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Todd Solondz makes movies about pedophilia and rape and abortion with characters who are obese or armless or socially retarded and who usually live in New Jersey. Larry Clark's often autobiographical subject matter centers around fucked up kids and parental abuse, adolescent gang bangs, murder, and junkies in Tulsa and New York City. Who goes to see severely troubled Todd Solondz's new film "Palindromes" (about a 13-year-old girl who gets herself intentionally impregnated) and an arguably even more severely troubled Larry Clark photo and video exhibition in one weekend? I do!

We walked into the International Center for Photography behind two poufy-haired older women who looked as though they'd recently returned from wintering in Coconut Glades Gated Community for Senior Citizens in Boca Raton. Facing us was a larger-than-life self-portrait of Larry Clark, taken in 1962. He's 19 in the photograph. Under a dark jacket, his collared shirt is buttoned all the way up to his adam's apple. His freshly coiffed hair and protruding ears suggest almost a nerdy innocence. "How precious!" One Boca lady said to the other. I exchanged smirky glances with my beau. He whispered to me as we walked behind them, past the portrait and into the exhibit, "'Precious?' Hold on to your hats, ladies."

Saturday night my friend Doug asked me what I found moving about the Larry Clark show. I've seen a lot of his photography before, mostly images from Tulsa and Teenage Lust, and I own a copy of the not-to-be-believed (and I mean that in the best possible way) film venture Kids. I've been interested in Clark ever since I saw my college House Chair walking down the hallway in my direction. (You people who went to real colleges call them "R.A.'s," I believe. At our skool, they were House Chairs.) My House Chair had a copy Crossett Library copy of Tulsa under his arm and was chanting the famous L.C. philosophy, "Once the needle goes in it never comes out."

"What did I find moving about it?" I started to respond to Doug. "The 15-year-old rail-thin blonde surfer boy with the biggest flaccid cock I've ever seen." That wasn't my commentary on the exhibition. It was just the first thing that came to mind at that moment when we were sitting in what felt like a college dorm room -- but, you know, not -- with ten thirtysomething children (4 gays, 1 lesbian, 3 loosely-termed straight people and 1 Iranian) desperately trying to invite the White Lady to the party, and me on my fourth glass of white wine.

What moves me about Larry Clark's work is just this unrelenting obsession to document, document, document, and his need to keep photographing kids which inevitably meant finding new kids' lives to observe when he and his cohorts had all grown up or were already dead. It's the attention to the detail. Of course, the autobiographical element speaks to me also; the unsettling photographer's involvement, being drawn in to his story, seeing through his eyes. It speaks to my personal obsession with images of seemingly endless days and nights spent living our lives as 16-, 17-, 18-year-olds--days that, regrettably, aren't represented by as many photographs as they are by saved flyers from all ages punk shows, warped mix tapes, and tattered notebooks with friend's tags scrawled on nearly every page.

I'm obsessed with documenting those years, though I never really did. I kept journals for most of my life, but there's a fat gap between 1988 and 1990. It's as if I thought to not write about it as it happened, to not photograph the people and places around me, because it would make the movie seem real. It would mean realizing that it would have to come to an end.

Clark observes real without judgement or mockery. Todd Solondz hates everything, including you. Comparitively speaking, -- I mean comparatively -- there's nothing very real about "Palindromes." One reviewer wrote:

Describing what happens in Palindromes... doesn't begin to capture what it's like to watch — the disturbed and heightened curiosity, the feeling of a social odyssey that unfolds with the suspense of a demented screwball dream.

Tulsa nightlife: Filth, gin, a slut.

That's a palindrome I found for Larry Clark. You know, in case he's reading this.

I give "Palindromes" 3 1/2 stars, by the way. But I'm the kind of person who almost always assumes that when someone says "[Blank] is the craziest thing I've ever seen," I think [Blank] must be awesome and wonderful.