adult

by jenks

The Last Exit To The Millennium

“Those of us who watched Kids as adolescents,” writes Caroline Rothstein, in her Narrative.ly piece Legends Never Die, “Growing up in an era before iPhones, Facebook, and Tiger Moms, had our minds blown from wherever we were watching–whether it was the Angelika Film Center on the Lower East Side or our parents’ Midwestern basements. We were captivated by the entirely unsupervised teens smoking blunts, drinking forties, hooking up, running amok and reckless through the New York City streets…. Two decades after [the] film turned Washington Square skaters into international celebrities, the kids from ‘Kids’ struggle with lost lives, distant friendships, and the fine art of growing up.”

If you came up in the 90’s, you remember Kids. But I’d hardly given it a backward glance in ages. Had it really been two decades? It seemed somehow inconceivable. The cast, none of them professional actors, all plucked from the very streets they skated on, had become fixed in my mind as eternal teenagers, immortalizing a hyperbolized — and yet, not entirely foreign — experience. Kids was grotesque and dirty and self-indulgent and unignorable, and so was high school. Which is where I, and my friends, were at the time. The movie had become internalized. I had entirely forgotten that this was where Chloe Sevigny and Rosario Dawson had come from. Like a rite of passage, it seemed to carry a kind of continuity, like it was something everyone goes through. It seemed disconnected from any kind of evolving timeline.

And yet time had passed. Revisiting the lives of the cast 20 years later, Rothstein writes, “Justin Pierce, who played Casper, took his life in July 2000, the first of several tragedies for the kids. Harold, who played himself in the film and is best remembered for swinging his dick around in the pool scene—he was that kid who wasn’t afraid, who radiated a magnetic and infectious energy both on and off screen—is gone too. He died in February 2006 from a drug-induced heart attack.” Sevigny and Dawson have become successful actors. Others tied to the crew have gone on to lead the skate brand Zoo York, and start a foundation that aims to “use skateboarding as a vehicle to provide inner-city youth with valuable life experiences that nurture individual creativity, resourcefulness and the development of life skills.” But the most striking story for me, however, was of what happened over the past 20 years to the movie’s most profoundly central character:

“I think that Kids is probably the last time you see New York City for what it was on film,” [says, Jon “Jonny Boy” Abrahams.] “That is to me a seminal moment in New York history because right after that came the complete gentrification of Manhattan.”

Kids immortalizes a moment in New York City when worlds collided–“the end of lawless New York,” Eli [Morgan, co-founder of Zoo York] says–before skateboarding was hip, before Giuliani cleaned up, suited up, and wealthy-ed up Manhattan.

“I don’t think anyone else could have ever made that movie,” says Leo [Fitzpatrick, who played the main character, Telly]. “If you made that movie a year before or after it was made, it wouldn’t be the same movie.”

Kids‘ low-budget grit and amateur acting gave it a strange ambivalence. It was neither fully fictional nor fully real. It blurred the line between the two in a way that it itself did not quite fully understand — it was the very, very beginning of “post-Empire,” when such ambiguities would become common — and neither did we. Detached from  the confines of the real and the fictional, it had a sense of also being out of time. But it turns out it was in fact the opposite. Kids was a time capsule. As Jessica [Forsyth] says in the article: “It’s almost like Kids was the dying breath of the old New York.”

It’s a strange thing. One day you wake up and discover that culture has become history. In the end it wasn’t a dramatic disaster or radical new technology that changed the narrative in an instant. It was a transition that happened gradually. The place stands still, and time revolves around it; changes it the way wind changes the topography of dunes.

Just a few days after Rothstein’s piece, I read these truly chilling words in The New York Times:

“The mean streets of the borough that rappers like the Notorious B.I.G. crowed about are now hipster havens, where cupcakes and organic kale rule.”

For current real estate purposes, the block where the Brooklyn rapper Notorious B.I.G., whose real name was Christopher Wallace, once sold crack is now well within the boundaries of swiftly gentrifying Clinton Hill, though it was at the edge of Bedford-Stuyvesant when he was growing up. Biggie, who was killed under still-mysterious circumstances in 1997, was just one of the many rappers to emerge from Brooklyn’s streets in the ’80s and ’90s. Including successful hardcore rappers, alternative hip-hop M.C.s, respected but obscure underground groups and some — like KRS-One and Gang Starr — who were arguably all of the above, the then-mean streets gave birth to an explosion of hip hop. Among the artists who lived in or hung out in this now gentrified corner of the borough: Not only Jay-Z, but also the Beastie Boys, Foxy Brown, Talib Kweli, Big Daddy Kane, Mos Def and L’il Kim.

For many, the word “Brooklyn” now evokes artisanal cheese rather than rap artists. The disconnect between brownstone Brooklyn’s past and present is jarring in the places where rappers grew up and boasted about surviving shootouts, but where cupcakes now reign. If you look hard enough, the rougher past might still be visible under the more recently applied gloss. And if you want to buy a piece of the action, Biggie’s childhood apartment, a three-bedroom walk-up, was recently listed by a division of Sotheby’s International Realty. Asking price: $725,000.

When we imagine the world of the future, it is invariably a world of science fiction. It’s always, “Here’s what Los Angeles might look like in seven years: swamped by a four-foot rise in sea level, California’s megalopolis of the future will be crisscrossed with a thousand miles of rail transportation. Abandoned freeways will function as waterslides while train passengers watch movies whiz by in a succession of horizontally synchronized digital screens. Foodies will imbibe 3-D-printed protein sculptures extruded by science-minded chefs.”

It’s always impersonal. The future,  even one just seven years away, seems always inhabited entirely by future-people. It’s not a place where we actually imagine….ourselves. Who will we be when the music that speaks to us now becomes “Classic” (Attention deficit break: “Elders react to Skrillex“); when the movies or TV shows or — lets be real, it’s most likely going to be — web content that captures the spirit of  this moment becomes a time capsule instead of a reflection? When once counter-cultural expressions — like skating, or hip hop — become mainstream? Who will we be when there is no longer a mainstream, or a counter-culture, for that matter? And who will the teenagers of this future be when the culture of their youth ages?

The past isn’t a foreign country. It’s our hometown. It’s the place we left, that has become immortalized in our memory the way it was back then. We return one day to discover new buildings have sprung up in empty lots, new people have moved in and displaced the original residents. Some from the old neighborhood didn’t made it out alive. The past has moved while we weren’t looking. It’s no longer where it was at all.

“In the ’80s and ’90s–as strange as it may seem to say this–we had such luxury of stability,” William Gibson, the once science-fiction writer who popularized the word “cyberspace,” and turned natural realist novelist in the 21st-century, said in a 2007 interview. “Things weren’t changing quite so quickly in the ’80s and ’90s. And when things are changing too quickly you don’t have any place to stand from which to imagine a very elaborate future.”

Yet this week, it seems to me the more mysterious our future, the more the past becomes a moving target.

Then again, perhaps it always was.

Strange memories on this nervous night in Las Vegas. Five years later? Six? It seems like a lifetime, or at least a Main Era—the kind of peak that never comes again. San Francisco in the middle sixties was a very special time and place to be a part of. Maybe it meant something. Maybe not, in the long run… but no explanation, no mix of words or music or memories can touch that sense of knowing that you were there and alive in that corner of time and the world. Whatever it meant.…

History is hard to know, because of all the hired bullshit, but even without being sure of “history” it seems entirely reasonable to think that every now and then the energy of a whole generation comes to a head in a long fine flash, for reasons that nobody really understands at the time—and which never explain, in retrospect, what actually happened.

There was madness in any direction, at any hour. You could strike sparks anywhere. There was a fantastic universal sense that whatever we were doing was right, that we were winning.… We had all the momentum; we were riding the crest of a high and beautiful wave.…

So now, you can go up on a steep hill in Las Vegas and look West, and with the right kind of eyes you can almost see the high-water mark—that place where the wave finally broke and rolled back.”

– Hunter S. Thompson

highwatermarknewyork
Map of New York City showing the remnants of the 6ft high water line from Hurricane Sandy.
Crom Martial Training, Rockaway Beach. (Source)

 

    



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by jenks

Who The iPad Ads Are For

Ever since Apple started putting a lowercase i in front of its products, their advertisements have been known for basically two things — articulating a visceral, transcendent grace inherent within the Mac product experience:

…and making fun of people who don’t already use Macs:

Which is why the iPad ads — with their exaggeratedly simplistic gestures, their induced first-person perspective, (the people in the photos always seem to be seated in some awkward position in order to give us, the viewers, the perspective of being the “user” in the image), and above all, the blatantly basic depiction of the product experience — just don’t quite fit with the image of what an Apple ad is supposed to be.

If these ads seem like a departure, it’s because they are.

In the 60′s, Everett Rogers broke down the process by which trends, products, and ideas proliferate through culture. There are five basic types of adopter personas in his diffusion of innovation theory:

Innovators are the first to adopt an innovation. They are, by defualt, risk-takers since being on the front lines means they are likely to adopt a technology or an idea which may ultimately fail. Early Adopters are the second fastest category to adopt an innovation. They’re more discrete in their adoption choice than Innovators, but have the highest degree of opinion leadership among the other adopter categories. Individuals in the Early Majority adopt an innovation after having let the Innovators and Early adopters do product-testing for them. The Late Majority approaches an innovation with a high degree of skepticism, and after the majority of society has already adopted the innovation first. And finally, Laggards are the last to get on board with a new innovation. These individuals typically have an aversion to change-agents, tend to be advanced in age, and to be focused on “traditions.”

The thinking in marketing, especially when launching a new product, generally tends to be about aiming at the early adopters over on the left side of the adoption bell-curve. Once the early adopters get into it, the thinking goes, whatever it is will trickle down through all the rest of the early and late majority who make up the vast bulk of the market share. A few years back I wrote about how Nintendo was going for a “late adopter strategy” with its Wii console. At the time (and perhaps still now) the Wii was outselling both Sony’s PlayStation and Microsoft’s X-box combined. The Wii’s uniquely simple controller and intuitive game-play enabled it to appeal to a much broader audience than the more complicated, hardcore-gaming consoles.

From a Time Magazine article on the eve of the Wii release in 2006:

“The one topic we’ve considered and debated at Nintendo for a very long time is, Why do people who don’t play video games not play them?” [Nintendo president Satoru] Iwata has been asking himself, and his employees, that question for the past five years. And what Iwata has noticed is something that most gamers have long ago forgotten: to nongamers, video games are really hard. Like hard as in homework.

The key to the Wii’s success is that it made gaming simple, broadly accessible, and inherently intuitive. Later that year, AdAge wrote that the Wii’s popularity is “part of a growing phenomenon that’s overhauling the video-gaming industry…. Video gaming is beginning to transcend the solitary boy-in-the-basement stereotype with a new generation of gamers including women, older people and younger children.”

Anyone who has bought, or even used, an iPhone at some point during the three years since the first iteration was released, already understands what the iPad is all about without any help from an ad. Indeed, Apple has done such a good  job of making ads aimed at early adopters for the past decade, they no longer need to. An ad is not going to make a difference in whether someone on the left-hand side of Apple’s adopter bell-curve buys an iPad or not. Instead, these ads are targeted straight at the people on the downhill slope.

New results from a Pew Research Center survey tracking 2,252 adults 18 and older show that use of social network sites among older adults has risen dramatically over the past two years:

While overall social networking use by online American adults has grown from 35% in 2008 to 61% in 2010, the increase is even more dramatic among older adults. The rate of online social networking approximately quadrupled among Older Boomers (9% to 43%) and the GI Generation (4% to 16%).

Of course, Millennials still have a healthy lead among all age groups in social network use, with 83% of online adults from 18-33 engaging in social networking, but grandma and grandpa are just catching up. Particularly grandma. Last year, the fastest growing demographic on Facebook was women over 55.

Unlike the Apple ads we’ve become accustomed to in the 2000’s, these iPad ads are no longer touting the product’s “higher resolution experience” to digital natives. That is, they are not emphasizing the ephemeral or smugly superior subtleties that are inaccessible to anyone who does not intuitively “get it.” These ads are, instead, paring the experience down to be as unintimidating as possible. Not only is the iPad a completely new way to experience personal computing, it is as effortless to use this technology, the ads say to you, the viewer, as if you were, yourself, a digital native.

    



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by jenks

taste the difference

…And I can make you wanna buy a product
Movers shakers and producers
Me and my friends understand the future
– The Flobots: “Handlebars”

I’ve been trying to get through Matt Mason’s The Pirate’s Dilemma for a while. It’s an easy read, but between digging up mind-blowing historical discoveries from the cultural strata–Did you know that a nun at the orphanage David Mancuso was raised at is pretty much responsible for modern dance culture? Dude, I know, it’s insane–And so many unconscious ironies and philosophical inconsistencies that I’m tempted to write a post after I finally do finish it called “The Pirate’s Contradiction”…. it’s difficult to read too much of it at a time.

There’s one very interesting section in it, however, that I think can be dealt with outside of the rest of the book. In keeping with the recent theme of musings on contemporary adulthood, here’s an excerpt from a section called “Parents Just Do Understand”:

The hip-hop generation was the first to grow up in a brand-saturated world. Before hip-hop, as Will Smith and DJ Jazzy Jeff once postulated, it was a given that parents just didn’t understand. But now parents who are the age of Smith have the same albums on their iPods as their kids, and the same reissued retro sneakers on their feet. This has serious ramifications for youth culture, commerce, and everything else.

…What does it mean now to “grow up” in a world where we all want a Nintendo Wii for Christmas?

BAM!

And while Mason presents the caveat that younger generations now find the outlet for rebellion through media and technology, that last bastion where parents and kids are still reliably segregated, in general his conclusion is that “The generation gap has become obsolete.”

But I wonder if perhaps it’s not quite that simple. Maybe the generation gap hasn’t gotten filled in and paved over, but has, in fact, gone deeper below the surface. From above, the divisions that would once define a generational cohort and distinguish it from its predecessors would appear to have eroded, but underneath, a different separation is very much intact.

A 2006 Rolling Stone article called “Teens Save Classic Rock” talks about how the genre of Hendrix, Floyd and Zeppelin is experiencing a resurgence among a whole new generation of kids. “We’re now seeing an audience that goes from sixteen to sixty,” said Allman Brothers manager Bert Holman.

The internet made this possible. iTunes means the music we can listen to is no longer determined solely by the offerings of an ever more homogenized radio, or limited to the finite selection of a physical record store. And while we can now instantly get to hear a bigger breadth of music from across genres and ages than was ever possible before, the question remains, as Rolling Stone points out, “Why would kids born in the Nineties turn to timeworn guitar anthems?”

One answer:

For all of the vibrant rock recorded in the past ten years — from pop punk to neogarage to dance rock — no new, dominant sound has emerged since grunge in the early Nineties. “I can’t think of a record recently that blew people’s minds,” says Jeff Peretz, a Manhattan producer and guitar teacher. “And there aren’t really any guitar heroes around anymore. Kids don’t come in and say, ‘I want to play like John Mayer.’”

“There is such a drought that kids are going back and rediscovering the Who and Sabbath,” says Paul Green, who runs the Paul Green School of Rock Music.

But I don’t think it’s a “drought” so much as a glut. Popular, contemporary music is so ominpresent and obvious there’s barely room for kids to even figure out if they like it. By default, it’s what they’re expected to be listening to. The hideaway of classic rock, where no doubt no one expected to find them, is a relished escape. The musical equivalent of disobeying your mom when she tells you “Just stay where I can see you.”

According to Rolling Stone, “9% of kids ages 12-17 listened to classic-rock radio in any given week in 2005 — marking a small but significant increase during the past three years, according to the radio-ratings company Arbitron.” It’s not just a sign of teen taste, it’s a sign of teen distinction. If you’re listening to classic rock in high school, you’re doing something the other 91% of the kids at your high school aren’t into, or onto yet. That’s some indisputable early adopter appeal there.

Which is perhaps the complete opposite of what appeals to adults about listening to the music of their own youth.

In a 2004 USA Today article about how Kids Are Listening To Their Parents’ Music, Jeremy Hammond, head of artist development at Sanctuary Records noted, “There’s not so much peer pressure to identify with a particular genre or even generation of music,” says “Back then, you had to choose a lifestyle associated with a genre. In England, you were in a gang of rockers or skinheads or Mods. Potheads wanted psychedelic music. Those boundaries are gone. [Now] It’s much more about defining one’s own unique tastes.”

The way a modern identity is constructed has changed. It’s no longer something as simple as how old we are that determines what is or is not “for us” to buy, or listen to, or dress like. The mechanics of taste is the next marketing frontier.

“I think the rebellion is that kids aren’t rebelling,” Says Rana Reeves, creative director of Shine Communications in The Pirate’s Dilemma. “They aren’t rebelling against the marketers; they want to be marketers.”

    



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by jenks

growing up and the city

“I am real!” said Alice, and began to cry.
– Through the Looking Glass, Lewis Carroll

I always find it fascinating when movies do things that executives didn’t expect. Entertainment, particularly the kind with narratives and characters, is like a Rorschach test where what we have to say about the inkblot and what the inkblot has to say about us are equally as meaningful. Thus when a movie manages to find an appeal beyond what was expected it can illuminate new cultural insight.

Here is the point at which I admit I love Sex And The City. And while I can’t say I’m a “huge” fan not because I don’t feel like I am one, but because I don’t think I am one in comparison to ACTUAL “huge” SATC fans, I will say I’m pretty excited to have a reason to be writing about it.

The series premiered on HBO in 1998, when I hadn’t even graduated high school yet, and at the time the show had absolutely no way to compete for relevance in my life against My So-Called Life. But then a couple of years ago an old friend of mine (who you should know is male, and straight, and works in real estate finance in NY) got me to watch a couple of episodes cuz he loved the show, and long before I went to see the Sex and the City movie this weekend, I’d actually managed to see every single episode of the show (thanks, Netflix).

It’s not just cuz the main character is a writer, and all the episodes were filtered through the perspective of a woman whose job was about observing and writing about social behavior (though, yeah, I did really dig that aspect). It’s because she was clever enough to make even cynicism charming, hopeful enough to still be curious, difficult enough to give her gravity beyond the frenetic giddy fashionableness. It’s because there’s not too many shows where four friends hanging out is consistently some of the funniest dialogue on a screen, and where decent, relatively normal people, dealing with lives complicated by emotions and nuance and relationships–rather than intrigue or crime or the paranormal–could continue to be genuinely interesting enough to be watchable for six years.

Of course, these decent, relatively normal people happen to be four urban, sassy, sexually uninhibited women, and the show happened to be on a cable network that blazed the trail on you-can’t-do-that-on-television television. So it’s no surprise that two weeks before the movie opened, the LA Times prophesied “Sex and the City” movie may lack wide appeal,” proclaiming:

Few films have polarized audiences more than May 30’s long-awaited cinematic adaptation of the influential HBO show. It’s easier to find $2-a-gallon gas than a straight man eager to see the movie. Older women (in Hollywood’s youth-obsessed view of the world, this means older than 30) hold a dramatically different view: When they are not posting online about their love of the series — “addicted” pops up with frightening frequency — they are organizing ladies’ night viewing parties around the film’s opening….

If “Sex and the City” can start attracting more teenage girls (and appeal to audiences in smaller cities), it just might have a shot at turning into a hit.”

The polarized reactions to Sex and the City–not just the movie, or the HBO series, but really the entire franchise–is not based just on gender, or even on age. When I asked a friend of mine if she wanted to go see the movie, she replied she didn’t think she could for “moral” reasons. Another texted back, “I never took you for that type.”

You’d think digging a show about smart, quick-witted, modern women, half hopelessly jaded half hopelessly romantic, talking about love, sex, and relationships over brunch, and reaping the sexual benefits and pitfalls of having happened to be post-feminist females wouldn’t be a bad type to be taken for. Especially by anyone else that fits that exact same profile. Yet that watching Sex and the City would seem somehow “immoral” even to another educated, liberal, sophisticated girl, speaks to a dramatic dissonance in the movie’s expected demographic.

LA Times movie critic, Carina Chocano, began her review of the film by admitting:

IT’S IMPOSSIBLE to talk about the new “Sex and the City” movie without first mentioning… the rabid fan devotion [the HBO series] enjoyed; or the equally fervent antipathy (female and male) it inspired on socio-political grounds (sort of like the late-’90s equivalent of not letting your daughter play with Barbies)….

Which is too bad, because Michael Patrick King, who executive produced the show (with series creator Darren Star) and wrote and directed the movie, has done some brave, surprising things with it, mining territory that’s been all but abandoned by Hollywood….

“Sex and the City” can’t rightly be called a romantic comedy in the dismal, contemporary sense, though it is at times romantic and is consistently very funny. It’s also emotionally realistic, even brutal….

Yet despite the fact that for the majority of it’s 2 1/2 hours this is not a happy story, yesterday morning Marketing Daily proclaimed, “‘Sex/City’ Poised To Become Era’s ‘Feel-Good’ Movie.” And I, and no doubt everyone else who cheered when the usher at the Arclight who’d introduced the movie yelled, “Let’s escape reality!” as the lights went down, would agree:

Brands looking to sweep consumers off their feet to escape the recession, global warming and the war in Iraq might want to take a closer look at Carrie Bradshaw and friends.

“Sex and the City” is poised to become the new Depression Era feel-good movie that makes cash registers ring in shopping malls and along Fifth Avenue and Rodeo Drive. Such films tend to make consumers feel upbeat and not overly cautious about spending, according to marketing experts.

…Faith Popcorn, a trend spotter and founder of marketing consultancy BrainReserve, believes the “Sex and the City” movie comes at the perfect time for a nation exhausted politically, emotionally and financially. Marketers can use the good feeling gained from the movie to their advantage, she says, helping consumers temporarily escape tough times. The movie joins “My Man Godfrey,” “The Women” and other Depression Era classics that provided weary audiences with high-style fantasy relief.

Of course, as Chocano says:

The clothes, the restaurants, the apartments, the shoes — they’re all there, but then, even on the show, they were always the fantasy element, the sugar that helped the sometimes harsh emotional reality go down….

For a film that delights in indulging in frivolity at every possible turn, it examines subjects that most movies don’t dare graze for their terrifying seriousness. [How should women live their lives in a society that constantly limits them while pretending not to? What is the function of forgiveness, and why is it necessary for living?] And when it does, the movie handles them with surprising grace, wit and maturity. In other words, it’s a movie for grown-ups of all ages.

The Marketing Daily piece mentions how, “During the run of “Sex and the City” on TV, even women who couldn’t afford Jimmy Choo shoes bonded to an image that had them skipping lunch for two months so they could buy them. In one TV show episode, Sarah Jessica Parker’s character is about to lose her apartment and she recognizes that $40,000 went into buying shoes.”

These anecdotes, of both real and dramatized women, speak not so much to a childish frivolousness as to a rudderless adulthood. Cuz it’s a funny thing, this idea of a contemporary “adult”–whatever that is. We are the generation that won the fight for our right to party, after all, did we not? So that we could stay boys and girls for longer than anyone ever before. And so we have!

Then perhaps that is what it looks like now, adulthood: It doesn’t always have its priorities straight. It makes some bad choices, it has to confront compromise and make sacrifices. It fucks up and has to face the consequ–

Wait a second….

Oh, god damn it! That sounds just like OLD version of adult! What the hell?!

Beyond the frosted fashion glaze, and the wonderfully fantasy ending we can only truly appreciate after having first been taken through some nasty emotional lows, what is, in fact, quite shocking about Sex and the City, is the apparent movie-going hunger it’s revealed for characters that can reflect maturity with a right to style and joi de vivre. And there is perhaps nothing more timelessly “feel-good” than a concept like that.

After just three days, the movie that by some estimates was only expected to make $20 million its opening weekend, whose appeal to anyone but 30+ year old women seemed incomprehensible, that unflinchingly staked its flag in that grown-up territory Hollywood had pretty much abandoned, now “Ranks as the biggest R-rated comedy opening of all time,” According to the LA Times. “Among all R-rated films, it ranks at No. 5 behind largely male-driven films like “The Matrix” and “300.”

Chocano concludes her review saying:

As far as big Hollywood movies go, the idea that we might watch movies to empathize with characters whose lives are different from ours but whose humanity links them to us is all but lost.

That’s why it feels unnatural to say that what feels most remarkable about the movie is its unapologetic embrace of middle-aged women…. The fact that Carrie et al. are allowed to be funny, independent, complicated, sexual, cynical and happy still comes across as a delightful surprise.

She adds that what really made the show so loved by its fans is that despite whatever moments of silliness or cliche, ultimately, the show reflected a vision of real life, “one which doesn’t require its characters being frozen in amber after a fairy tale ending and allows life to go on, happily and unconventionally.”

I think to have considered Sex and the City as having no greater appeal than merely a poshed up “chick flick,” is just as erroneous as to consider it to be some un-PC farce “immorally” portraying women as ludicrous cartoons.

All of us who went to high school in the late 90’s had to look a decade back to find the movies (Heathers, Pump Up the Volume, Sixteen Candles) that defined a generation’s adolescence. (American Pie, aside, of course). Now in the next decade, I wonder if Sex and The City might pave the way for new stories and characters that can fill the void in contemporary cinema for movies that can define a generation’s coming to terms with its adulthood.

    



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