May 30, 2018

I mean, there's the photo. We can all see it, but can we string together words like that? And yet, what is it about those 2 sentences that makes me think other people are the writers — the writer writers?

1. "buttoned-up... tumbling... channelled... pushed up" — we're entertained with swirling action, even though it's a static, formal, boring posed photograph. How did Fry see all that stuff? How did she arrange it so it's up, down, around, and back up again.

2. We've got cultural references: Botticelli’s Venus (I know what that is) somehow merged with ("channelled by") Elvira, Mistress of the Dark (which I would have thought I knew who she was but the reference to the Calabasas Renaissance is telling me I am an idiot to think that).

3. Those sleeves! So much happening there: "her jacket sleeves pushed up in a gesture of can-do, eighties-style power-dressing." I would have thought the can-do gesture was rolling up your sleeves, and that bunchy push-up look was something casual that people did in the 80s because of Don Johnson on "Miami Vice" and that the power dressing of the 80s was something else, something more northeastern and businesslike, not a Floridian police-work fantasy.

4. Those "long, dark locks tumbling in abundant waves." I would not have dared to use all those words. Like Coco Chanel with her "Before you leave the house, look in the mirror and take one thing off," I'd have looked at that sentence and felt obliged to strike one word out. One or three or four. And I couldn't bring myself to call hair "locks." Especially near "waves." I'd get influenced by the wateriness of "waves" and think of the locks in canals.

5. Why are we talking like this about a woman? She's a real human being. Is it okay to make her into some sort of clusterfuck of female iconography? I'd get stalled in some vague ethical cogitation and not save my time for putting out crafting that kind of prose.