A movie so big it had to be filmed in color!

The Naked Gun arrived in theaters in 1988 and became the standard by which I judged all other comedy. Leslie Nielsen redefined the term 'straight man', taking it to such deliriously absurd heights I thought I was going to throw up I laughed so hard.

Frank (Leslie Nielsen) to Jane (Priscilla Presley):
"Jane, since I've met you, I've noticed things that I never knew were there before... birds singing, dew glistening on a newly formed leaf, stoplights."

I've seen it probably a dozen times since and it still makes me laugh out loud. Credit has to be given to the producers, the supporting cast (George Kennedy take a bow) and especially the writers, but without Leslie Nielsen I don't think this boat floats. He's the glue that holds the whole improbable thing together. His comic timing was peerless and he always knew exactly what the character required.

Two more Naked Gun movies were made after this and there were rumors for years of a fourth which never materialized.

RIP Leslie Nielsen

Naked Gun - trailer

Listen to that Steve Stevens highway blues solo. Painfully primal. Utterly compelling. Makes me break out in a whiplash smile babe.

Hard to know what to say about Brazil, Terry Gilliam's homage to George Orwell, except that I never seem to get enough of it. Though it seems "futuristic" Gilliam intended it to be contemporary. He called it "1984 for the year 1984" and it doesn't take long to figure out what he means. From the almost casual acceptance of random bombings to the loss of personal liberty there isn't much in this black comedy that was unfamiliar to audiences then or now. It's not important what city the story is based in just as it's not important exactly what the date is (for the record it's 'Somewhere in the 20th century, 8:49 p.m. Wednesday'). What is important is Gilliam's razor sharp critique of a world gone mad: where fathers take a break from torturing suspected "terrorists" to play with the kids and bureaucrats get offended when a widow won't accept a check in lieu of her missing husband, who was abducted and murdered by the police due to a paperwork mixup. Jonathan Pryce's Sam Lowry, whom the film revolves around, doesn't seem to get it. Nor does he really care to. He just wants to be left alone with his fantasies and that's the problem. Citizens, Gilliam seems to be saying, have turned to fantasy to escape the increasingly brutal reality of modern life to such a degree that they've forfeited their share of the societal franchise, essentially leaving barbarians in business suits in charge. God help us all.

The film could also be taken as Gilliam's personal critique of the Hollywood studio system. With the Hollywood execs represented by the faceless bureaucrats and artists like Gilliam represented by the dreamer, Sam Lowry. Such a reading is buttressed by facts of the films making as well as the protracted battle Gilliam engaged in with Universal to get his finished movie released. Universal, believing that Gilliam's original bleak ending would be a turn-off to American audiences, sat on the film. With the stalemate drawing on and no release date in sight Gilliam finally went around the back of the studio and secretly screened the film to critics. As a result - before ever selling a single ticket to the movie going public - the film was declared "Best Picture" of 1985 by the Los Angeles Film Critics Association. Upon learning of this award Universal finally relented and released the film.

The cast is stellar: Katherine Helmond, Ian Holm, Bob Hoskins, Michael Palin, Peter Vaughan and Jim Broadbeant are joined by the aforementioned Jonathan Pryce in the lead role and Robert DeNiro, making one of the few essentially cameo appearances of his career as freelance duct uber-repairman Harry Tuttle.

I recommend avoiding the "love conquers all" studio bs version at all cost. Go with the 142 minute "directors cut" or the 132 minute European theatrical version of the film.

Brazil: Trailer




Reviews of "Brazil"

Linda Evangelista burst onto the modeling scene in the 80s and it wasn't long before it seemed like her face was everywhere. She worked for all the biggest fashion houses and appeared countless times on the covers of the industry's most famous magazines. In the late 80s she cut off most of her hair giving her the look that would make her a fashion icon. But the new look didn't come without a price. Most of those same fashion houses cancelled her contract almost immediately after taking a look at her new do. Didn't matter though because what she lost in runway revenue she picked up in commercial revenue. She stayed on top for the better part of a decade before being squeezed out by a new generation models during the 90s.

So what's she up to these days?

After taking time off from modeling for personal reasons and giving birth to a son in 2006, she came back in 2007, signing a big contract with L'Oreal Paris. The following year she signed with Prada and will be the new 'face' of Talbots as well.

She still looks terrific today and seems to have a long second life in modeling ahead of her.

Bob Dylan has always been one of my favorite old-school musicians, probably because my dad owned all his records on vinyl and was still playing them well into the 80s. Albums like "Bringing it all Back Home" and "Blonde on Blonde" were and are some of the best music made in the past 50 or so years, and his recent efforts like "Love and Theft" were right up there with them.

During the 80s though Zimmy lost his way. Big time. Maybe he was hitting the bottle too hard, maybe he just got bored. For whatever the reason Bob Dylan didn't produce much during the 80s that was worth listening to, much less paying money for.

It started in the late 70s and carried over into the early 80s with his ill-conceived gospel albums. Apparently he felt he couldn't lose if he followed in the footsteps of Elvis. But he wasn't Elvis and he'd never be Elvis (hell, he was Dylan, wasn't that good enough?). Elvis bled gospel music. It was in his Mississippi veins. For Dylan, a good Jewish boy from Minnesota, it wasn't quite the same thing and you could hear the difference between the two if you were a deaf dog sleeping a hundred miles away. Suffice to say the gospel period was a lost weekend. Problem was, it didn't get any better after that.

While "Infidels" wasn't a complete disaster it wasn't what anybody would call compelling either. This was followed by a rogue's gallery of increasingly hard to digest albums: the headscratcher "Empire Burlesque" (the title being the best thing about the record), the hideously awful "Knocked out Loaded" and the incomprehensibly terrible "Down in the Groove". By this time even my dad, a life long defender of the D-man, had had enough and stopped listening; not to the old stuff, but to anything new that was being plopped onto the shelf under the Dylan brand.

Luckily, at the very end of the decade Dylan saw the light. Able to sink into the background of the enigmatic Traveling Wilburys, he seemed to find new purpose and old inspiration and snapped out of his daze. Since then he has reverted back to the Dylan of old: creating interesting, mysterious, haunting, wry, tortured American music like only he can.

The 80s though will always remain, like a wine stain on the white shirt of an otherwise stellar career.

On November 11, 1987 Sotheby's, New York auctioned off a previously little known work by the Dutch artist Vincent Van Gogh. The painting was Irises and Van Gogh, when he was alive, never thought of the work as more than a sketch. Alan Bond, who had risen from virtually nothing to become one of the richest men in Australia (and who garnered international fame in 1983 by becoming the first non-American since 1841 to win the America's Cup) apparently held a much higher opinion of it and paid the then unheard of sum of 53.9 million dollars for the work, sending shockwaves through the art world.

His purchase touched off the era of the blockbuster art sale, and had a cascading effect few would have foreseen. If Irises was worth $54 million then how much was the much more famous "Starry Night" worth? If you were a museum that owned Starry Night how much did your insurance just increase by? If, in the past you were a private collector who might have been inclined to loan your Van Gogh out to this institution or that for scholarly retrospectives etc you now held it close to home for fear someone might steal it if you let it out of your sight. Or you simply sold it outright to some private collector from overseas for zillions of bucks and he treated it like any other big investment, locking it away in a vault somewhere.

Unfortunately the problems caused by the onset of the blockbuster auction have only become worse over the intervening years and there's no reason to think things won't continue to get crazier and crazier, with the big loser being, of course, the art loving public.

But back to Irises: There was only one problem with the auction of Irises and that was that Bond didn't have the money to back up his purchase. He wound up borrowing most of it from Sotheby's. As a result Sotheby's kept the painting as collateral against the money it had loaned Bond and the brazen Australian never even got to enjoy hanging the painting over his mantle.

Three years later the painting was re-sold by Sotheby's to the Getty Museum in Los Angeles where it hangs to this day.

For more about Van Gogh's life click here.

Van Gogh musem here.

On August 1, 1981 at one minute after midnight MTV went on the air with the words: "Ladies and gentlemen, rock and roll." Appropriately, the first video played was the Buggles "Video Killed the Radio Star". At this very beginning MTV was only broadcast to a relatively small audience in the metro New York area but it wasn't long before it became ubiquitous, challenging the supremacy of radio and introducing American music fans to songs and artists that many of the top AM and FM channels weren't playing.

MTV's concept was simple enough: play music videos 24 hours a day, 7 days a week and have them hosted by the television equivalent of the radio DJ, christened VJs. MTV's original five VJs were Nina Blackwood, Mark Goodman, Alan Hunter, J.J. Jackson and Martha Quinn, and during the early 80s they became as recognizable as old school TV fixtures like Walter Cronkite and Ed Sullivan had once been.

A mad scramble by established broadcast and cable channels followed as they attempted to get on the music video boat before it pulled away from the pop culture dock. Everyone from HBO (Video Jukebox) to NBC (Friday Night Videos) to ABC (ABC Rocks) dove into the fray along with seemingly countless other national and local stations. None of them were able to reproduce the MTV magic and within a decade most had thrown in the towel.

It should be noted that while MTV was clearly forging a new pathway through popular culture, one that was trumpeted as being cutting edge, fact is that at the beginning they almost completely ignored black artists. It wasn't until Michael Jackson came along and kicked in the door that MTV became artistically integrated.

Post mortem editorial:

Ironically, after vanquishing all comers, MTV itself decided to pull out of the 24/7 music video business during the 90s, moving slowly but inexorably into talk shows, game shows and garish, self-indulgent "reality" programming which pandered to the growing swarm of consumer-youth. In the process they left behind any semblance of integrity or cultural importance. The network continues to wallow in the shallows to this day with mind-numbing fare like "Jersey Shore" where a bunch of no-talent nobodys from nowhere with nothing to say are followed around for no discernible reason.

The first video ever played on MTV: The Buggles - Video Killed the Radio Star

the humble but commercially formidable Sony Walkman

In June 1980 Sony Corporation of Japan introduced the "Walkman" into the American market and people's experience of music would never be the same. The cassette tape had been around for years but had found only niche audiences. Sony's co-founder came up with the basic idea for the Walkman in the late 70s when he was frustrated at having to carry around a bulky cassette tape player on business trips just to listen to music. He had a prototype developed and pitched the idea to the company's chairman as "...a good idea...".

It was that alright and a lot more.

The Walkman took off, eventually selling more than 200,000 units. If you didn't have a walkman in the mid 80s you just weren't happening. It would be like someone today who didn't have a mobile phone.

While the Walkman as it came to be known in the 80s and early 90s would eventually be shoved aside by the digital revolution it's indelible mark on popular culture cannot be over-emphasized. It made wearing  earphones in public acceptable, it cemented the idea that music was not something you had to listen to in a static indoor setting and it helped marked the beginning of the end for vinyl records.

I should note that while the Walkman product did lose it's pre-eminence in the market that doesn't mean it went away. Sony now makes high tech mp3 players sold under the Walkman name, as well as old-fashioned cassette player versions.

George Lucas actually developed the idea for Raiders of the Lost Ark before Star Wars. He wound up shelving it though so that he could work on his little outer space adventure instead. When that became a phenomenon Lucas had enormous clout in Hollywood and was able to cut a sweet deal with Paramount for Raiders that gave him something like 40% ownership of the film and a hefty percentage of the profits.

He was also able to get his buddy Steven Spielberg to direct, something that was key to the films ultimate success. Lucas wanted to call his character "Indiana Smith" and it was Spielberg who told him the name didn't work. Lucas then suggested "Jones" and the rest is history. Released in June 1981 it became the highest grossing film of that year and, when adjusted for inflation, is still one of the highest grossing films of all time.

Several actors tried out for the lead role. Spielberg wanted Harrison Ford but George Lucas didn't want Ford's name to become linked too closely with his own. Subsequently, Tom Sellek was offered the role but was unable to take it due to scheduling conflicts with "Magnum P.I.". Jeff Bridges also reportedly turned the role down. With just three weeks to go before shooting was to start Steven Spielberg finally convinced Lucas to give the role to Ford.

It seems crazy now to think of anyone else playing Indiana Jones. Ford seems to have been born for it. It's a tribute to him that he's probably just as well known now for playing Indiana Jones as he is for playing Han Solo.

Watch the original trailer here.

In the 80s a lot of former 60s lefties embraced the capitalist tide and moved from the commune into the marketplace. Perhaps no one typified this trend more than Jane Fonda.

The former "Hanoi Jane" of the 60s anti-war movement decided it was time to feel the burn and, in 1982, put her celebrity behind a series of aerobics tapes that became a sensation. Her initial tape "The Jane Fonda Workout" went on to sell a whopping 17 million copies and remains the highest selling exercise video of all-time. It seemed there wasn't an upwardly mobile yuppie female in any major metropolitan area of the US in the mid-80s that didn't own a copy.

Some people claim that the popularity of Ms. Fonda's video actually created a surge in the sale of then new-to-the-market VHS players, (and certainly it put wind in the sails of leg-warmer sales), but no matter how you look at it her videos helped stoke the fire of the workout craze that is still thriving day.

John DeLorean was a car designer who had worked his way up through the ranks of the Detroit auto establishment. Ultimately he yearned to create his own car company and, with the help of Hollywood friends, pulled together the financing to open the DeLorean Motor Company.

DeLorean had orginally intended to open his factory in Puerto Rico but when the Irish government came knocking with over $100 million in additional financing if he'd open his factory in Northern Ireland, DeLorean couldn't resist.

After myriad production delays and cost overruns the first car rolled off the assembly line in January 1981. It officially entered the pop-culture mainstream when it was used as the time traveling vehicle in the movie "Back to the Future" in 1985.

Well before that though things had started to go wrong. The car received only lukewarm reviews from the automotive press and sales were sluggish. Facing possible bankruptcy in 1982 DeLorean was caught on video arranging a high stakes cocaine deal as part of his plan to raise capital. It raised capital alright: capital charges of drug trafficking.

Though he was eventually found not guilty by reason of entrapment the damage to his reputation was done and his company went out of business shortly after the trial ended. DeLorean himself died in 2005 but other financiers eventually picked up the DeLorean name and returned the car to extremely limited production.

He was a controversial choice to play one of the great genuises of all-time and he had some heady competition: Mel Gibson, David Bowie, Mikhail Baryshnikov, Mick Jagger, Sam Waterston, Mark Hamill and Tim Curry all either auditioned or were considered for the role at some point. In his autobiography Kenneth Branagh states that he was actually cast in the role before producer Saul Zaentz changed his mind and decided to work with an American cast and crew.

So the wheel of fortune stopped on Tom Hulce's number and he went on to create one of the most memorable film performances of the 80s as Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart in the film, Amadeus. The movie won 8 academy awards including Best Picture. Hulce himself was nominated for Best Actor but lost out to his Amadeus co-star F. Murray Abraham. Hulce went on to appear in a number of other films through the 80s and 90s, though he was never to revisit the mountaintop that was Amadeus.

Hulce retired from acting in the late 90s and spends much of his time in New York now where he has had a successful second career producing for the stage.

Hard to believe but there was actually a time when Bono was not the ambassador of all free-thinking people of conscience, hobnobbing with world leaders at G8 summits and solving sovereign debt problems the world over. Swear to god. Back in the 80s U2 was a band, not a clothing line and they were arguably the most influential and exciting band working.

Following the international recognition that came with "War" they sought a change in direction and signed on an initially reluctant Brian Eno to help them find that direction. He and Daniel Lanois deconstructed the band's sound in order to find it's soul and after months of patient, persistent effort (at Ireland's Slane Castle and at Windmill Lane Studios in Dublin) band and crew emerged with a mystical, ambiguous, pulsating work of genius. The lead single "Pride (in the name of love)" acted as a bridge between War and the new sound but it was the album's other cuts like "Elvis Presley and America", "A Sort of Homecoming" and "Wired" that really brought the house down on the band's past. Here was rock music that didn't beat you into submission but quietly convinced you upon repeated listening that it was 'right'.

Though in the long run The Unforgettable Fire would be overshadowed by the mega-success of The Joshua Tree (which we'll talk about later) I think it's pretty safe to say there would have been no Joshua Tree without it. It's my favorite U2 album and in my top 5 of best rock albums ever.

Title track: The Unforgettable Fire

While they were a time of immense political and cultural upheavel, the fact is the 80s were a pretty quiet time in the natural disaster department. Nothing occured that could match the Indian Ocean tsunami of 2004, Hurricane Katrina wiping out an entire American city, or the recent earthquake/tsunami catastrophe in Japan. Thank the maker!

One notable exception occured on November 13, 1985 when the Columbian town of Armero was buried in the middle of the night under gigantic mudslides caused by the eruption of the nearby volcano Nevado del Ruiz. Nearly the entire population of 27,000 was buried alive. It was the second deadliest eruption of the 20th century.

If the Columbian government had been listening they would have heard the warnings the volcano had been issuing for a full year before the fateful eruption and relocated the town's inhabitants in time to save them. The National Bureau of Geology and Mines (INGEOMINAS) issued a report a month before the tragedy which declared that a moderate eruption would produce " . . . a 100 percent probability of mudflows . . . with great danger for Armero . . ." Sadly, like the warnings issued regarding the vulnerability of New Orleans, public officals in Columbia turned a deaf ear and the result was a tragedy of immense human proportions.

You can learn more about the tragedy here.

Video here.

Perhaps no designer came to represent the 80s fashion split with the past more than Giorgio Armani.

He began his love affair with fashion as a window dresser for a Milan department store and eventually became a buyer for their men's wear department. Not long after he became a freelance designer creating his own men's wear line which he marketed through several fashion houses. By 1979 he was ready to go big time and established the Giorgio Armani Corp. He pioneered what were at the time non-traditional advertising methods including designing for film and eventually landed an agreement to design for Miami Vice in the mid 80s. This association turned him into a household name in America and launched him as a superstar in the fashion world.

Among Armani's rules of style for men are:

Today Armani himself is said to be worth something in the neighborhood of $7 billion. Not a bad neighborhood.

Miami Vice was a TV series produced by Michael Mann and starring Don Johnson and Philip Michael Thomas as a pair of undercover Miami vice detectives. The show more closely resembled a long form music video than Dragnet. But who cared about procedure when you could show cops dressed in Armani driving Ferraris along South Beach? The series was allegedly based on certain actual laws that allowed cops to use property they seized from convicted drug dealers to do their job. Hence: cops in Ferraris. Sounds good to me.

Speaking of sounds: The official Miami Vice soundtrack actually made it to #1 in the US and stayed the #1 album on the charts for an incredible 11 weeks in 1985!

People magazine is often quoted as saying that Miami Vice "was the first show to look really new and different since color TV was invented." It made household names out of Johnson and Armani, influenced the look and sound of the mid/late 80s and ran from 1984 until its cancellation 1989.

On the evening of December 8, 1980 former Beatle John Lennon was returning from a recording session at the Record Plant in New York City to his home in the Dakota building next to Central Park. After exiting his limo at the street he stopped to sign autographs for a few people waiting on the sidewalk. As he made his way into the building after signing the autographs one of the the people who he'd just given an autograph to opened fire on him with a handgun and hit him with several shots. Lennon, barely alive stumbled into the security guard station of the building and collapsed. He was rushed in the back of a police car to a nearby hospital and was pronouned dead a short time later.

Lennon's death sparked a global outpouring of grief not seen since the Kennedy assasination. Six days after the murder some 250,000 people gathered in Central Park near the Dakota to observe 10 minutes of silent rememberence.

I will not give the murderer the satisfaction of mentioning his name here. He remains to this day an inmate at Attica State Prison in New York and, personally, I hope he rots in hell.

You can't get too far into any homage to the 80s before getting around to Michael Jackson. The decade belonged to him the way the 60s belonged to the Beatles. Though "Off the Wall" was technically released in August of 1979 it's full impact wasn't felt until well into 1980. Maybe the most important career move he ever made was to bring Quincy Jones in to produce. Jones was a studio master who'd worked with everyone from Sinatra to Dinah Washington to Dizzy Gillespie and he and Jackson formed a working partnership that created music history. With this album, Jackson became the first solo artist to have four singles from the same album reach the top 10 of the Billboard Hot 100. And he was just getting started.

Enough talking.

Michael Jackson - Rock with You




Michael Jackson - Official website

Bob Marley was a one-man musical movement. Sure, there was reggae before him and after him but for most of the world Bob Marley WAS reggae. He took a musical movement that previously had been heard seldom outside of the Caribbean (let's not forget too that reggae was essentially religious music) and brought it to the forefront of the musical world, in the process infusing new life into rock and roll and opening people's minds to the fact that there was music outside the cozy confines of the American-European culture club.

By 1980 he had reached the pinnacle of his power and influence, mediating a tense political standoff in Jamaica, singing at the independence celebrations in Zimbabwe and becoming to many a semi-religious figure himself. Little more than a year later though, he was dead; overcome by cancer. This coming Wednesday marks the 30th anniversary of that sad day.

The nation of Jamaica held a state funeral for him and millions in Africa and around the world mourned his passing. But while his influence lives on, reggae as a musical force never fully recovered or knew just where to go without him.

Here he is in 1980 performing in Germany.

Billy Idol was lead singer of GenerationX before embarking on a solo career that made him a household name. I remember seeing this video when I was just a wee tot and thinking "That's what I want to be when I grow up!"
Well, it didn't quite work out that way, but hey, there can only be 1 Billy Idol anyway.

The Space Shuttle program began in 1981 and signaled a new era in man's attitude toward space. In the past space flights had seemed like grand adventures and the astronauts were hailed as modern-day Magellans. Well no more. Those adventurers of NASA's early days were replaced by scientists, pilots became little more than high-tech truck drivers and with no political will to send anyone further than low-earth orbit the public pretty quickly lost interest. The liftoffs themselves were pretty amazing, but once the little white dot disappeared into the distance everybody went home to watch the video hos on mtv. Sigh.

Still I'm a little sad that the program is coming to an end. Kids need to dream and with nobody venturing skyward (the oh-so-boring truck stop in space known as the ISS doesn't count) it'll be a little more difficult for them to see the future as a place of expanding horizons.

Here's video of that first Shuttle launch in April of 1981.


Learn more about the Shuttle program here.

NASA homepage here.

Kathleen Turner was one of the true hotties of 80s cinema. A whiskey-voiced temptress and star of multiple big-budget Hollywood hits including "Who Framed Roger Rabbit", "Romancing the Stone" and "Prizzi's Honor" (a personal favorite of mine) you just knew she'd be the kind of girl mom warned you about, if only you could get close enough to put her to the test.

Well, that was then and this is now and as the photos below indicate Kathleen's had a rough go of it over the past 2 decades, completely bypassing MILFhood and jumping straight into OMG territory. In fairness to her though I have to note that she has suffered for years from rheumatoid arthritis, and that can't be any fun at all.

George O'Dowd, aka Boy George, put the TV in MTV. Here he is with Culture Club in their first big international hit "Do you really want to hurt me?"



Culture Club - Do You Really Want To Hurt Me by EMI_Music

Nothing says 80s quite like leg warmers. Apparently someone forgot to tell the girls who bought them by the bushel (as though they were some revolutionary advance in clothing) that leg warmers had existed for hundreds of years: we call them pants. But I digress because I love a good fashion trend (plus Chris has just reminded me that he saw my mom wearing a pair of LWs not so long ago. Oops! Love ya mom!

If, like Jennifer here, the thought of wool marshmallows wrapped around your lower legs makes you wanna dance or for that matter if you'd just like to dig deeper into this important subject, you can learn more about the wide world of leg warmers here.

Most great bands seem to have a shelf life of about 10 years before they start repeating themselves and/or otherwise lose interest. The Stones made it about about 20 before they began their decline into a full-fledged multinational corporation. This was their last gasp and what a last gasp. A full 3 years before U2s 'Bullet The Blue Sky' it dared to go where no one wanted to go (South America - Land of the right-wing death squads as Bono would later discover) and managed to offend plenty of sensitive types in the process. It's a churnin', burnin' mess of a groove and the first real movie-style music video; predating 'Thriller' by a couple of years. Directed by Julien Temple.

Link to the full video: Rolling Stones - Undercover of the night 1983

New York Observer has a really interesting article that revisits the handful of artists who were making big waves in NYC during the 80s. A lot of them have just kind of faded into the background, (including a former teacher of mine, Eric Fischl), and not really been replaced by anyone new.

Read the full article here

George Harrison, Bob Dylan, Roy Orbison, Tom Petty and Jeff Lynne came together in the late 80s as the Travelling Wilburys. The only thing more shocking than the joining together of these rock and roll legends was the quality of the music they produced together. Funny, chaotic, sarcastic, sly, devious, uplifting and joyful the songs were like a breath of fresh air that swept through the airwaves and breathed new life into the careers of all 5 of these icons.

Here is the first single from Volume I: "Handle with care". Enjoy.

satellite image of Mount St Helens eruption

The 80s got off to a emphatic start when, on May 18, 1980, Mount St. Helens in Washington State blew its top. Unbelievable that almost half the mountain just slid away like it did.




Learn more about the eruption and aftermath here.

Right off the top I should say that I bleed Celtic green. No apologies.
So with that said, and with the Celtics about to tip off in game 1 of the Eastern Conference semis against the Miami Heat I figured this was as good a time as any to take the first of what will surely be many looks back at the Celtics of the 80s.
Bird, McHale, Parish; now THAT'S a 'big 3' (no disrespect to anyone in the current Celtic lineup).
Maybe nothing exemplified the fighting spirit of this team more than Kevin McHale's takedown of Kurt Rambis in game 4 of the 84 finals. The Lakers got angry and distracted, the Celtics got fired up. The rest is history.

Enjoy. McHale takes down Rambis: