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Friday, January 26, 2007
CRY
Godley & Creme
Episode #34, Definitely Miami, 1986
[Buy it]
TAKE ME HOME
Phil Collins
Episode #23, Prodigal Son, 1985
[Buy it]
INTO THE NIGHT
Ace Frehley
cover of Russ Ballard's In The Night from:
Episode #4 , Calderone's Return: Part 1, 1984
[Buy it]
ANGRY YOUNG MAN
Ted Nugent
Episode #34, Definitely Miami, 1986
[Buy it]
VICE
Grandmaster Melle Mel
Miami Vice: Original TV Soundtrack
MCA : 1985
[Buy it]
I was a fan of Miami Vice from the beginning. Before it was cool. Way before I was cool. Before its glorious superficiality was ruined by the gloriously superficial mainstream. In fact, I was a fan from before the beginning. I recall, early in my sophomore year in High School, running manically into my math class and chalking in huge letters on the board:
MIAMI VICE SEASON PREMIERE, NEXT SUNDAY 8PM!!!!!!!!
I must have caught a TV promo the night before. I can't remember anything specific, but it's a safe bet it featured speedboats, convertibles, palm trees, piles of cocaine, snakeskin boots, Cuban-american guys in fake moustaches. And guns. Lots of guns. None of the other stuff, exotic as it was, caught my fancy. But I loved guns. I hadn't really discovered girls yet, but at that stage in my adolescence, guns triggered the same brand of chaotic physiological elation that sex-ed teachers awkwardly assured me I should be feeling about girls. I was specifically in love with submachine guns. The Uzi, of course, and various Heckler & Kochs. But my favorite was hands down the stumpy MAC-10. There was something utilitarian yet thrillingly impractical about its design.
I wasn't actually in love with guns themselves. It wasn't a fetish. I wasn't a creepy pre-Columbine kid, or one of those hetero-homo types, who fancied the fussy, feminine, razor-ad machismo of Llorenzo Llamas and limited edition replica bomber jackets. What really left me flush was gun play. The mad dance of exit wounds, muzzle flash, spent casings pinging off the warehouse bitumen. No one choreographs this dance in the editor's suite quite like Michael Mann. For Mann, the bullet in flight is an Objet d'Art.
Mann loved the MAC-10 too. With its short barrel and protracted magazine, the MAC-10 could introduce bullets into a scene faster and more inaccurately than any other weapon. And with Mann, the mastery was in the bullets that missed as much the ones that found the mark.
For 2 years, my brother and I, and a younger kid from the neighborhood, played "Vice" on our front porch. The rules were simple. One guy was Crockett. The other two were coke dealers. We had a prop briefcase of cash. Maybe it was a lunchbox. Then we would make the following exchange, using these exact same words every time:
"You got the stuff?"
"You got the money?"
Then there would be a pause, and then someone would panic and pull out a gun and then we would all kill each other.
That was it. TWO years. Sometimes I wore a blazer.
At some point I was in JC Penny or Sears with my mom, and convinced her to buy me a pair of mint blue canvas pants. The pants were pleated with a cuffed hem, a clean crease and a thick braided cord belt. The brand was "PCH", embroidered in an exciting broad sans serif type face, like Bank Gothic, and they were only $10. I felt pretty good in the carpool the next morning, with my PCH pants and a white sweatshirt and some sockless loafers.
My classmates soundly punished me for the getup. Someone got a look of the "PCH" logo and from that point on I was known as "Punk Crockett Homeboy." What was I thinking? These people clearly were not ready for my South Beach Marina Prep styles. I quickly and quietly returned to the dominant school fashions, of, well, New England Marina Prep: double up-turned pastel polo tees, docksiders, pleated Ocean Pacific pants, Vuarnet sunglasses.
My favorite episode of Miami Vice, hands down, was Episode 34, Season 2, "Definitely Miami."
Ted Nugent guest stars as Charlie Basset, a crooked drug dealer who lures clients out to the dunes where he shoots them, steals their cash, and buries them in their sports cars under the sand. In tracking Basset, Crockett, working deep cover as Burnett, begins a stormy relationship with Basset's stunning wife Callie. Callie appears willing to turn over and give Basset up to the cops. But Tubbs doesn't buy it. He warns Sonny that Callie's just playing him, that she will betray him. Sonny just refuses to believe it. He has to find out the hard way.
posted by James
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