Kids

[KXX4493553 at aol.com]

First, thank you, Jill, for your very good reply. And, Heikki, I think "Kids" 
is almost a porn but not quite a porn. I don't want to moralize about the 
"immorality" of teenagers or about very special sexual preferences or such 
stuff. There's another point that is much more interesting I suppose: if 
"Kids" shows the reality (and in Germany it's not far away from it) as a kind 
of "mirror aesthetics" is it still aesthetics? This "one-to-one"-aesthetics 
is not very different from an amateur video shot by a teenager himself. 
What's art about it? It's a kind of " independent socialist realism". Why 
didn't Clark make a documentary film? Perhaps it would have been more 
authentic than this kind of pseudo-fiction.

Pynchon I think is far away from this kind of "independent realism". But in 
some way he has got his own kind of simplification. Children are always 
innocent even if they are cruel in Pynchon's work; they are always victims. 
Look at Prairie in "Vineland"! Can't it be that this is also a kind of 
"social kitsch"?

BTW, the attitude towards chidren and teenagers in Germany and in whole West 
Europe is contradictory and with no clear direction. They alternate between 
extreme versions of "liberalism" and pure repression. Juvenile deliquency is 
also a heavy discussed subject in the European hemisphere. We haven't got the 
situation as in the US but we also have "our" runners amok here in the 
meantime. Surely this subject is abused for political propaganda, but it has 
really become a problem here, too. 
There's a hidden rule you can be sure of: every new fashion, every new 
development in US society will be imitated in Europe three or five years 
later, you can be absolutely sure. We also have got this grotesque new 
clothing fashion with the jeans trousers with "the ass on the knees" - looks 
very funny. 
kwp