The UN, formed out of the dust-clouds of World War II when the Nazis murderous rampage through Europe shook the world to its core, held itself to a higher ideal of universal dialogue and peaceful co-existence; two concepts the Nazis didn't exactly hold in high esteem. Austrian diplomat Kurt Waldheim served as Secretary General of the United Nations from 1972 to 1981.
When Waldheim was running for President of Austria in 1985 a popular Austrian paper began to raise questions about his role during the war. He had admitted to being in the German army but said he had no choice and spent the war "confined to a desk". But in the wake of the paper's initial article others began to dig into Waldheim's past and allegations surfaced that he had not, in fact, been hiding in the hinterlands behind a desk during the war but was, allegedly, a member of the SS and had, again allegedly, participated in the reprisals against partisans in Greece. Waldheim called the allegations "pure lies" though he did later admit that he was aware that most of the Jewish community in the town near where he was stationed in Greece were being rounded up and sent to Auschwitz, something he'd previously denied any knowledge of.
In the end the controversy surrounding Waldheim seemed to degenerate into a series of allegations and counter-allegations none of which went anywhere substantive but which nonetheless served to permanently sully Waldheim's reputation in the eyes of millions around the world. He died in 2007 and though he was given a state funeral no sitting heads of state were invited. A telling sign of just how far he'd fallen.
Aha's single "Take on Me" is one of the great pop songs of the 80s (or any decade for that matter). The video that accompanied the song was also groundbreaking in its fusion of animation and live action footage and won numerous awards. Key to the success of the video was the young actress who played the girl drawn into the comic book world of the singer. Her name was/is Therese "Bunty" Bailey and she was Aha lead singer Morten Harket's girlfriend at the time the video was shot.
So what ever happened to Bunty Bailey?
After "Take on Me" Bailey went on to star in Aha's follow-up video "The Sun Always Shines On TV" and then had a short career in motion pictures. After a 16 year hiatus she returned to the silver screen in the 2008 low-budget comedy "Defunct". These days Bailey is a dance teacher who describes herself as "happily married" and is the mother of two teenage children.
(left) Bunty Bailey in Aha's 1985 video "Take on Me" and (right) in a recent photo
On March 11, 1985 Mikhail Gorbachev, 54, became General Secretary of the Communist Party of The Soviet Union. His ascension was hailed as the dawn of a new day for the hidebound superpower with leaders in the West salivating over the prospect of finally having someone in the Kremlin that they could, in Maggie Thatcher's words, "do business with".
Gorbachev energetically undertook the daunting task of trying to breath life into the corpse of the USSR initiating his programs of glasnost (openness) and perestroika (restructuring) and letting it be known that the USSR was no longer intersted in playing the role of the cranky old uncle with all the guns in international relations.
A new kind of General Secretary: "Gorby" mingles with the people - 1985
To say that his 6 years as the big cheese atop the Kremlin wall were eventful would be an enormous understatement. He signed agreements that ultimately lead to huge reductions in the number of nuclear weapons held by the US and USSR, he relaxed state oversight of Soviet media and encouraged criticism, he released political prisoners, began the process of opening up the Soviet economy to privately owned business and reduced the overall size of the Soviet military. Yet he also oversaw the catastrophe that was/is Chernobyl, tried desperately to prevent Soviet satellite states from gaining their independence as the USSR began to crumble and was largely ineffective in trying to ram through meaningful economic reform. In the end his efforts would come back to haunt him in unexpected ways and he'd wind up losing power to Boris Yeltsin and overseeing the collapse of the Soviet Union.
In 1985 many saw his coming to power as a sign that significant change was on the horizon. Few, if any, could have predicted just how significant those changes (intended and unintended) would turn out to be.
In the early morning hours of September 19, 1985 an 8.0 magnitude earthquake occurred off the Pacific coast of Mexico. Coastal communities suffered relatively little damage and the quake did not produce any significant tsunamis. However, more than 200 miles to the east the sprawling metropolis of Mexico City, one of the largest cities on the planet, underwent horrific shaking that lasted for 5 minutes. During that time more than 400 buildings collapsed and thousands more were damaged. Millions of inhabitants lost water, electricity and phone service and worst of all an estimated 10,000 people lost their lives.
In the aftermath of the quake many were asking the same questions: how could such enormous devastation happen in a city that was so far from the quake's epicenter? And why were some parts of the city destroyed while other parts remained virtually untouched? The answers, it would turn out, lie in the nature of the land Mexico City itself is built upon. When the Spanish invaded Mexico in the 16th century they found a city perched on an island in the middle of an enormous swampy lake that lay between two volcanoes. Over the centuries as the city grew the lake/swamp was drained to provide land for expansion. As a result much of central Mexico City rests uneasily upon a mixture of volcanic clay, silt, sand and (relatively recent) lava deposits, while the outer regions are situated on much more dependable rock. The silty deposits that underpin much of the city center are perfectly tuned to the natural 'pitch' of seismic waves so when these waves arrived from the coast they found a perfect amplifier. Its not unlike an electrical signal from a guitar traveling quietly through a cable only to burst out of the amplifier at ear splitting decibel levels.
In the aftermath of the quake the silence from the government was deafening. In fact it wasn't until 39 hours after the disaster that President de la Madrid addressed the situation publicly. With the government response virtually nonexistent the city's inhabitants took matters into their own hands and began scouring through the wreckage to find survivors. In all more than 4,000 people were pulled from the rubble alive and a large percentage of them owe their lives to these anonymous citizen heroes.
Ruins of the Hotel Regis, Mexico City Sept 19, 1985
This song, written by Daryl Hall in 1980, was given a workover by producer Laurie Latham and became a monster hit for Paul Young in 1985. A beautiful ballad marked by Pino Palladino's distinctive fretless bass it was his only song to reach #1 in the US and was the springboard to the multi-platinum success of the album that spawned it; "The Secret of Association".
"West End Girls" the Pet Shop Boys smash 1985 hit was a song few could figure out but almost nobody could resist. It was actually a remake of a song recorded a couple of years earlier by the duo which had received some minor dance club attention.
The video, with a gaunt Neil Tennant walking around London, occasionally stopping to "sing" at the camera and a very depressed looking Chris Lowe following behind in puppy dog fashion (and occasionally becoming so irrelevant that he actually begins to dissolve into the background in some shots), was a major MTV hit notable for the almost complete absence of any West End girls. Details, details...
The Nuestra Senora de Atocha (Our Lady of Atocha) was a Spanish galleon on its way back to Europe with a load of gold, silver, gemstones and more when it ran headlong into severe hurricane on September 6, 1622 and sank in the vicinity of the Dry Tortugas.
Mel Fisher was a chicken farmer from Indiana who yearned for the sea. After graduating from Purdue University he moved to California and opened that state's first dive shop. Eventually he'd move to Florida and begin a decades long quest to find treasure he was convinced lay at the bottom of the Caribbean.
The primary target of his quest was the legendary wreck of the Atocha that had eluded all who had attempted to locate her. For more than 16 years Fisher and his partners (whose motto was "Today's the day") scoured the sea bed in search of her with no more luck than any of their predecessors. That is, until July 20, 1985 when one of Fisher's son radioed the news to him on shore that they had finally located the Atocha and her motherlode of treasure. Over time Fisher's crew would haul to the surface treasure worth nearly half a billion dollars but he would have to wait even longer for his payday since the US Government promptly stepped in and claimed ownership of the Atocha and its contents.
After an 8 year legal battle the US Supreme Court recognized Fisher's claim to the treasure (or more precisely to 80% of the treasure with the remaining 20% ordered to be turned over to the State of Florida for public display) and Fisher was able to spend the last 5 years of his life enjoying the fruits of his labors.
Left: A young Mel Fisher and his wife Dolores. Right: Treasure from the Atocha.
I'm writing about this movie because its too awful to ignore. Part of the reason its too awful to ignore is that it hopes for it were so high. But in one of the great tragic cash-grabs of recent memory, George Miller went for the mainstream buck and in doing so, castrated his creation with a rusty steak knife and left it to die from infection in a sea of pig poop. His previous Mad Max effort, "The Road Warrior", took Eastwood's "High Plains Drifter" and explored its contemporary possibilities. The result was a film that spoke to the fears engendered by the escalating nuclear showdown being played out at the time between the US and USSR and subtly (and not so subtly) showcased the shortcomings of both camps. Buttless chaps aside the film seemed as if it took place in a world that might actually happen. The wasteland was left to speak for itself and elements thrown into it to provide context for the action had an air of hodge-podge believability about them that didn't distract from the narrative.
Nothing about Thunderdome's post-apocalyptic world seems as if it would have even the slightest chance of ever coming to light. Everything is carefully and self-consciously assembled to look "post apocalyptic". There's not a dirty hair whose positioning hasn't been meticulously considered, not a ramshackle building that doesn't look like it passed Archie and Veronica's "ramshackle" test and not a brown-clad survivor of the nuclear war that doesn't look like he/she shops at "Nuclear Survivors R Us". Throw into the mix the unconvincing specter of the wasteland queen "Aunty Entity" (an unfortunate big role for the otherwise laudable Tina Turner), a 'tribe' of kids who have all the requisite post apocalyptic hi-tech-turned-low-tech gadgets and a rockem sockem car chase at the end that seems to exist simply because well, its a Mad Max movie, and you have one of the most overwrought, underwhelming and disappointing films of the entire decade. That it hit theaters only 2 years after Ridley Scott's sublime "Blade Runner" made 'post apocalyptic' comparisons inevitable; but there was no comparison. Scott understood to his core something Miller had touched on in The Road Warrior but seemed to have quickly forgotten: the real apocalypse of the (post) modern age is an apocalypse of the spirit and that even in a world populated by the dissolute everyone probably won't dress alike, talk alike, be overwhelmed by blood lust and adopt evil laughs.
Joe Theisman's leg is broken clean in half by Lawrence Taylor. Just listen to the guys in the booth moan and groan upon seeing the replay. Theisman has said that endorphins kicked in immediately and he felt no pain (or anything else) in his leg from the knee down as he laid on the ground. The leg never healed properly and this play represents the end of Joe Theisman's outstanding career.
Amazingly Simple Minds were never behind this song as a band. They were proud of the fact that they wrote all their own material even if it was material that wasn't getting them much notice. But Keith Forsey, who would go on to become drummer of the Psychedelic Furs and who wrote the song, knew he had a winner and after both Billy Idol and Bryan Ferry declined to record it Forsey set his sights on Simple Minds and kept after them. Their record label, A&M, also thought they should do it.
Finally the band caved and according to lead singer Jim Kerr "...went in (to the studio) one afternoon, came up with the intro, came up with the big middle, came up with the coda and it was done and dusted in about three hours." John Hughes promptly used it for his movie "The Breakfast Club" (the video for the song features clips from the movie playing on TV screens alongside Kerr) and the song became Simple Minds biggest hit ever, reaching #1 in the US.
Ah the 80s. When basketball was basketball and the courts were populated by all-time greats like Larry Bird, Magic Johnson and Kareem, along with a host of assorted supporting players who made the whole thing into great theater. Perhaps no team in history understood this idea of sport as theater as well as the aptly nicknamed 'showtime' Lakers of the early/mid 80s. This was one of the greatest basketball teams ever assembled. As a lifelong Celtic fan that's not easy to admit but its true. These guys played basketball like nobody's business. They were pros of the highest order whose seemingly effortless mastery on the court was the result of incredible talent and discipline. I think its a testament to the level of concentration required to do what they did that, when the Celtics disrupted that concentration during the '84 Finals the Lakers were basically finished.
They didn't make that mistake again though. Next time the two teams lined up against each other in the finals in '85 the Lakers were ready for any mind games the Celtics might throw at them and erased decades of frustration by beating the C's (in the Garden no less) in 6 games.
Here's a highlight reel of the showtime Lakers. Sit back and enjoy. They don't make basketball like this anymore.
Recorded when he was 16, Charlie Sexton's debut album "Pictures for Pleasure" made a splash in 1985 powered by this top 20 hit "Beat's So Lonely". The music video was in heavy rotation on MTV and Charlie was being hailed as the next big thing. That didn't exactly pan out but Charlie wasn't exactly a 1-hit wonder either. He wound up being a much in demand session musician backing big names like Don Henley, Lucinda Williams and Ronnie Wood and continued to record his own music, though none of his subsequent efforts would capture the limelight like Beat's So Lonely.
In 1999 Charlie joined Bob Dylan's band and toured nearly nonstop with him until 2002, with the band taking time out to record the critically acclaimed album "Love and Theft". He rejoined Dylan in 2009 and is still with him as of this writing. I had the chance to see Dylan with Charlie Sexton in 2001 and that band was tight as a drum.
"Out of Africa" is a languid affair delivered in measured tones meant to evoke the Kenyan disdain for hurrying anything. Based loosely on Isak Dinesen's memoir of the same name and depicting events in her life from 1914 to 1931 the story meanders from Denmark, where the down and out aristocrat Karen Blixen (Meryl Streep) accepts entry into a loveless marriage with the sympathetic but unfaithful Baron Finecke (Klaus Maria Brandaur), to Kenya where she goes to set up a proper colonial plantation to prove her worth. Along the way she is humbled by the rhythms of both the native people and nature itself, undercut by the machinations of her disinterested, absentee husband and falls for the here-today-gone-tomorrow Denys Finch Hatten (Robert Redford) who seems to thrive amid his lowered expectations and teaches her something of the value of the moment.
But she's a hard sell, brought up in a strict environment where she was taught a version of life that is at odds with her newfound desire to seize the day. Like seemingly everything else just when she thinks she's about to take Finch Hatten firmly in her grasp he slips away and she's left to contemplate whether she missed out on her life while waiting for her ship to come in.
The Kenyan landscape as filmed by cinematographer David Watkin is lush and airy and awakened the wanderlust in countless romantic souls in 1985 much the way Freddie Young's work on Lawrence of Arabia had a quarter century earlier. Though not in quite the same league as Lawrence, Out of Africa as a film does manage to knock on the door of profound without preaching or succumbing to cliche. Winner of 7 Academy Awards including Best Picture and Best Director Out of Africa reminds us to stop and smell the roses before their petals fall away.
I find this homage to composer John Barry's score to be a better representation of the film itself than the unfortunate trailer. If nothing else, listen to the first 2 1/2 minutes or so of the main theme.
Where did they come from these 85 Bears? Where did they go? They were no dynasty, yet no one could call them a fluke team either. They didn't win Super Bowl XX because all the good teams got eliminated early in the playoffs. No sir. They kicked ass and took no prisoners right up to trophy presentation time. Everyone knew they were going to win it all. Everyone. As a kid and a Patriots fan even I knew it. But most especially they knew it. They had that look about them that said: "I'm going to take your lunch money and there isn't a damn thing you can do about it". They had a (not-so) secret weapon they used in short yardage situations near the goal line called "The Fridge". They had a quaterback who was born with a self-satisfied smirk on his face. But most of all they had defense. Man did they have defense.
They went 15-1 in the regular season and then steamrolled their way through the playoffs, outscoring their opponents 91-10 in the process. In the Super Bowl, with the trophy so close they could almost touch it, they didn't wilt under pressure and instead destroyed what had been a gritty, overachieving Patriots team 46-10. It wasn't nearly as close as the final score indicated either.
Were they the best team ever? You could make a case for it. And, due to the fact that they won "only" one Super Bowl as a team you could make a case against it. I know there are some out there that would argue that the '72 Dolphins were a better team, but these people have obviously been sitting out in the Miami sun too long.
Ditka is carried from the field following Super Bowl XX
In the early 80s Coca-Cola Co. was in trouble. The sweeter tasting Pepsi Cola was eating away slowly but surely at Coke's once overwhelming market share. Coke executives decided the time was right for drastic action and a secret working group was formed within the company to develop a response to the Pepsi challenge. The result, New Coke, was launched on April 23, 1985 and was in trouble almost from the time it left the dock.
People felt betrayed that this icon of Americanism would suddenly become subject to the winds of apparently changing tastes. If Coke could be changed what was next? The Statue of Liberty in a mini skirt and leg warmers? Coca-Cola Co reportedly received nearly a half million calls and letters of protest from outraged customers. Editorial writers lambasted the change and even Fidel Castro weighed in with his disgust.
Somebody had to do something or the moral fiber of America itself would soon unravel, so the company announced a mere three months after dumping it that they were going to re-introduce the original formula much to the delight of well meaning people of good standing everywhere. Coke Classic (as it would now be called) was a huge hit when it went back on the shelves in July and by the end of the year New Coke was fading quickly into the mist of marketing blunders (although it lingered on store shelves here and there for some time until it was officially discontinued in 2002).
Coca-Cola Co's stunning reversal on New Coke led many people to conclude that they were being duped by a grand marketing conspiracy. The idea floating around was that Coke executives conspired to introduce a product they knew would be controversial in order to draw attention back to their flagship brand, which had been losing market share. If that was their plan it worked. But most marketing experts tend to think that Coke executives simply blew it.
As one Coke bigwig remarked when asked about a possible conspiracy; "We're not that smart."
Roland Orzabal and Curt Smith founded Tears for Fears in the early 80s. After doing time in a synthpop influenced group called Gradute they struck out on their own. Success followed soon after with their debut offering "The Hurting" in 1983. That album reached #1 in the UK and yielded several UK top ten hits.
In 1985 they released Songs from the Big Chair which became a huge hit. It spent 5 weeks at #1 in the US and videos for "Shout", "Everbody Wants to Rule the World" and the song featured here, "Head over Heels", spent many months in heavy rotation on MTV. The melodic richness of this song grabbed me from the get-go and it remains one of my all time 80s favorites.
So without further ado, Tears for Fears - Head over Heels
Robert Ballard of the Wood's Hole Oceanographic Institute (WHOI) was eager to secure funding for projects of his that involved deep sea imaging. He figured the best way to get that funding would be to demonstrate what he could do by finding something everyone from here to there figured was lost forever: the wreck of the Titanic.
But he'd need funding for that too. So he made an agreement with the US Navy: they'd give him money to find the wrecks of two sunken US Navy subs and, if he was successful - and there was still funding from that project left over - he could use that extra money to go search for the Titanic. Well, he found both subs (the USS Scorpion and the USS Thresher) and then set sail for the chilly waters of the north Atlantic. Armed with the robotic diving vessel Argo he spent several days sweeping the seabed looking for a debris field he believed (rightly) would lead him to the wreck itself. Finally on September 1, 1985 cameras on the Argo began to pick up pieces of man made debris on the ocean floor and soon after Ballard and the others on the mothership, The Knorr, were staring at the the hull of the once great ocean liner.
A year later Ballard returned to the wreck with a deep sea submersible called Alvin and dove to the site personally, returning with a treasure trove of both still and video imagery.
The discovery of Titanic touched off a firestorm of publicity and the legendary ship and its tale of woe has been with us (non-stop it seems) ever since in the form of numberless books, TV specials and a little movie you might have heard of that came out in 1997.
Another great pop song from the mid-80s. I've tried a million times to hit that high note and failed, but that doesn't stop me from trying again every time I hear the song. The video itself was no slouch either.
Here's an exerpt from Wikipedia's A-ha page:
(With "Take on Me") A-ha became the first Norwegian band to have a number 1 song in the U.S. The song's popularity earned the band a spot on the American television series Soul Train in 1985, making them one of the few white artists to appear on the black music-oriented show. Sales were aided in the U.S. by heavy rotation on MTV of the new music video, which may have been inspired not only by the truck-chase scene from Terry Gilliam's film Brazil but also by the climactic scene from Ken Russell's film Altered States. The video used a pencil-sketch animation / live-action combination called rotoscoping, in which individual frames of live video are drawn over or colored. It became one of the most instantly recognizable and most enduringly popular music videos in the U.S., where it was nominated for eight awards at the third annual MTV Video Awards in 1986, winning six, including Best New Artist in a Video, Best Concept Video, Best Direction, Best Special Effects, and Viewer's Choice.
With "Take on Me" A-ha achieved the perfect storm of breathtaking pop song combined with a breakthrough video and in the process gained a permanent place in the pop culture memory.
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.
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.
