Here's Kevin Staab, Tony Hawk, and Greg Smith watching a 1983 video of free style skateboarder Rodney Mullen. "Look at him just creating modern street skating, right there". "Yeah, he goes through this run twice. I've seen this video before." The 1983 version of Tony Hawk makes an appearance at around 3:50 trying to figure out how to ride 2 boards.
In the excesses of satire one may take a certain comfort. They provide a distance from the human condition as we meet it in our daily life that preserves our habitual refuge in sloth or blindness or self-righteousness. Mr. Orwell's earlier book, Animal Farm, is such a work. Its characters are animals, and its content is therefore fabulous, and its horror, shading into comedy, remains in the generalized realm of intellect, from which our feelings need fear no onslaught. But ''Nineteen Eighty-four'' is a work of pure horror, and its horror is crushingly immediate.
After yesterday's post on Ghostbusters ("Don't cross the streams"), I got hit with a few follow-ups worth following up:
When I said 1984 was arguably "the biggest/most important year in modern cinematic comedy," I meant mostly because of the ridiculous amount of money comedies made that year and how those surprise blockbusters affected how comedies were made afterwards.
Still when you add This Is Spinal Tap, which also came out in 1984 but didn't make very much money, you really could make a case that it really could be the best/most influential year for movie comedies.
I particularly like Simmons's note about college basketball (maybe even more relevant today):
College hoops meant something in '84. You stayed home on Monday nights to watch the Big East. You knew the players because they had been around for years. And since guys stuck around, you could follow Ewing and Georgetown, Hakeem and Phi Slamma Jamma, Mullin and St. John's, Pearl and Syracuse, MJ at UNC . . . these were like pro teams on a smaller scale. I'm telling you, a Georgetown-St. John's game in the middle of February was an event. These moments aren't even possibilities anymore. They're gone.
My favorite document of 1984 (sports or otherwise) is undoubtedly Sparky Anderson's Bless You Boys, his running diary/memoir of the Detroit Tigers' amazing season that year. It's about baseball, but so many other things -- life, death, perspective. I wrote about it last year for The Idler when Sparky Anderson passed away.
One last "what if?" note from Simmons:
Rolling Stone was offered the chance to buy MTV, and Sports Illustrated was offered the chance to buy ESPN. Both magazines decided against it.
The British government is installing talking CCTV cameras in public places...the control center staff will be able to yell at people they see on the camera to stop littering and the like. "Smith! 6079 Smith W.! Yes, you! Bend lower, please! You can do better than that. You're not trying. Lower, please! That's better, comrade."
