We miss you, Chris. Thanks for doing it.

Uh. You're welcome?

It's not clear what they were trying to gain or who they were trying to serve by the stunt. Even at Fox — which repeatedly used the horror anyone felt that day as an excuse to push all sorts of ill-fated policies — they spent the morning airing live pictures from the memorial service at the Pentagon. So did CNN.

MSNBC did this last year, too. Even posting a news quiz on their site to see how much info you were absorbing. All we learned — before we quickly turned the channel — is that this is a dumb tradition that MSNBC ought to stop.

WWD has a bizarre round-up of memories from a lot of people who weren't there, including Anna Sui—"I did read about it and definitely knew about it"— and some people who were there, like Courtney Love (?):

"Because I'm old, I was there. I remember mom and pop there, a woman screaming, and there's a guy - this woman with watermelon, watermelon on my body and this woman with pink on her face. And a black guy, with his guitar on fire - so that was one of them. And this woman screaming. And that is all. And I, you know, searched."

We're sure Love is confusing the Woodstock Music & Art Fair, which took place in August 1969, with Woodstock 1999, which took place in July 1999. There was a fire, but it was an audio tower being burned to the ground by vandals, not Jimi Hendrix. And there were lots of women screaming, because they were being raped.

In addition to WWD, just about everyone from CBS News to the BBC to Ang Lee—whose historical film about Woodstock starring Demitri Martin opens in two weeks—is pausing to consider the significance of the gathering.

This is the fourth navel-gazing retrospective spasm devoted to the event that we can recall in our lifetimes. There was the 20th anniversary in 1989, when a half-assed gathering of not-particularly-interesting bands attracted 30,000 people to the concert's original site in upstate New York. Coming as it did on the heels of an orgy of boomer greed throughout the '80s, it had a dazed feel to it, as ex-hippies pondered the distance between the all-consuming ideas of their youth and the mid-life crises they were trying to avoid by revisiting them. From the New York Times' coverage:

Now the Woodstock Generation has credit cards and dares not leave home without them. It used to be that they did not trust anyone over 30. Now they are over 30, and the big four-oh has come and gone, too. And they have different ways of getting around now.

''The last time they came in Volkswagen buses; this time they'll come in Mercedeses,'' said Bob O'Keefe, an ice cream vendor. ''Here comes a Volvo.''

But the 20th anniversary was just a dress rehearsal for Woodstock '94, when Pepsi bought the festival and helped turn it into something actually marketable: A three-day festival featuring Metallica, Bob Dylan, Blind Melon, James, and a rogue's gallery of other band from the '90s you had forgotten about (Arrested Development! The Spin Doctors! Peter Gabriel headlined!). The rampant commercialism—it was chopped up and sold on Pay-per-View—sparked handwringing about whether a seat-of-the-pants, commercial-free, crazy happening like the original Woodstock was even possible in the '90s without the intervention and support of multinational corporations. It wasn't. And Trent Reznor stole the show with horrible teenage music, so the torch was passed from the Boomers and their hazy memories of hanging out naked in the grass to "Generation X," a nihilistic and mopy cohort raised by divorced parents and wholly without ambition.

Woodstock 1999 was an MTV production, forbodingly staged on a former Air Force base and Superfund site 200 miles from the site of the original festival. Rage Against the Machine played, bottles of water were $4, and ATMs were stationed everywhere. At 30 years on, whatever remained of the spirit of Woodstock had curdled into a rage and senseless violence as pissed-off concertgoers torched the place. Four women were raped while MTV's cameras scanned the crowds.

Mercifully there was no Woodstock '04. Who needs a festival that traces its roots to the activism and culture of a generation that stopped a war, when there's a war in Iraq to be fought?

Nor is there a Woodstock '09. There was going to be a concert in Brooklyn's Prospect Park—which would have killed your blogger's summer—but it proved too expensive. Instead there's a VH1 special on Friday night, and we're left to mull the meaning of those 40 years that have elapsed without the benefit of a hollow re-enactment sponsored by Facebook (which you know it would have been). So what does it mean? What tectonic cultural shifts are we to identify on this anniversary? We don't know, but each Woodstock remembrance takes on the character of the age in which it occurs, and the one thing that struck us looking back over the coverage of the original concert was this: Tickets—which no one even paid for anyway—were $15 $18. Jesus.

The essay published on Speakeasy, written by a WSJ graphics editor named Jovi Juan and titled "John Hughes, 'Sixteen Candles' and Me," is actually quite endearing once you get rein in your "oh not another one of these" reflex and actually read it, particularly Juan's passage about having his family's lawn mowed by Gedde Watanabe, the actor who portrayed Long Duk Dong.

I wasn't too happy about Long Duk Dong. I mean, he was the only guy in the cast who kinda looked like me. Did he have to talk like a boat person? Couldn't he be a contender for a better-looking babe? He was, incidentally, the only one in the cast I met. I was mowing my front yard, no doubt ruining another shot. And he came over and asked if he could mow for awhile. I said sure and watched him walk back and forth, cutting my grass, smiling as if this was a great way to spend an afternoon. He stopped after a bit, and, laughing, shook my hand and went back to the set.

Being the angry, disaffected teenager that many of us were, Juan says that when the film was being shot at the house next door he was ambivalent, even dismissive, towards the events taking place a few feet away from his childhood bedroom, so much so that he didn't actually see the film until long after its theatrical release when he watched a VHS copy of Sixteen Candles with some friends. Understandably, Juan now expresses regret over having that attitude toward the film.

Its opening scene is a truck delivering newspapers. It passes under a canopy of trees, a cathedral of great green boughs. By the time I saw it, most of those trees were gone, struck down by Dutch Elm disease, even the ones in front of my house. It also makes me sad that I didn't find any real joy in its filming. There I was with a front row seat to an American classic, and what did I do with it? I turned away, yawning, leaving the show just as it was getting good. It took me years and many more mistakes to learn to grasp the singularity of moments, the importance of saying goodbye, of glancing back as you leave a place forever, of letting yourself be star struck.

Kinda touching, no? Now with that said, can we go ahead institute a 48-hour rule on these sort of tribute essays or whatever you call them, as in any and all such remembrances must be published on the internet within 48-hours of the death of the person being fondly remembered? Such stories being run in print media outlets will be granted extra time (A week? Two?) to compensate for print being the tortoise to the internet's hare. Can we get a vote on this?

Now, on a somewhat unrelated note, have you ever wondered whatever happened to the guy who played Jake in Sixteen Candles? Did he get fed-up with losing every available job for his type to Matt Dillion and give up acting? Well tonight my curiosity about Jake's fate got the best of me so I did some digging around.

As it turns out, the actor who played Jake Ryan, Michael Schoeffling, had roles in eight other films after Sixteen Candles (One of which was in the film Belizaire the Cajun, which was, coincidentally, filmed in the swamps near where I grew up). Schoeffling, who's now 48 years old, gave up acting in 1991 and lives in rural northeastern Pennsylvania with his wife and family, where he makes his living as a carpenter and woodworker. In 2002, GQ termed him the "Salinger of male models/actors." Maybe he'll emerge to make an appearance at Hughes' funeral?

To commemorate the historic bloodshed, the fucking cops got together to congratulate themselves on smiting the lawless hippie menace:

"From the pictures the media showed, it always looked like poor little Jimmy was getting attacked by the police, but what they didn't see was what Jimmy did just a minute before," said Tom Rowan, 65, a retired officer. "Everybody who got hit during the convention may not have deserved it, but 95 percent of them did."

Meanwhile, the anarchist protesters who came to Chicago as college kids to throw bricks and some poor terrified young cop who was just out there doing his job to feed his family are still acting just as outraged about the mere existence of police:

Some among the thousands who had demonstrated in 1968, meanwhile, said they were appalled by the notion of a reunion party, and others who have objected to Chicago police officers' behaviors in more recent years and even months considered the meeting an affront worthy of a protest march, which materialized with signs and musical instruments and old convention photographs just down the block from where the former officers had gathered.

In this way we see that—no matter how passionate our political differences—the healing passage of time can calcify those differences into resolute hatred for one another.

[NYT. Pic via]

Cooper said that he went to Studio 54 with Jackson and a "bunch of people" when he was a 10 year-old child. He made no mention of whether or not his mother, octogenarian smut-peddler Gloria Vanderbilt, was one of those "bunch of people," so it's possible that Vanderbilt allowed Michael Jackson to take her 10 year-old son to what was New York City's most notorious den of drugs and sexual promiscuity without her.

I don't know whether I should feel jealous or outraged.

Because, really, what a spectacular bungle that was. Only after people fled their downtown office buildings in 9/11 flashback terror, did anyone who knew what was really going on think to send someone over with a bullhorn to tell everyone that it was nothing to worry about. It was insensitive and dumb, to be sure, but also a strange display in how a community can remember together. A scary and sad reminder that the city, or at least some of us in it, might always keep one worried eye trained on the sky.

So if you see anything else, here, beneath low-flying planes, take a picture. Citizen journalism! Or whatever.

All pictures via NBC and WSJ

To be honest, it's Friday and I'm not sure I can do justice to the whole saga. (If you want to catch up, reading through his tag page will be educational.) So suffice it to say that he sought out to capitalize on his reputation as a misogynist and lothario, this site pretty much cemented it, which was hilarious to television executives (because Hollywood is run mostly by guys who want to be misogynist lotharios) and eventually he got a TV show on Showtime (which I keep meaning to subscribe to) called, you guessed it, I Can't Believe I'm Still Single.

Apparently it was about him going on a road trip looking for love. My guess is he failed to find it. Because now there is the creatively titled I Can't Believe I'm Still Single II in which he does the same thing, except this time he has friend-of-Gawker (and foe-of-Scientology) Mark Ebner on board as his "wing man." So for us, it's sort of like the Iron Sheik and Hulk Hogan making a buddy flick. We have no idea if or when this is actually airing. But enjoy (or detest), and have a happy weekend.

We're trying to keep this series alive. So if you have or spot any old photos of media type friends, send them over. Hopefully we'll be able to compile something of a yearbook at some point.

There are two pictures, just posted on Facebook. One is a portrait of the gloriously becoiffed future media queen (sans boa, in these days), the other a cross section of college dorm life. Two shirtless, lean young men, louche on a bed. Two permed, and fully clothed women sit upright. The girl on the inside is Touby, we believe. These were taken at Smith college in Northampton, MA sometime around 1981.

This is something of a Part Two to our The Way We Were series. We'd like to keep it going! Have any old media heyday photos lying around? Send them over! We'd like to compile something of yearbook, to remember how the world used to be before the internet, like a mad and glowing Pied Piper, led us all to ruin.

The caption on this is both priceless and sad: "After slumber party in Laurel and I's room. Don't ask me what happened that night. I spent the night in a friend's room. Anne Laufe was going to nearby Mt. Holyoke at the time. I can't remember the guy's names, Laurel?"

The ever-hungry Nothing is gathering around the property, with Kathleen Kennedy/Frank Marshall and Leo DiCaprio's Appian Way pecking at its peacefully resting corpse. Of course the potential producers hope to put a "modern spin" on the fantasy tale (based on a German children's book), which means CGI wizard fights and snappy dialogue or something.

If you're not familiar with the film—or its weirder, more Jonathan Brandis-y sequel—you should smoke a fat bowl and check it out. Basically a lonely, friendless kid (is there any other kind in movies?) is reading a book about a fantasy land called, um, Fantasia. In hte tale, a mighty Injun named Atreyu is trying to defend the Childlike Empress from The Nothing, a dark and evil force that's eating everything. As the lonely little bugger, Bastian, continues to read the story, he becomes an integral part of it. It's directed, bizarrely, by Wolfgang Peterson and there are lots of puppets and it's the kind of strange, vaguely menacing kids movie that they don't really make anymore—because kids are dumb and coddled and have no imagination or attention span anymore.

Now, before we get too doom and gloom, it's important to note that this cabal of producers has only secured the puppet rights thus far. So maybe they're just trying to build their very own luckdragon for personal reasons. Which I would have no problem with.

Atreyyyyuuuuuuuu!

• Way back in early 2001, Barbra asked of our great new President, "how could such a destructive man be so popular with the American people?" It's funny because her knee-jerk liberal nonsense was prescient! "Not only is he poisoning our air and water, she added, "he's poisoning our political system as well."
• In 2002, she called President Bush, Vice President Cheney and John Ashcroft "crazy.'" She called the White House "too far to the right house." Clever.
• "She tells Oprah Winfrey in the latest edition of O magazine, 'I'm sure President Bush is a very nice guy, but some people voted for him because they thought he was a person they could have a beer with. What is that about?! Do you want to have a beer with the doctor who's going to operate on you, or do you want him to be the top of his class ... be a bit in awe of him?'"
• In 2004, Babs wrote a blog about how Thomas Jefferson called Bush's administration "a reign of witches."
• Hey, you can read a bunch of Barbra's blogs right at her official site.

Here's Babs performing in 2006 in Philadelphia. There is a funny skit, about how Bush is a moron. Comedy! (This skit was directed by Sidney Pollack.) (No, it wasn't.)

Man, can you believe she kissed that guy? Now James Brolin is going to kick the president's ass.

• "Which A-list actor with a long-suffering wife is not only a serial philanderer (we knew that) but a major cokehead (that's news!)? He makes bathroom trips every five minutes at his favorite L.A. club and likes to have a young woman seated on his lap." [Gatecrasher]
• "This A list country singer was at a middle school within the last month to give a little speech and do a song or two. Before entering the school he spent twenty minutes doing line after line of coke, and when he got out of the school, did the very same thing. I bet you think the speech was about staying off drugs, but it wasn't. It was about why you should fear and obey God. See, it was a private, religious middle school and our singer is very pro-God. Obviously very pro-drugs as well." [Crazy Days and Nights]