So It Goes

Kurt Vonnegut’s novels, though easy reads, are notoriously difficult to translate into film. The only attempt Kurt himself thought successful was Slaughterhouse-Five (1972), though the plot is the most nonlinear of any of his books. Critics agreed with Kurt, but audiences did not: the film won the Prix de Jury, Hugo, and Saturn awards, but flopped at the box office.

The plot: Billy Pilgrim becomes “unstuck in time” and randomly relives different parts of his life in non-sequential order. One moment he is in the Ardennes during the Battle of the Bulge where he is captured by Germans, the next he is reliving his wedding night, the next he is a child, the next he is being abducted by aliens, the next he is at a party of fellow optometrists, the next he is a POW in Dresden during the Allied firebombing, the next he is on the alien planet Tralfamadore with fellow abductee and porn star Montana Wildhack, and so on. Despite reliving the episodes over and over, he can change nothing. He relives them as a passive observer because the past, present and future must exist only as they are. As the Tralfamadoreans (who can see all time at once rather than merely one single moment of it) tell Billy, “that is the way things are structured.” Though a person may be suffering or dead at particular moment in time, he is perfectly well and happy in other moments – and all moments exist simultaneously. Time is an illusion created by the limitations of human senses, they tell him; humans cannot see beyond the moment just as they cannot see beyond a limited spectrum of light. The broader spectrum nonetheless is there. “Just concentrate on the good parts,” is their advice.

This fatalistic philosophy is comforting to Billy. He, like the Tralfamadoreans (who, Billy’s daughter believes, are a figment of Billy’s mentally unbalanced imagination), is able to deal with horrible events with the phrase, “So it goes,” because he knows that things are hunky-dory somewhen else. The phrase “So it goes” occurs 116 times in the novel according to one critic – I’ll take his word for it. (Vonnegut, by the way, was a POW in Dresden in 1945, and witnessed the firebombing.)

All this was hard enough to bring to a screen, so the idea of bringing it to a small off-Broadway stage with a minimal set seemed to me utterly preposterous. Yet, that is what the International Fringe Festival did at The Players Theater in Greenwich Village. They pulled it off, too, once again showing that a good script can overcome almost any other limitation. (Yes, good actors help as well, but they can do nothing without the script.)

So far, so good. The play and the company of three friends made for a pleasant evening – until I left the garage at 8^th Street and discovered my Jeep Cherokee no longer had power steering – except to the degree I supplied the power. It still was possible to wrestle the machine home, I figured, but by the time I reached 7^th Avenue, the engine temperature gauge needle had slammed to the right. (The mechanically inclined among the readers might be saying, “It’s the belt!” Almost right: the belt was intact, but one of the parts which should be turned by it was not.) As you can imagine, getting a vehicle off the streets of NYC and out to a far suburb on a Saturday night is neither simple nor cheap. The play ended at 9:30 PM. I got home at 3:30 AM, hundreds of dollars poorer. So it goes.

A close examination of the Jeep reveals enough problems to conclude that it has reached the end of its useful life – the cost of repairs would exceed its value by far. So it goes. Until last night the Jeep had served long and well. Somewhen else, I’m enjoying those pleasant times and a quasi-niece (that designation is a long story) is learning to drive in it. Tomorrow, all those Columbus Day auto sales will be of some use.

As for last night, I just concentrate on the good parts.

Trailer Slaughterhouse-Five (1972)

  

Plus Six, by Juno

Bad reviews are fun to write, but a collection of good movie reviews probably is more useful to anyone pondering the next Netflix option. I always consider user reviews when making picks (though I don’t always rely on them). So, below are a few recently viewed films, on or soon to be on DVD, all of which nudged my thumbs upward. Below these are six more starring an interesting young actress.

Kick-Ass 2 (2013) – Chloe Grace Moretz doesn’t often play a normal human being, but when a script calls for a homicidal costumed vigilante (Kick-Ass), a vampire (Let Me In), or a werewolf (Dark Shadows), Chloe is likely to be at the top of the casting director’s call list. In Kick-Ass 2, released this past summer, she reprised her role as Hit Girl. I own the Kick-Ass comics (yes, I’m one of those) by Mark Millar and John Romita, Jr., both of whom previously honed their skills at Marvel. For all the reputation of mainstream Western comic book/graphic novel publishers as purveyors of violence and adolescent sexual fantasies, they are surprisingly antiseptic in their portrayals of such stuff, even today. Millar and Romita are unabashedly septic with their own comics, which nonetheless have clever plots, characters, and dialogue. Overall, Kick-Ass (the movie), in which characters dress up as superheroes to fight crime, followed the comic book pretty closely – with a couple of significant deviations I’ll leave as a surprise for the reader. The film adaptation didn’t pull any punches. The tongue-in-cheek violence offended some viewers (including Roger Ebert), but, in general, Kick-Ass met with positive reviews from critics and from audiences.

Kick-Ass 2 (the movie) is adapted from the two subsequent graphic novels Hit Girl and Kick-Ass 2. Chloe, as she was in the first film, is the most enjoyable presence in it. This time the movie does pull its punches, leaving out two very disturbing episodes present in the printed version including an attack on Katie, the would-be girlfriend of Dave (Kick-Ass). Despite this, the second film is more violent than the first – to the point that Jim Carrey expressed regret for appearing in it. I’ve read numerous viewer reviews saying the sequel is better than the original; this is such a puzzling reaction that I don’t quite know what to make of it – other than to guess that the grander scale of the action scenes is responsible for it. The movie is not better (or nearly as good) on any other basis. Nevertheless, if you liked the first movie, as I did, you’ll probably want to see the second just in order to finish the story arc.  It is good enough, but, if you see only one, see the first one.

The World’s End (2013) – Five unlikely high school friends try to drink in every bar on the street in the town of Newton Haven. The quantity of alcohol is too much, so they never finish their pub crawl. 20 years later, at the insistence of the one total failure among the five, they try it again. Their goal is to reach the final pub this time, named The World’s End. While drinking their way up the street, they discover the town has been taken over by alien robots. Are the aliens plotting the world’s end? The premise sounds incredibly silly, now that I write it, and it is. But it is also quite funny. Give it a try – the movie, that is, not the pub crawl.

Igby Goes Down (2002). 17-year-old Igby (Kieran Culkin) is a member of an upper-crust family, but his mother (Susan Sarandon) is a callous pill-popping alcoholic and his father is insane – though fortuitously he had his breakdown only after solidifying the family fortune. The movie opens with Igby and his older “neo-fascist” brother Oliver (Ryan Phillippe) plotting to kill their mother. The film then flashes back. The misfit Igby fails in a series of tony private schools because of his disrespectful attitude. The problem is just his attitude, for he makes far too many intellectual jokes to lack academic ability. (When asked why he calls his mother Mimi, for example, he says “‘Medea’ was taken.”) Sooner or later, he provokes almost everyone in his life into lashing out at him. (Oliver: “I think if Gandhi had had to hang out with you for any prolonged period of time, he'd have ended up kicking the shit out of you.”) Igby sees no reason to show respect to the disrespectable. There is a reason though, as many (not all) of us after adolescence learn. Having had a kinder mom probably would have saved him a world of trouble, but warmth was outside Mimi’s capacity for reasons of her own. This is a dark and quirky coming of age film with an understated commentary on class. Recommended.

****

Not a Preface but a Midface: One of my favorite newer faces on the screen is the young English actress Juno Temple, who – whether by good fortune, good advice, or good judgment – always seems to be in films that are, at the very least, interesting. She shows up in supporting or minor roles in mainstream Hollywood movies from time to time (e.g. as Catwoman’s girlfriend in The Dark Knight Rises or as Patsy in Lovelace), but her forte is playing major characters in smaller independent productions. It’s not that she is irreplaceable in any of her roles. She isn’t. But there is no reason to replace her, and her presence is a good sign that the script has something to offer. She is a busy actress, and, in truth, I’ve not seen the majority of the movies in which she has a prominent part. The ones I’ve viewed, though, are listed below, and there isn’t a bad one in the bunch. I’ve mentioned a few of these in previous posts, but it’s worth putting them all in one place.

Dirty Girl (2011) – For her role as a troubled teen in 1987 Oklahoma, Juno Temple nailed a Border State accent – as did Russo-Serbian actress Milla Jovavich, playing her mom. It would come in handy in future parts. The film barely flickered across big screens, but critics noticed it anyway, and with good reason. Dirty Girl at first blush seems to be yet another lowbrow high school comedy of the sort we’ve all seen many times before, but it quickly morphs into a very different animal. Danielle (Juno), raised by a single mom with marginal finances, thinks the father she never met might save her from her unhappy life. She studiously avoids asking herself why he is absent now. Her gay friend Clarke meanwhile needs to escape from his homophobic dad and his insufficiently assertive mother. A road trip and a very 80s sound track ensue; offbeat humor mixes with high sentiment along the way. Sentiment in teen movies doesn’t always work well, but this time it does almost perfectly.

Little Birds (2011) – Two teen girls (Juno Temple and Kay Panabaker) live in a dreary run-down former resort town on the Salton Sea. They meet boys from Los Angeles who are there to skateboard in an empty pool that is well suited for the purpose. The girls “borrow” a truck (one of them reluctantly) and run off to LA to join them. The boys are waifs who live in an abandoned motel and get money through petty crime. The arrival of the girls gives them an idea for a more ambitious scheme. What could go wrong?

Killer Joe (2011) – Matthew McConaughey is Joe, a Texas police detective who is a contract assassin on the side. Trailer park resident Ansel lives with his daughter Dottie (Juno Temple) and his new squeeze Sharla; at the urging of his son Chris, Ansel hires Joe to kill Ansel’s ex-wife. They believe her life insurance money will go to Dottie. Dottie is indeed dotty – not firing on all synapses – but she is a sweet young thing who is innocent and seductive at the same time. Joe normally demands a $25,000 fee up front. Chris and Ansel don’t have the cash, but Joe accepts Dottie as a “retainer” pending the insurance payoff. This film caught heat from critics for degrading way Joe treats Sharla at one point to establish his authority, but the scene does tell us clearly who Joe is. This is a disturbing movie, but, if you’re not easily offended, it is worth a look.

Magic Magic (2013) – This odd movie is categorized by IMDB as a “thriller.” I’m not sure that’s right, but it is close enough. Alicia (Juno) is a young woman with some mental health problems, but at first they don’t seem severe or debilitating. We learn during the course of the movie, however, that she takes a lot of pills. She arrives in Chile from California to vacation with her cousin Sarah and Sarah’s friends. One of those friends is a creepy character named Brink (Michael Cera) who displays an unwelcome interest in Alicia. Suffering from insomnia, Alicia grows unsure of the boundary between dreams and reality. Are her suspicions that these people are playing sadistic games on her justified, or is she being paranoid? When Alicia’s mental and physical health deteriorates seriously, will local magical folk customs and remedies help her, or will they drive her over the edge? The film achieves a spooky mood, but if you want all questions to have neat answers, Magic Magic isn’t for you. The movie reaches a grim conclusion, but some loose ends are left deliberately untied.

The Brass Teapot (2013) – As so often in Juno Temple movies, a hackneyed premise twists into something unexpected. A young Indiana couple (Juno Temple and Michael Angarano) is struggling financially. Juno discovers her Bachelor’s degree is useless for landing the sort of job she wants. Michael loses his salesman’s job. Is a magical teapot the solution? Unfortunately, the teapot rewards them with cash only when they hurt themselves or each other – and not just physically. They later learn they can profit from the suffering of others, too. How far will they go down this sinister path? How far would you? This is a better dark comedy than it has any right to be.

Afternoon Delight (2013) – If you blinked, you might have missed this little comedy about a couple, Rachel and Jeff, whose marriage has grown tiresome and nearly sexless. In order to spice things up, Rachel goes to a strip club. Rachel, without consulting her husband, invites one of the strippers (Juno Temple) to move in with them. Once again, against any reasonable expectation, the film pulls the viewer in. It has unoriginal (and debatable) but noteworthy things to say about what is and isn’t important in personal morals and in relationships. Quentin Tarantino, of all people, picked it as one of the top ten films for 2013.

IMDB lists four Juno movies either filming or in post-production for 2014. I see no reason to avoid them.

Thumbing It

A few blogs back I noted one man’s quest to expand his knowledge by reading the entire Encyclopaedia Britannica. It’s nice to learn the facts. Sometimes, though, we don’t have that luxury. We just don’t have all the relevant information about something in front of us, and neither the Britannica nor our latest generation iPhone can provide it for us – at least not in the requisite time window. We nonetheless have to make our decisions based on our sketchy data. On those occasions we rely on Rules of Thumb.

The phrase “rule of thumb” has existed for centuries in several languages, and apparently derives from the use of thumb width for rough-and-ready small measurements. Thumb also means “inch” in several languages including Dutch (duim) and Sanskrit (angulam). Using your thumb in this way is inaccurate, but, for many applications, good enough. That is the whole point of thumb rules: it is better to be approximately right than to be wrong with a high degree of precision. Rules of Thumb are not facts, they are not laws, and they are not 100% reliable, but most of the time they will get us where we want to go, more or less. Sometimes that’s the best we can do.

Some years ago, Tom Parker set out to collect a bookful of Rules of Thumb. Calling himself the Alpine Planetarium (which he hoped would sound serious enough to stir responses), he sent out inquiries to people in all walks of life from economics professors to gravediggers. He published the results in a book titled, unsurprisingly, Rules of Thumb.

The list is oddly intriguing, even though I’ll never have any use for the bulk of them. It’s at least possible some might come in handy, for example, #797 “seven quail eggs equal one chicken egg” and #798 “one ostrich egg will serve 24 people.” I’ve never cooked any eggs other than chicken, but I suppose it could happen. Some of them are esoteric, e.g. ”a Learjet 25g will float about an extra 100 feet down the runway for each knot over its proper landing speed” and “inviting more than 25% of the guests for a university dinner party from the economics department ruins the conversation.”

Random excerpts:

103. PLAYING POKER. Don’t enter a poker game unless you have 60 times the betting limit in your pocket. When you have doubled this amount, quit.

314. USING DYNAMITE. Wait at least an hour before investigating a charge of dynamite that didn’t go off.

[I might wait two.]

322. BUILDING WALLS OF ADOBE. The height of an adobe wall should be less than ten times its thickness unless reinforced with buttresses.

357. USING A HOT TUB. Soaking in a hot tub adds two to three pints of perspiration per person per hour to the water.

[Ew.]

386. TAKING A FEDERAL EXAM. On any government multiple-choice test, the longest answer is usually the correct one.

480. MAKING CRIME PAY. Commit a federal crime rather than a state crime. Federal judges are more worldly and less likely to send you to jail, or for as long. Also, federal prisons are nicer places to stay.

539. THE TRAVELING RULE OF TWO. Take twice the money and half the clothes you think you will need.

544. DEBUGGING AN OFFICE. Checking an office for electronic bugging devices takes at least 4 hours for every 5000 square feet of office space.

682. SHOPLIFTING. One out of every forty to sixty people in a store is a shoplifter.

746. LEADING A SEMINAR. Allow six seconds for a response to your questions. If someone is going to respond, they’ll do it with six seconds.

896. DEALING WITH DOUBT. When in doubt, don’t.

As I’ve grown older I’ve embraced #896 more, though without ever verbalizing it that way. I know I’ve missed golden opportunities thereby, but I’ve also avoided stepping into an abyss or two.

We make most of our decisions by such rules, not least in matters of politics and personal relations. Our rules save us too much time to do without them. I’ve learned the hard way, though, (as yet another rule of thumb) that they do – not might, but do – lead us astray sometimes. Jonathan Swift is, after all, being satirical in Gulliver’s Travels when he is fitted for clothes by a literal rule of thumb: “Then they measured my right Thumb, and desired no more; for by a mathematical Computation, that twice round the Thumb is once around the Wrist, and so on to the Neck and Waist, and by the help of my old Shirt, which I displayed on the Ground before them for a Pattern, they fitted me exactly.”

Uma Thurmon rules with a spectacular thumb in Even Cowgirls Get the Blues

Unvarnished

An oft-repeated truism is that young people don’t believe they will die. Most teens and twentysomethings will object to this. Not only do they know (so I’ve been told), but they are more age conscious than any other cadre in the population. I won’t argue with the age consciousness, but that is not the same thing. True enough, the big three zero does loom ahead scarily for them, but, unlike in the 70s scifi movie Logan’s Run, 30 is not really the end. The truism refers to something deeper. Of course 20-year-olds know intellectually they are mortal, but, by and large, they don’t feel it in their bones. The fact doesn’t impinge upon their moment to moment world view or decisions. (This is one reason they make good soldiers.) I know it didn’t impinge on mine. Young people laugh at horror movies. (Some older folks do, too, but there is more sourness to the laugh.)

Though some event in one’s life (not necessarily anything dramatic) can shift one’s perspective ahead of schedule, usually the transition to an integrated sense of mortality occurs in middle age sometime. The change often is very audible in the recordings of musicians. When young artists write or sing about mortality, they typically do so playfully (Jim Morrison) or indulgently (Jagger/Richards Paint it Black). At 50, the references become retrospective and thoughtful, not playful. Frank Sinatra released the album September of My Years (a blatant title if there ever was one) in 1965, the year he turned 50. Among the tracks on the album were How Old Am I, Don’t Wait Too Long, Last Night When We Were Young, and It Was a Very Good Year. In 1969 at age 49, Peggy Lee had her last big hit with Is That All There Is? At age 56, Bob Dylan, while perpetually irked at being called “the voice of a generation” (not even his own: born in 1941, Bob is not a Boomer), voiced that generation’s aging pains with Time Out of Mind. Time wasn’t very far out of his mind in 1997. Two songs from the album also were released as singles. One was Not Dark Yet, with the melancholic refrain, “It’s not dark yet, but it’s getting there.” The second, which he sang at the 1998 Grammy Awards, was the weary been-there done-that I’m-too-old-for-this-crap Love Sick: “I'm sick of love, I hear the clock tick...I'm sick of love, I wish I'd never met you.”

What brings all this to mind is the latest Joan Jett and the Blackhearts album, released today, with whatever degree of irony, on the last day of September. I was aware of Joan back in her 70s Runaways days, and started adding her vinyl to my own shelves during her 80s heyday. I remained enough of a fan to order her Greatest Hits CD a few years ago. Amazon never forgets, so last week the site recommended Unvarnished for pre-order; the samples of the album tracks sounded promising, so I clicked “Add to Cart.” The CD showed up in the mail a few hours ago. Joan always has favored simple, no-frills, back-to-basics, hard rock-and-roll; her albums are never brilliant, but they are reliably good. Who fairly can demand more? Unvarnished is very very good, if only because there isn’t a bad track on it, a rare feat for any artist. (Even the Greatest Hits collection has several that are dreary.) Yet, running through the lyrics of the 55-y.o. rocker are a reflective tone and a consciousness of time, most glaringly in Hard to Grow Up. “I think about my own mortality” is actually a lyric in the track Fragile. The album ends with the whisper “Life and death/the change to rearrange/life and death.”

My remarks probably make the album sound like a real downer, but it isn’t. On the contrary, Joan’s current perspective adds richness, just as it did for Frank, Peggy, and Bob before her. As for the music itself, it rocks. If you’ve ever liked Joan Jett, you’ll almost surely like this album, too. Recommended.

Joan Jett Hard to Grow Up (Live: studio version not yet available for post)

Peggy Lee Is That All There Is

On Sense and Pretense

As the Richard’s Pretension title of this blog site suggests, I enjoy intellectual affectation as much as the next fellow. It is much less strenuous than sporting the real thing. So, my eyes instantly were drawn to a book on a “recommended for you” list (Amazon knows me) titled How to Become an Intellectual: 100 Mandatory Maxims to Metamorphose the Most Learned Thinkers by Nick Kolakowski. It’s an enjoyable work, with a couple pages of explanation attached to each maxim. Fair warning: if you follow all 100 – hell, if you follow 50 – you will not be posing as an intellectual; you will be one. Be sure you want to be one of those. There are drawbacks – or so I’m told: I comply with scarcely more than 40, so I might be unqualified to say.

A fair minority of the maxims are about presentation rather than substance, it is true. In case you are almost an intellectual and want to pass, they may help. Promisingly for my own efforts at dissemblance, I have several of these nailed. For example, #46 tells us that it is pedestrian to care about owning a fancy automobile. “Remember: your car’s not crappy – it’s bohemian.” I regret to say that my purpose in driving a jeep with 178,000 miles on the odometer is not to show the world I care more about my mind than my wheels; I merely care more about my wallet than my wheels. Nevertheless, the old steel beast apparently subtly delivers the first message, too. Cool. #11–“Enjoy popular culture.” In the bag. #78–“Abstain from using Google in front of other people,” is easy enough for me, since I may be one of the few people left in the world without an internet-connected iPhone, which fits nicely with #48: “Resist the temptation to show off your phone.” #3–“Cultivate a few choice idiosyncrasies.” Done. Never mind. If you meet me you’ll notice them. #4–“Learn some truly enormous words.” I’ve always tended to floccinaucinilipilificate sesquipedalianism, but maybe I should tergiversate on that one.  #9–“Tell jokes only 0.05% of people will understand.” I frequently obey this one, but I suspect the reason my jokes often evoke puzzled frowns has little to do with them smacking of intelligence. #17–“Become comfortable with saying ‘I don’t know.’” With age, I’ve gotten better at this one.

Given the list so far, I know what you’re thinking: posing as an intellectual is a snap. Unfortunately, the largely atmospheric maxims above are the easiest. The substantive meat-and-potatoes maxims are tougher. By luck, I conform to some of these, too. #88–“Familiarize yourself with the ancient Greeks.” My degree is in history and classical humanities, so a few baubles of information linger about those fellows. #19–“Passionately hate one classic author.” This relates to #88 again: Plato, but one has to love him before one can hate him properly. #81–“Know these books.” Every list of “must read” books is idiosyncratic, and Kolakowski’s is no exception. While my top ten list would be nine different from his, all of the books on his are certainly good: Ulysses, Lolita, The Stranger, Democracy, Crime and Punishment, One Hundred Years of Solitude, Anna Karenina, The House of Mirth, The Great Gatsby, Invisible Man. (I’ll even grant him Nabokov, who still is a controversial pick.) Kolakowski loses me on many (OK, most) of the other maxims, though. #14–“Play at least one classical instrument.” Sorry, I barely can keep a beat when slapping my thigh. #12–“Know your Monet from your Manet.” Hey, they were contemporary impressionists who both painted fuzzy pictures, sometimes in the same park. Cut me some slack here. I know one tended more to landscapes and the other more to people, but I’d have to look up which vowel corresponds to what subject – which would violate that “no Google” rule. Then I’d probably forget again, to the amusement of any art historian at the table. #49–“Remember the names of certain designers.” I do know most of the names he lists, but further reading reveals that I should know something about what each did, too.  Mostly I don’t. (There are similar maxims involving directors, philosophers, and opera composers, among others.) #74–“Cultivate rivalries with other intellectuals.” I’d rather not.

There is much more. Once again, my score is in the 40s. A few more of the “atmospherics” maxims might tip me over the halfway mark though. #89 looks simple enough: “Mix these historically famous drinks.” I can learn to do this – and learn to recite why they are famous. #76–“Lose a debate graciously.” I try, dudes, I try. #98–“Learn one new thing from everyone.” Good advice, actually, though it’s even better (with a nod to Lewis Carroll) if it’s an impossible thing. The final maxim #100 is “Know when to say nothing.” Very sensible. I’m still working on that one.

Clip from My Dinner with Andre, the quintessential intellectual conversation that means so much less than it seems

Hurricane in Morristown: Bout Recap

For the first time since June, the Corporal Punishers, oldest of Morristown’s four derby teams, returned for a bout on their home track. Last night, in an exciting interleague bout, they faced the Hurricane Janes, traveling up from Sewell in South Jersey. With several of their veteran skaters sidelined for various reasons, the Punishers were relying heavily on their newer talent, who proved up to the challenge.

The Janes picked up an early lead. Both teams were strong on defense, but the Janes were particularly good at exploiting the no-pack rule by lingering back at key moments – this is a method of breaking “the pack” which forces opposing blockers to let a jammer through. A power jam by Lil MO Peep added 15 points for the Punishers, however, and tightened the score to within a few points. Veteran skater and team captain Doom Hilda skated consistently well as blocker or jammer; Pretty Khaotic and Brass Muscles also both jammed impressively for the Punishers. El Pony Picante, Twisted Tink, and (especially) Curly Suicide did the same for the Janes, and maintained their team’s small lead through the bulk of the first half. Anna Nicole Smithereens for the Janes and Raven Rage for the Punishers were notably hard hitters as blockers. Curly Suicide (#22) of the Janes was knocked down hard at one point and stayed down for some minutes, stopping the clock temporarily. The bout resumed. The Janes expanded their lead in a power jam just before the halftime whistle, and led 110-73 a halftime, still very much in competitive territory.

In the second half, the Punishers worked to close the point gap. Brass Muscles was especially good at powering her way through blocking walls of much larger girls. Jam by jam they ate away at the Janes’ lead. Both teams continued to accumulate points. Curly Suicide returned to the track, apparently unfazed, and continued to score. The Punishers whittled down the Janes’ lead to 15 points. In the final 10 minutes, the Janes were able to re-expand their margin, with Miss Phat Booty exploiting a power jam successfully. At the 5-minute mark, the Janes were up to a 50 point lead. Despite a hard push by the Punishers, the Janes defended their lead to the end, winning with a final score of 205-138.

MVP were #911 Brass Muscles for the Punishers and #22 Curly Suicide for the Janes.

Champagne Tastes

My 20s are barely discernible in the rear view mirror and I have no kids of my own, but, if only for anthropological reasons, I like to keep up with the latest round of “what’s the matter with kids today” worries. (I’ll refrain from posting a video of the Bye Bye Birdie tune of the same name.) While such worries are constant, the particular contents change with each decade. Sometimes they even are well founded. (My worrisome Boomer generation largely succeeded in spite of itself, thanks to the solid economic foundations built by our parents.)

This time around, the concern has much to do with the shaky foundations beneath the feet of Millennials, especially those in or nearing their 20s. The mother-daughter team of Robin Henig and Samantha Henig address this in their book Twentysomething: Why Do Young Adults Seem Stuck? Part of their answer is in the title: it’s more that they seem stuck rather than that they are. The authors tell us the educational requirements of modern life (and the need to pay for them) simply take longer to get past than was formerly the case, but that the rewards come in due time. I don’t entirely agree. True, a sizable minority of twentysomethings move on from college and, before too long, do quite well for themselves; that is always the case in every generation, and the Henigs, both of whom are successful writers for The New York Times, understandably know a lot of them. But this is not the typical experience – certainly not among the Millennials of my acquaintance. More typical is a 24-year-old with a business degree and $100,000 debt who lives with her parents, got a temporary job at the Boston Market after college because the right permanent job didn’t present itself, and who now realizes she has been in the temporary job for two years. Young men are unlikely even to have the degree, since they now make up only a third of college graduates. (Perhaps one reason that female bisexuality is trendier than at any time since the 1970s is that women are better prospects.)

There is more to it than just graduating into a sluggish economy, however. Part of the Millennial mood has to do with dashed expectations. (The Henigs nail this one.) We’d all like to have lives “less ordinary,” but members of this generation have been told all their lives how special they are, and often regard such a life as a realistic prospect. It isn’t. Oh, one still can live an adventurer’s life, seeing the world as a seaman, for example, but that entails hard work and living hand-to-mouth; seeing the world from the window of your Gulfstream is more the idea, but those window seats are very hard to come by. So, even a prosperous life can seem unsatisfying.

A film recently in theaters and now on DVD catches this sense of things. Sofia Coppola’s The Bling Ring is based on a real gaggle of Los Angeles teens who robbed the homes of celebrities back in 2009. They used internet entertainment sites and fan sites to learn when the celebrities were out of town. They got caught only because they openly bragged about their activities to their friends and even posted pictures of themselves inside the celebs’ houses on facebook. Bizarrely, some of the movie is shot inside the actual house of Paris Hilton, one of the victims. The teens were not poor or deprived. They were upper middle class kids – by global standards, rather than First World standards, members of the upper 1% – who nevertheless couldn’t afford “the lifestyle that everybody kinda wants,” which is the truly fabulous lifestyle of the upper 0.001%. So, they helped themselves to it.

Sofia Coppola caught some criticism in the reviews of this film (including from The New York Times) for being “impartial.” The film neither sympathizes with the kids nor takes a moral tone against them. But that, I think, is the point. She just lets the characters talk and act. The juxtaposition of their PC comments about wanting to run charities and help "the planet" with their utterly vacuous personal narcissism speaks for itself and is devastating.

These kids were an extreme case, and I doubt that Millennials as group are any more or less dishonest than any other generation. But the Bling Ring members’ sense that their lifestyle wasn’t adequate compared to “the lifestyle” is a common one.

Time passes, and generations always get their footing eventually, if only because they have no choice. This one will, too. Much of it already has. Yet there is a certain irony to a cadre raised with such overblown expectations being the first since the Great Depression to face a lower lifetime standard of living than that of their parents.