Eating breakfast in the early morning, a second day of thick gray clouds drifting quickly southeast, I moved through TV channels, finding the usual skin care/hair/God will save you/astounding vacuum cleaner programming airing inevitably around dawn.  A mid-1930s movie with young Robert Taylor and Virginia Bruce seemed a relaxing way to spend twenty minutes, but I looked elsewhere before settling on that, to see Chris Jenner, mother of five dark-haired TV stars with grating voices, seated in the back of a luxury SUV, enthusing to her unenthusiastic daughter, Kylie, about a "just the two of us" jaunt to San Diego.
     Chris Jenner's failure as a parent of Kylie became evident to me during the two segments I watched this morning of Keeping Up with the Kardashians, Season 10, Episode 5.
     Yes.  Season 10.
     Chris suggests they have "a slumber party" in their hotel suite.  Watch a movie, eat popcorn, wear pajamas.  She seems eager to embrace her inner adolescent.  Her outer adolescent, Kylie, seventeen, won't look at her.  Her phone beeps with incoming messages and calls every time she's on camera.  Later, Chris explains she's trying to get Kylie to engage with the world around her, a good piece of advice, but it's too late, isn't it?  What is Kylie's world, anyway?  Since 2007, she grew up in a family on camera, her half-sisters--Kourtney, Khloe, Kim--setting a standard for their younger two half-sisters, Kendall and Kylie, consisting of living a weird life of exposed privacy and riches.
     Once established in the hotel suite, Chris says, like a normal person born before the age of personal computers, "What do you think of that view?!"
     The blue Pacific, seen from a five star hotel's most vertical height, spreads out into an illusion of infinity, while Kylie, unmoved, blank, tells her mother she needs her own room.  Chris, apparently not realizing her daughter is still a minor and can thus be told to shut up, and put up with the four figure a night hotel suite, again brings up the slumber party idea.  Kylie's having none of that.  Chris gives in, calls for an additional room.
     Later, walking on the sidewalk near the hotel to see a friend of Chris's, Kylie complains, "How far is this place?"
     "It's just a block from the hotel!" Chris says, either regretting or not regretting never having taken the little shit camping in past irrecoverable years.
     In the friend's shop, Kylie tells her mother, and us, that she's moving out the "minute" she turns eighteen.  Chris hasn't heard this before.  It doesn't seem to bother her that such a bold declaration was shared not between mother and daughter privately, but within the Kardashian open concept video prison of their lives.
     Cutting edge Wikipedia research on my part reveals that Kylie, in February 2015, bought a $2.7 million mansion in Calabasas, California, making it "...her primary residence upon her 18th birthday [August 10, 2015]."
     Did she buy her own place to get away from the Kardashian show cameras?  I don't know, but I doubt it.
     Her Instagram photos include a sloppily composed shot of a matte light gray Ferrari with red rims.
     heyitsnadiaxo comments, "u gon crash that too?  lol"
     A shot from inside that car, or some other, shows off Kylie's shoes against the black sunlit interior.  She calls this image, "black"
     Kylie's photo titled "today's catch" is my favorite on the first page of offerings, receiving one million "likes."  Again, the setting is a car with a black sunlit interior.  Two pairs of new sunglasses are held by Kylie or someone else as the cameraperson (Kylie or someone else) shoots at a downward angle, picking up reflections on the lenses, as well as fingerprints.
     Why do I find this interesting?  I don't consider myself a "hater" of the Kardashians.  I observe them and the phenomenon of unseen cameras and sound equipment surrounding them as a symbol of our time.  Reality TV is complicit surveillance; I find that interesting, as I do the explosion of the practice of selfie-taking.  Young generations have grown up in a technologized world turned back on itself; a room of mirrors where everyone can generate images seen by thousands or millions across the planet.
     Kylie Jenner took a photo of mirrored sunglasses, lenses that forbid contact with the wearer's eyes.  On a person's face, mirrored sunglasses convey distance and impersonality (picture a cop looking at you, wearing them and asking for your driver's license and registration).  In her million-liked Instagram photo, Kylie, whose focus was probably just on fashion, shows a fascination for reflections, surfaces, characterizing a key idea-world of twenty-first century youth.  I don't condemn them for this, I just point it out.
     We're far from the time when a majestic view of the Pacific, meaning nothing to Kylie Jenner now, spoke of new and unimaginable lands and cultures to Vasco Nunez de Balboa when he first saw the same ocean in 1513.

                                                                           Vic Neptune