1984

Monday

Bill Kauffman

Back to 1984 with Robert Dean Lurie

Robert Dean Lurie, who had written very good books on worthy rock music subjects (REM, David Bowie and the Church), sure picked the right year — 2020 — to slip into a time machine. Instead of finding Morlocks and Eloi, as H.G. Wells’s time traveler did, this married father of two in Tempe, Arizona, encountered Walter Mondale and Night Ranger — and he lived to tell his entertainingly perceptive tale. Lurie explains, “In 2019, I had a premonition that 2020 was going to suck. So I decided to spend the year re-experiencing my favorite year from my [Minneapolis] childhood: 1984.

Lurie

Thursday

Stephen L. Miller

Apple downplays the value of human achievement

In January 1984, Blade Runner and Alien director Ridley Scott shot an Apple computer Super Bowl commercial mocking Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four — and it changed the television advertising landscape forever. It featured a woman in a white tank top and bright red shorts destroying a monochrome screen with a sledgehammer. This week, Apple CEO Tim Cook promoted a new ad titled “Crush” that gave the exact opposite message and led to a furious backlash on social media. The ad begins with lights coming on in a factory setting with cultural items and artifacts stacked on top of each other, all gathered on a giant industrial press. Then the press begins to lower as a Sonny and Cher song plays.