Things were so simple then. Last year’s passing of John Hughes (1950-2009), though ill-timed for the accelerated zeitgeist in the prolonged shadow of Jack-O’s farewell, permitted many ’80s babies to again bask in the lucid energy of Ferris Bueller’s shower mic finesse and urgent pivot-step.

Still, it’s difficult for the youth of today to objectively evaluate whether Hughes’ films—their tingly adolescent strife aside—served as decade-mythologizing of the Hollywood-ist order. Did the ’80s really pop fantastic like innocent lip gloss on Anticipated Friday Night? Like soft-neon signs in a socially-impassioned mall food court?

Matthew Broderick’s IRL snob-trajectory after “Bueller” and “Project X” should be evidence enough of VH-1-endorsed decade hyperbole. And yet the more surprising answer is contained in the below video: a ten-minute, self-indulgent PSA starring the Me Decade’s posterboy, Corey Haim, made and released in 1988.

Historians and nostalgists can finally take a breather: Haim’s vid is double-proof that the ’80s were “The ’80s.” This thing plays like a heavy, child star docu-spoof directed by Paul Thomas Anderson in the vein of his early test footage for “Boogie Nights“…except it’s non-fiction.

That PSA is synth-addled proof that during the ’80s Haim inhaled cool like tanks of nitrous, and no doubt, in addition to nitrous.  Modern science cannot explain it, but Haim was officially appointed Prince of the ’80s by Lenient Mother Nature herself.  As the decade came to a head, clashing messily with ’90s jadedness and the earliest signs of ’00s irony sickness, Haim was too much the embodiment to find a dry place.

In 1985 and ‘86, Haim precociously hickied the hearts of girls and their babysitters with “Lucas” after registering with cool guys and dorks in the lycanthropic Stephen King flick ”Silver Bullet.” It was a watershed role in 1987, as a comic book devouring Californian/de-facto vampire slayer, Sam Emerson, in ”The Lost Boys” that vaulted Haim to tan, fresh-faced superstardom.

After that, Haim’s teenage fans could never imagine how his life would suddenly become plush in monies, alligator floats, keyboard lessons, Ferraris, bitches, and, of course, cocaine. Perhaps no quote better encapsulates the zany levels of romance demanded of an ’80s heart throb than this one from the PSA, Haim’s second mention of dolphins therein, natch…

“What does kissing really mean to me? To me, if you feel…you kiss a girl, that certain feeling of all of those dolphins, like, swimming through your blood stream and you get those get good tingles inside your stomach? I don’t think there’s anything better than kissing, because…it basically comes to, I guess, the word ‘love.’ I guess...that’s what it’s all about.”

Love is the answer. “And kids,” to paraphrase Haim later, “don’t forget to stay in the school. Did I mention how I only go to school for three hours a day? Isn’t that totally awesome?”

On screen in “The Lost Boys” and “License to Drive,” Haim developed a signature for leaving his mouth in an agape state of awe for what seemed like minutes, hours—like vert ramp hangtime measured in fun. The sight of Haim’s agape mouth became so synonymous with his acting that, per an interview I did with him this year, Haim’s mother used to warn him about “catching flies.”

Soon enough, hangers-on and Hollywood goons began to take advantage of Haim’s open mouth by giving him pills, swarms of them. He’s so pilled out in the PSA that his cool-DNA feels exposed without his knowing; it’s unnatural and tragic but fascinating—like when a beloved android’s wires are sputtering and its eyes are rolling back as it delivers a heartfelt message. If you watch closely, an equation of influences and inspirations show through: the positivity of John Ritter is a major ingredient. And dreaming big, an ethos Haim never really lost…

“I’m trying to get in the habit of, you know, picking up a book and writing my feelings down, well, not my feelings, but my thoughts about things. And hopefully I’ll be moving towards the writing and the directing, uh, soon” (Corey Haim in the above ’80s PSA).

“I want to direct. Definitely a goal of mine. I want to direct sci-fi, definitely not horror. Horror movies, man, the blood entails so much time. And horror movies are not fun, definitely not starting there as a director. Definitely not horror. I’d like to do something like “License to Drive.” Maybe some cool animation? I’m just kicking ideas around. I really like dramas, and horror movies are second…well, if I can get past the blood, I’m good to go. Then third, comedy is where it’s at for me, so that’s always number one, but maybe I’ll mix it up and make it a dramedy? And I’ll start directing from there” (Corey Haim, in an interview with me, April, 2009).

Haim’s personal demons weren’t available for comment about what it was like working for him in the ’90s and then having Haim work for them in the ’00s. In the aughts, Haim didn’t pull a fatal DJ AM, nor did his career hit another stride.

Throughout 2009, Haim remained just outside the public eye. A larger-than-expected role in the year’s amazing and absurd, “Crank 2: High Voltage,” at least vaulted the actor out of the ironic cameo dungeon in desperate films like “Lost Boys 2: The Tribe” and back into movie theaters. What’s more, Haim managed to demonstrate some old pep and charm, albeit playing a crack head with a giant mullet who’s bangin’ and abusin’ Amy Smart.

If Haim’s biggest hope was to become so famous and rich—and in the PSA, he’s on his way—that by 2009 he could stare back at L.A. from a vista in Tahiti, he failed. The below video shows how his life had come to consist of shopping marathons, signing autographs—re: possibly staged ones—and pecking the cheeks of immaculate, now hesitant California bimbos.

Corey Haim, gifting event in Hollywood (2009)

Near the end of the vid, he puffs a cigarette, hair shaved on the sides like a juvenile delinquent. He playfully and habitually sells the paparazzi on the premise of an imagined “License to Drive” spin-off entitled “License to Fly.” He knows it’s bullshit, but hey, maybe not.

“License to Fly,” Haim tells the camera, would allow him the opportunity to finally make sex to co-star Heather Graham and then steal a plane “like Johnny Depp in ”Blow“” and fly off to Cuba (might as well be Tahiti). (I wonder if Fidel Castro was a fan of Haim.)

I can’t write this article without mentioning Haim’s more stable partner in crime, Corey Scott Feldman, who was the chatterbox astronaut to his shooting star. Fortunately for fans and their families, neither ended up on a spilt milk carton; Haim sobered up and found peace enough in floating, sans alligator float, a couple of miles outside of the current TMZ-tribal-tattoo-sex-sweat celeb culture.

In the end, his career was a makeshift raft tied up with past glories, but what does it say about modern Hollywood and entertainment that he was still cooler and more believable than would-be Haims like Zac Efron, Lil’ Bow Wow, and Rumer Willis?

- Hunter Stephenson

In my eyes, if a 20something guy aspires to sit inside the healthiest, truest beating heart of the human race—if only for the first few months out of university—while making $65K a year, with benefits, AFLAC, and an unbeatable 401K, he should aim for an office job in online pornography.

Most young men today will never know what it feels like to fight on the front-lines of a war, and I believe such jobs in porn offer the safest alternative to wallow in the capitalistic blood that really keeps our world spinning; in this case, to the tune of $10 billion annually (and that is just what is on the books). The strange realization that one’s office-loaned car, one’s office walls, one’s office computer, one’s food, one’s tequila, and one’s toothpaste are paid for simply by harnessing the energy of people fucking to attract the energy and dollars of millions of faceless strangers is nonpareil as far as modern epiphanies go.

To this day and partially for this reason, I am fascinated by the inner-psyche, attitudes and psychology of the pornography industry’s legendary pioneers like Larry Flynt and Al Goldstein, and none more so than Bob Guccione, founder of the Penthouse empire. These men harnessed sexual energy to such great, lucrative effect that they were rewarded with fantastically filthy empires built from nothing; empires that existed like monoliths power-forced onto our landscape of civility by something primal, insatiable. Without the once formidable influence of Penthouse and its sexy ’70s aesthetic, culture today would probably be much different (Dov Charney, Terry Richardson). But it just seems natural that a man, an Italian man no less, would see dollar signs in dismissing Hugh Hefner’s hugely popular airbrushed girls and general phoniness.

Growing up in the early ’90s, Bob Guccione was the first man I ever saw who discussed and promoted porn like respectable Art. I’m not sure I knew such chutzpah existed. However, even in the days before I closed my door and stumbled into an online nirvana of Jenny McCarthy nude pics and sites like Thumbzilla, something about Guccione’s ideas for the porn industry seemed outdated. Too romantic. Of another era.

In this 1979 interview--his shirt unbuttoned and his naked chest decorated with cool gold--Guccione’s confidence nearly warrants a second guest chair. With leveled assurance, he casually dismisses the failure of his ridiculous and ridiculously expensive film “Caligula,” the now-bogus theory that pornography spurs violence against women, and even wider notions of sexism.

Nearly two decades later, in a great interview with Charlie Rose, the signature confidence remains, but Guccione’s empire had already peaked. Indeed, it was battling the irreversible erosion of changing times and pickier, more peculiar tastes. We witness here in retrospect a well-tanned pillar of the second-gen American porn community who can’t foresee the online porn explosion (surprising), nor hear the approaching death knell of the print industry (less so). At this point, even the Unabomber was turning Guccione down.

Two years later he would make Penthouse’s content explicit, asking models to perform poses and acts long synonymous with the bottom-barrels of Larry Flynt’s Hustler and Tijuana sideshows. And less than five years later, Guccione would declare bankruptcy. His life story—complete with an estranged son who famously founded SPIN—has a tinge of epic Greek tragedy that nearly seems fated. Unlike Hefner and Flynt, Guccione didn’t come off like a sly huckster. There was a time when he believed his work was making a difference.

“Do you worry that it’s all slipping away?” Charlie asks.

“Not really Charlie.”

Contrast Bob Guccione’s financial splat with Larry Flynt’s continued success and his company’s growth (even as Hugh Hefner’s empire sputters on), and I think it’s highly amusing: In this industry, the junkyard dog lives the longest.

A few years ago, I had the pleasure of interviewing Flynt at an ACLU forum, in a backstage room no bigger than a sister’s closet. I asked Flynt why his empire flourished as so many others’ waned. From his golden wheelchair, Flynt’s heavily sedated eyes focused in on mine. A tight smirk hooked across his lips, a winner’s swoosh, and he said, “No matter what ‘they’ say, always go with your gut.” It was a mantra he professed had saved his ass on more than one occasion.

By this point, Flynt was running for political office in California, having survived an unsolved assassination attempt that left him paralyzed and a battle with the Supreme Court in a diaper that was later adapted into a Hollywood feature film. For a few seconds, the dead-serious way in which he delivered this advice felt Patton-esque. It was then I realized that in order to make a living in the world of pornography a man has to be as tough and relentless as any politician. Eventually, there is no room for the artful mind. But I still admire Guccione for almost proving Flynt wrong.

- Hunter Stephenson

Mika Miko, “Business Cats” (2006)

The only problem with David Byrne of “The Talking Heads” is that he began making sense. That’s a side effect of becoming a de facto sage punk rock silver fox. But like the best comedy today, the most upperest-level music remains the stuff that doesn’t make sense as it bumps and whizzes by your brain like fractals of energy. Like nappy waves in a newly plowed field at 90 mph. Or drippy, cliché urban lights trailing late at night with the aid of Strattera and Stella. Sure, this may not be a profound observation for a Ryeberg curator, but such is the music employed as fluid dressing on an unpredictable 20something life of college loan fuckery.

To most of us, California’s Mika Miko is a band that is no longer a discovery, a Smell — endorsed youth outfit that perhaps shines to the point of interruption in an Internet hunt for the newest pick-me-up distributed from the tiniest mail-order bedroom. But I love them so. As leaked pics of Dakota Fanning and Kristen Stewart flood my email tin from the set of 2010’s The Runaways, I exhaust my WinAmp with a downloaded discography of the eager-beaver Miko. I want their music to leave the fabulous stain of permanency, but their jams empty at such a raucous clip so as to make this impossible. Instead, I am a Mika Miko addict.

As of today, the Catherine Hardwickes of Hollywood have not yet swept down upon Mika Miko to direct hit videos (if such a thing still exists, of course). What a feature film can do in two hours compared to what Mika Miko does in 30 secs in the scrappy vids here, and especially live, will make any fertile male and female jealous. Their “Business Cats” video from C.Y.S.L.A.B.F. calls collect on an Ocean Pacific partyline and shot-puts youth fury into a RED TELEPHONE, the band’s weapon of choice until recently. Dr. Strangelove is on the other end and he’s learning quickly that 20something girls in afterthought fedoras roam his distraught earth like feral cats choosing to jam econo over alley-breeding beside discarded 40 oz’s. His bomb is unsexy, obsolete, broke.

Mika Miko’s latest video, “I Got a Lot (New New New)” chews up emotions and highway demons faster than a candy string necklace during a saucy crush. It’s like, get off that tight dick and tight hole, and go outside and explore already. Create. Destroy. Create.

Mika Miko, “I Got A Lot (New New New)” (2009)

A few weeks ago, I went to a Mika Miko show and I was registered to interview them in a makeshift venue. During their performance I sweated out gray post-post-Wynwood District toxins alongside 70 or so others. Then I walked to a Deep South bodega, bought a sixer, and walked back past kung-fu DoJos with airbrushed signs, and past black guys loudly offering swag blunts from dilapidated porches. The show was so off the Google grid it didn’t make sense. Nobody knows what Mika Miko is saying. But you know what I’m saying, and clearly, like a long dead man-o-war on Key Biscayne, the effect is less than a quarter as thrilling. K.

- Hunter Stephenson