Jay Gabler

You’d think that dropping a bucket of water on a hot babe in a lace leotard would be something impossible to screw up. Surprise!

portable:

Guilty Pleasures: Billy Squier’s “Rock Me Tonite”, MTV And Homosexuality In 80s Pop Music

He would have had a New Coke, but he was afraid that would be too gay.

"Axl [Rose] left some of the best of ‘em waiting. He left the Rolling Stones waiting for a sound check. In late ‘89, [Alan] Niven took Axl to do a pay-per-view show in Atlantic City and he kept banging on Axl’s door. Axl said, ‘The longer you pound, the longer I’m gonna take.’ Two hours later, Axl walks onstage and Mick Jagger is staring at him. And Keith Richards says, ‘I slept in a chandelier last night. What’s your excuse?’"

Doug Goldstein, in I Want My MTV: The Uncensored Story of the Music Video Revolution

"Axl [Rose] loved [MTV executive John] Cannelli. He didn’t care John was gay, that didn’t bother him at all."

I’m reading a history of MTV, and it’s reminding me just how recently it was that people felt the need to say things like, “He didn’t care John was gay, that didn’t bother him at all.” For Portable, I wrote about homophobia at MTV.

"My first year [hosting the VMAs], I spent some time hanging out with Cher. A little kid came over and said, ‘Could I have a picture of you all?’ And the picture ended up on the front page of the Globe, with the headline CHER’S NEW BOY TOY. It would have been cooler if it had paid off and I got the punani from Cher. I could tell my grandchildren, ‘See that lady with the feathers on her head? Daddy rocked that.’"

Arsenio Hall, in I Want My MTV: The Uncensored Story of the Music Video Revolution

My Guilty Pleasure for Portable this week (forthcoming) is a holiday twofer, and one of the two is Darlene Love’s timeless classic “Christmas (Baby Please Come Home).” Love has performed the song on Letterman every year since 1986, excepting 2007 because of the writers’ strike. Here’s that first 1986 performance, complete with Spuds MacKenzie commercial.

imhollyhood:

“If It Isn’t Love” choreography | New Edition (1988)

One Direction, this is the bar.

This week I researched Scientology to write a review of the movie The Master…and also, I’ve been reading Transformers comics like this one from 1986. Thus it was that I came to the strange discovery that “engram,” the Transformers’ word for stored memory, is the same one used by L. Ron Hubbard.

Was Optimus Prime a Scientologist?

The editors of my eighth grade yearbook made predictions for each graduate of Nativity of Our Lord School. Mine: “Most likely to become coach of the Seattle Mariners.”

Indeed, despite living in St. Paul, Minnesota, I was a big fan of the Mariners. Well, it’s not so much that I was an actual fan as that I was enacting a sort of tween performance art in which I pretended to be a fan of the worst team in baseball. I wore the cap around all the time (pictured here at a Twins game with my cousin Chris in 1988), bought the complete set of baseball cards, followed the standings in the paper, and—in the spirit of Charlie Brown idolizing the hapless Joe Shlabotnik—made my favorite player the occasional reliever Ed Núñez, best known for accusing the Mariners of racial discrimination when they refused to put him on the disabled list in 1986.

“They are treating me like this because it is Edwin Núñez, from Puerto Rico, and the color of my skin is a little dark. If it was a white person, they would just put him on the disabled list. Edwin Núñez? No, he has to go through every test in the book.”

Good grief!

In about 1989, when I was 13, our next-door neighbor sold me his TI-99/4A. First released in 1981, the TI-99/4A was one of the first successful home computers allowing users to do actually useful things like track finances and write and edit word-processing documents. The basic model just had a keyboard and a cartridge slot (you plugged it into your TV), and its processor was about 1/267 as fast as that of an iPhone 4. At God knows what expense—I’m estimating it would translate to about $5,000 today—Jerry had completely tricked his TI-99/4A out with peripherals including a floppy disc drive (without it, you could only record your programs on an audiocassette recorder), a speech synthesizer, and a printer. I think I paid him like $500 for the whole thing, payable in installments of babysitting money.

I remember vividly that our Duluth neighbors’ TI-99/4A, sometime in the mid-80s, had given me my first eerie opportunity to type letters and see them appear on a television screen. That was in the computer’s BASIC programming mode, which was what you got by default if you turned it on without a cartridge in the slot. Once I had a TI of my own, I took advantage of the opportunity to buy books, programs, and other peripherals at bargain-basement prices from Texas Instruments, which had discontinued production of the TI-99/4A in 1984 and was trying to dump its inventory of supplies. (The shipments were delivered—wait for it—C.O.D.) I remember a frustrating phone conversation with an operator in Lubbock who was trying to get me to find a pen; and I couldn’t understand why on earth she wanted me to find a pin. “A pin!” she cried in her thick Texas accent. “Not a pin, a pin! A pin!”

At the time my career ambition was to become a computer programmer like my uncle Jeff and aunt Jackie, so I taught myself BASIC, in part by checking old computer magazines out from the library and painstakingly copying hundreds of lines of code into my TI so that I could play simple games like Moon Landing. My crowning achievement as a programmer was this game for darts scorekeeping—it worked, and even included an opening animation of a dart flying across the screen and sticking to a dartboard.

My career aspirations as a programmer ended when I failed to land a position as a teen intern at Cray, the supercomputer manufacturer then based in a Twin Cities suburb. My mom took me out to the Cray headquarters, where I competed against dozens of other teens (mostly, but not exclusively, boys): we each had to write a program in our language of choice that would result in the display of an accurate list of all the prime numbers from one to 100. I wrote a program that tested each number, and I’m sure it would have worked, but I’ve always wondered if they would have given me the internship if I’d just written a one-line program, then walked cooly up to the scientists and handed them my sheet of paper while all the other kids gaped in astonishment that I’d finished the whole program in just two minutes.

10 PRINT “1, 2, 3,  5, 7, 11, 13, 17, 19, 23, 29, 31, 37, 41, 43, 47, 53, 59, 61, 67, 71, 73, 79, 83, 97”

When I decided to get rid of the TI-99/4A in the mid-90s, I wrote to the Computer Museum in Boston (since merged with Boston’s Museum of Science) asking whether they wanted it as a donation. They never wrote back.

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