According to Ass-Muncher: "The eighties are over, having brought us the Talking Heads, the Pixies, a Mets World Series victory, and nothing whatsoever more." Well. True to form, Ass-Bugger is right for about ten words and then he, ummm, blows up. Such as it is, Koko and Slothrop sat in an electric teepee for a few, smoked some cloves, and pose a humble reminder to our beloved mule of a few items he forgot to remember, but which have a tight connection to our hearts:
1. Ronald Reagan promises to “outlaw Russia forever”
2. The Smiths
3. Depeche Mode
4. Nintendo
5. Macintosh computers
6. Jean-Claude Van Damme
7. Boris Becker
8. Syndicated reruns of Three’s Company
9. Married with Children
10. Down by Law
11. Empire Burlesque
12. The Decalogue
13. Breakin’ 2: Electric Boogaloo
14. Crimes and Misdemeanors
15. Andrew Cooper’s only book published
16. Where’s the Beef? campaign
17. Alf
18. Michael Jackson
19. Roger Moore as James Bond, especially Octopussy
20. Charlie Sheen getting arrested in Wall Street
21. The Goonies
22. “Skateboarding is not a Crime” stickers
23. Glengarry Glenross
24. Julie Delpy’s first movie
25. Raging Bull
26. Andrew Dice Clay says "Oh!" a lot
27. Airplane
28. The Coen Brothers hit it big
29. Blue Velvet
30. Bull Durham
31. NWA
32. Mike Tyson
33. Pee Wee Herman: Big Adventure and Playhouse
34. Matt Davies got laid for the first time listening to Soft Cell
35. Piekarski turned his Polish ass American
36. Summer of Love (1987)
37. Raymond Carver’s Cathedral
38. Rushdie’s Satanic Verses
39. Haim/Feldman
40. Roger Federer manufactured by Swiss engineers
41. Double Dragon: a pizza parlor experience
42. The Simpsons
43. Nebraska, Born to Run, Born in the USA, Tunnel of Love, The River
44. Kareem Abdul-Jabar
45. Yankees did not win a single World Series
46. The entire Celtics basketball team
47. Rubik’s Cube christened in 1980
48. Madonna, especially True Blue
49. John Holmes in The Return of Johnny Wadd
50. VHS videotape
51. Arnold Schwarzenegger
52. Rambo
53. REM
54. Sampras and Agassi turn pro
55. Violent Femmes
56. Christie Brinkley
57. The Beastie Boys
58. Bon Jovi
59. INXS
60. Guns N’ Roses
61. U2’s Joshua Tree
62. Prince
63. The horror genre begins: Friday the 13th and Nightmare on Elm Street
64. Government and Binding Theory in syntax (wicked bad!)
65. Cosmos
66. “Pet Sematary, one of the first books I ever read. Mark it, Dude” – Krzys
67. Tom Wolfe
68. Eddie Murphy
69. Fraggle Rock
70. Inspector Gadget
71. The Smurfs
72. Blood Meridian
73. Raymond Carver’s Where I’m Calling From
74. Midnight’s Children
75. Confederacy of Dunces
76. Beloved
77. Lonesome Dove
78. Flaubert’s Parrot
79. Gorbachev
80. Berlin Wall, motherfucker
Ass-Headed Bottom: I owe our readers an apology: having cycled through Talking Heads '77 twice this afternoon, it's clear that the Heads were from the 70s, which leaves the 80s with only two worthwhile memories, namely the Pixies and the Mets' 1986 World Series victory. Some vandal, meanwhile, seems to have hacked our website with the above nonsense. This malefactor's list of golden 80s memories begins with a perverse encomium to our once-proud nation's second-silliest president, who made his name playing the stepfather of a monkey on TV, and kept it by blaming his crimes and blunders on defenseless Alzheimers. We wish we could excuse the rest of the list on like grounds, but I do suspect that there actually are those out there who fail to recognize that the 80s turned out lamer even than the 40s, yet lacked the excuse of the Second World War. Therefore let me point out that as critics we simply cannot afford to continue to esteem trash like Alf or Married With Children on the sole grounds that back then we had nobody better to fall in love with than Christina Applegate or some ugly puppet. Indeed, were I to compile a list of the failures and embarrassments of the 80s, I would be obliged to include many of these very items. I cannot recall, for example, more impoverished plots than those of Inspector Gadget or The Smurfs. I refuse to care for Julia Stiles as an infant, for Michael Jackson when he was only annoying and not yet vicious, or for Stephen King novels of any period. As for skateboarding, it should be a crime. Of course, there were some fine movies and so on made during the 80s, but really, it's a question of proportion: if you're reaching for The Goonies at #21, you've chosen the wrong decade to extol. Or just perform the simplest comparisons between decades: face Mike Tyson off against Muhammed Ali, or George Foreman, or either's pate-sweat...
Koko: Dammit, Bottom, half the contents of that list are brilliant because they are, and the other half are brilliant because they aren't. I mean, they really aren't. Alf, for example, was so preposterously, insistently bad that it poked a hole through the space-time continuum, wormed its way out the other side of life, and now churns itself over and over in the endless intestine of some burrito-chomping giant who lives quietly on a white dwarf in the Andromeda galaxy, watching us argue about Alf, thinking we're idiots. Sure, Alf sucked. So what? Whoever said something had to be smart or well made or even coherent to be wonderful? Sometimes, and it's a rare feat indeed, something sucks so completely, so perfectly, that it passes through stupidity and into genius. Alf did exactly that. So did the twelve goofy years between Carter and Clinton. You know it, I know it, and the burrito giant, who even now is getting episodes of Alf beamed directly at him, knows it. Yes, the 80s were crap, but they were magnificent crap, and I wouldn't trade their clunkers for all the Deadwood episodes on Earth. Sometimes bad art, bad life, bad culture is too precious to do without. But lest this turn into another Schillerfest, how about we argue further over Mets-Yankees this evening? Yes, yes?
Slothrop: True and wise, Koko. Also true that Ass-Head and his misunderstanding of Alf just got sodomized by Frank. He had it coming. May I add that all week long Frank Sobotka was listening Empire Burlesque; if you will it, is no dream.
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