Movies Til Dawn

Above is one of Stern's most vitriolic, funny and ill-timed rants, prompted by the occasion of his radio show going 'international'--by which he means it was picked up for markets in Toronto and Montreal. One of the delights of early Howard were the 'press conferences' he gave via satellite whenever he entered a new market. They were typically disastrous (intentionally so for the most part) and the Canada press conference doesn't really even get off the ground due to the insane and insulting 'welcome' that Stern gives to his Canadian audience. Enjoy.   Subscribe in a reader

On the cold morning of December 8, 1989, you might have turned on WXRK (K-ROCK) in New York or WYSP in Philly or some station in Washington DC and heard the above Howard Stern show. The Washington station had recently been added and Stern is already furious with the DC press and his own station for ineptitude, negativity and failure to recognize his genius. Gary Dell'Abate's theme song is still the Italian Tarentella--'Baba Booey' had yet to have come into being. Orders for  'US OPEN SORES'--Stern's then-current tape (available from 1-800-52 Stern)--have been placed but the tape is slow to arrive and listeners are complaining. George H.W. Bush was president, Bill Clinton was a complete unknown, Barack Obama was in college and Donald Trump was already a huge pain in the ass. The 80s had twenty-three days left in their existence. I was twenty-five and a half years old. Jesus.   Subscribe in a reader

It's been a delightfully irresponsible ten days since I last posted, most of which was spent adding up the years receipts, shopping for gifts nobody needs and feeling guilty about not writing posts or, for that matter, the script that I'm supposed to deliver yesterday. But now that another Xmas is behind us, I've come back to torture my readers (both of you) with a few more days of 1980s memories. Actually, all I'll be doing is posting a series of late 80s Howard Stern shows, which manage to evoke the era quite nicely given the ads, the subject matters in the news and the occasional bits of dead lingo that are heard (lots of things are 'bogus'. Remember 'bogus'?) Some enterprising Youtuber has begun to post a series of old shows from the late 80s which appear to have been in his cassette collection (remember cassettes?). They've so far attracted minimal hits but I'm grateful for his contribution as the current staff rarely seems to play the s...

Above is a trailer for a movie that will absolutely never be remade. It's so very 1986 that I had to include in my increasingly grating 'tribute' the decade that time (and sensible people) forgot. The movie, 'Soul Man', starred C. Thomas Howell as a white kid who gets into Harvard Law School but is denied financial support by his parents. In order to obtain maximum financial assistance, he masquerades as an African-American, a term that I hasten to add didn't exist at the time and would probably have sounded oddly racist to 1980s ears (just as 'black' is beginning to sound to our 21st century ears). I actually recall finding the movie rather funny and even having a little bit of social commentary threaded through it. As C. Thomas suggests, everyone will love him since 'it's the Cosby decade'. (If only he'd known what was going on in the Cosby dressing room.) At the conclusion of the trailer, the narrator intones: "He didn't giv...

Above is a very nice little portrait of the rise and rise of the President Elect, who I recall as a seminal 1980s figure representing everything hated about New York City--glitz, arrogance, boastfulness, disdain for outsiders. Apparently the 'Trump Brand' was on course from the very beginning of the Reagan years as witness the 1980 interview with...I forget who with, but you'll see what I mean. The comments section below the video are typically disgusting with one very funny exception:  'Jesus Christ, the dude had the same hairdo since 1985!' The 80s are dead...somebody bury them.   Subscribe in a reader

Nothing has a worse shelf life then TV commercials. Hopelessly wedded to the styles of the moment and featuring things that frequently no longer exist, there is no watching old commercials with anything but a wise-ass grin which, alas, soon begins to morph into a sadly resigned frown as we realize that pretty much everything going on in our current lives will soon turn into fodder for a future generations amusements. Newscasts are another victim of their own time period, with stiff and no longer authoritative news presenters telling us stories that, for the most part, are utterly forgotten. Old newscasts are yet another reminder that nothing truly matters. Great. Above I've posted a nice little reel of 1980s commercials and newscasts. Watch it at your peril. Movies also have a surprisingly short shelf life, thanks to outdated clothing, hairstyles, cars and silly telephones. This doesn't, however, apply to period pieces, in which case the costumes and gadgets are already sup...

Mary Beth Whitehead was a Long Island mother of two kids when she agreed in 1986 to be a surrogate mother for a New Jersey couple, William and Elizabeth Stern, who didn't wish to have their own baby due to Mrs. Stern's multiple sclerosis gene. Immediately upon giving birth to the baby who would soon be known to the world as  Baby M , however, Mary Beth Whitehead regretted her role in this once novel (and now incredibly not-an-issue procedure) and claimed the baby as her own. The tumult that ensued informed the entire country of the weird new world of surrogacy and certainly pleased the religious nuts on all sides of the spectrum. It also pleased Howard Stern who mercilessly used the tapes of a phone call between Mr. Stern and Ms. Whitehead as fodder for his then-new morning show. I remember lying around my bedroom, unemployed and recently graduated from college with a wonderfully useless B.A. in English, laughing mirthlessly at the disastrous triangle and the phone call that ...

What's with all the 1980s hate? Nobody seems nostalgic for the Reagan years but me. Is it the Michael J. Fox haircuts that everyone wants to forget? The emergence of Bon Jovi? The phenomenon that was 'Beverly Hills Cop'? The mayoralty of Ed Koch? I personally enjoyed every one of those cultural landmarks, including Reagan (who my father instantly called out as having Alzheimers, years before anyone else noticed). The 1980s were my college years. I met my first girlfriend, acquired a pot/cigarette habit (long since extinguished), developed my first healthy dose of cynicism toward the media and acquired a love and fascination with all things New York City-centric. My weekends were filled with walking tours, old movie-revival houses (remember them?), pizza places and coffee shops. Manhattan had bookstores on every corner, crazy homeless people all over the place, old tired and shabby men who lived in hotels in Times Square, pimps, hookers and Donald and Ivana Trump. Jesus. ...