It's been my dream since I came to UCLA to direct a course while still in undergrad. Unfortunately, UCLA doesn't allow students in the professional schools to participate in the USIE programme-- a huge injustice, if you ask me. However, largely thanks to Belinda, we've managed a work-around.
A few weeks ago, per Belinda's advice, I founded a new student club with Erik and one of the film juniors. We're calling ourselves MelGowan, after the film and theatre buildings, Melnitz and MacGowan. (A proposed Art-Theatre-Film-Music club would be called Brogownitzberg, but we didn't want to get too ahead of ourselves.) While I'd love to see MelGowan go places, including setting up a roster of students by specialisation, for the here and now, being incorporated as a club nets us funding and, even more importantly, legitimacy.
With MelGowan as our banner, Belinda was able to convince the head of scheduling to let us secure the most coveted of all screening rooms, the Design Room, on Monday nights for the duration of the winter quarter. We'll have full access privileges, able to use any of the given media playback stations (video, DVD, 16mm, etc) to screen any content we like, to whomever we like.
So, it's not a class, per se, but rather a set of seminars. Light on lecture (good, because I could never lecture in a way to give the material justice) and heavy on the crazy. We're screening feature-length anime, particularly from auteurs known for their superflatist and socially-critical leanings. And it's because of their dabbling with this uniquely-Japanese style of postmodernism, superflat, that there could only be one name for the series: Anime Pancake.
(Erik and I considered briefly naming it Okonomiyaki, but thought that was being a little mean.)
A webpage with all the details will come soon, as well as a page for MelGowan. At the moment the screening series is open to all comers, although we're giving preference to TFT students and faculty if there's exceptional interest. But interest will, of course, depend on me ensuring more than 10 people know about it...
12.15.2007
12.13.2007
I guess I'll log out and go check my email or something.
Of course, it's also possible the exceptionally large check from my grandparents was actually my inheritance from my great-grandmother, who died this past summer.
That's a fact I still feel numb about. In fact, I keep blocking it out and forgetting it until someone reminds me, and then I scramble desperately to muffle the thought again. Part of me thinks that if I actually tried grappling with it, it'll ruin me, just like I've so far been unable to properly face my maternal grandfather's death.
I think sometimes I'm so "new media" oriented because I don't want to think too hard about human life and its predictability. I don't want to deal with the immensity of the human record thus far. It's a cowardly position to take, but it's been a mentally debilitating quarter. Ask me next year.
~
The year is, fortunately, nearly over for me. I completed my last final today-- a history class, appropriately enough; I haven't dealt with US history since I was 16. I didn't forget very much, apparently.
This past Tuesday I also delivered a DVD to my faculty advisor, containing captured footage from .hack to better illustrate the thrust of my paper and what I've been working on this quarter. I'd've like to shown more, but it was a very last-second thing, and I didn't really want to waste his time. Though one of these days I'm going to have to start behaving very selfishly if I want him to take the slightest active interest in the project.
But that, too, is nothing new.
I treated a friend to a graduation dinner last night, and tomorrow I'm taking Josh, my alter-ego, to Write Aid, the WGA comedy benefit being hosted at my school. A nice thing to go out on, apart from the mini-movie we're shooting together with the third member of our Three Amigos, Kevin. But that's Monday. Friday through Sunday is a movie set, and a fairly exciting one, at that. Dan knows how to get a good energy flowing, even for an exhausted, long-suffering crew. Stills and video coming soon.
That's a fact I still feel numb about. In fact, I keep blocking it out and forgetting it until someone reminds me, and then I scramble desperately to muffle the thought again. Part of me thinks that if I actually tried grappling with it, it'll ruin me, just like I've so far been unable to properly face my maternal grandfather's death.
I think sometimes I'm so "new media" oriented because I don't want to think too hard about human life and its predictability. I don't want to deal with the immensity of the human record thus far. It's a cowardly position to take, but it's been a mentally debilitating quarter. Ask me next year.
~
The year is, fortunately, nearly over for me. I completed my last final today-- a history class, appropriately enough; I haven't dealt with US history since I was 16. I didn't forget very much, apparently.
This past Tuesday I also delivered a DVD to my faculty advisor, containing captured footage from .hack to better illustrate the thrust of my paper and what I've been working on this quarter. I'd've like to shown more, but it was a very last-second thing, and I didn't really want to waste his time. Though one of these days I'm going to have to start behaving very selfishly if I want him to take the slightest active interest in the project.
But that, too, is nothing new.
I treated a friend to a graduation dinner last night, and tomorrow I'm taking Josh, my alter-ego, to Write Aid, the WGA comedy benefit being hosted at my school. A nice thing to go out on, apart from the mini-movie we're shooting together with the third member of our Three Amigos, Kevin. But that's Monday. Friday through Sunday is a movie set, and a fairly exciting one, at that. Dan knows how to get a good energy flowing, even for an exhausted, long-suffering crew. Stills and video coming soon.
12.11.2007
Through a postal service, darkly.
I received a Christmas card from my paternal grandparents today. As I tromped up the stairs I reflected that at some point, I'd have to just vanish off my relatives' radar if I wanted to lead an uninterrupted life. Following a fiasco at Thanksgiving, I can't say I'm altogether inclined to deal with any blood relation on anything more than a one-on-one basis from a distance of at least ten feet for the rest of my natural life, so there ought to come a point over the next few residences I move into that I just don't tell people where I'm living.
In the case of extended family, it isn't aversion so much as guilt, especially in cases like these. I'm very bad about thank-you cards, notes, letters, virtually anything. It isn't that I'm ungrateful, just that I suck at expressing gratitude for those with whom I have a familial acquaintance but don't actually know.
But the worst part was inside the card. Even as I was opening it, I cringed, hoping no familiar check would fall out-- but no such luck. More miserably still, the check was for a monetary amount I'm seriously, seriously embarrassed by. Did my mom tell them that I'd been out of work since November? Did they think I'd spend some of this toward their son, knowing I hadn't spoken to my father in almost three years, and deep down they suspected I was just a Good Catholic Girl who got sentimental at Christmas?
I'm trying my best not to be cynical. I don't mean to be ungrateful-- as before, as always, I just don't really have the words.
You want the truth, Grandma and Grandpa? Your son never taught his children charity. All four of them have grown up slightly uncomprehending of true generosity, constantly suspicious of a hidden catch, sensing a burdensome obligation. It's the same reason our holidays are so terrible now I can't even bring it upon myself to go home. Too much expectation, too much deep-seated and directionless resentment, too high stakes for too little pay-off, because we don't really understand each other and we never will.
Maybe you do know that, and that's why you sent this. It's more than enough to mail-order presents, to go through the designated motions without having to tear my psyche down in the process. It lets me love without the reminder of what that sentiment is up against. It lets me feel without my convictions getting torn apart.
I am a product of the internet generation. I am comfortable with disconnect.
But whatever your intention, I'll try to put your generosity to the best possible use, okay?
In the case of extended family, it isn't aversion so much as guilt, especially in cases like these. I'm very bad about thank-you cards, notes, letters, virtually anything. It isn't that I'm ungrateful, just that I suck at expressing gratitude for those with whom I have a familial acquaintance but don't actually know.
But the worst part was inside the card. Even as I was opening it, I cringed, hoping no familiar check would fall out-- but no such luck. More miserably still, the check was for a monetary amount I'm seriously, seriously embarrassed by. Did my mom tell them that I'd been out of work since November? Did they think I'd spend some of this toward their son, knowing I hadn't spoken to my father in almost three years, and deep down they suspected I was just a Good Catholic Girl who got sentimental at Christmas?
I'm trying my best not to be cynical. I don't mean to be ungrateful-- as before, as always, I just don't really have the words.
You want the truth, Grandma and Grandpa? Your son never taught his children charity. All four of them have grown up slightly uncomprehending of true generosity, constantly suspicious of a hidden catch, sensing a burdensome obligation. It's the same reason our holidays are so terrible now I can't even bring it upon myself to go home. Too much expectation, too much deep-seated and directionless resentment, too high stakes for too little pay-off, because we don't really understand each other and we never will.
Maybe you do know that, and that's why you sent this. It's more than enough to mail-order presents, to go through the designated motions without having to tear my psyche down in the process. It lets me love without the reminder of what that sentiment is up against. It lets me feel without my convictions getting torn apart.
I am a product of the internet generation. I am comfortable with disconnect.
But whatever your intention, I'll try to put your generosity to the best possible use, okay?
12.09.2007
That being said, I'm still a consumer whore.
I have my copy of NiGHTS: Journey of Dreams pre-ordered with Gamestop, to arrive on the 18th. Of course, I don't believe the game will include this.
Seldom have I ever wanted a piece of tie-in merchandise so badly. What do I have to do to get this? Whom do I kill? I'm prepared, you know.
I'd use the month's food budget to get this thing. Oh god. My childhood cries out to be appeased.
Seldom have I ever wanted a piece of tie-in merchandise so badly. What do I have to do to get this? Whom do I kill? I'm prepared, you know.
I'd use the month's food budget to get this thing. Oh god. My childhood cries out to be appeased.
12.08.2007
Japanese animation and you (or rather, me).
Sometimes it helps to think of our influences. It's always struck me that I, but even moreso my classmates, are quick to pass judgement on a piece of work based on what we're used to, rather than its objective merits. That's natural, certainly, but it's untrained thinking. The best solution is to expose yourself to as much of everything as you can.
But that sort of cosmopolitan naivete gets us about as far as deliberate ignorance. An artist can be as worldly or restricted as he chooses, and it won't necessarily bear significantly upon his output. More than anything, understanding one's influences works best when you're trying to communicate.
This goes back to a "qualia" line of reasoning, but only if we're considering qualia in a holistic sense, with the full specific context applied to the experience. I imagine the only reason we don't often default to "everything about a mentality is informed by the entire length and breadth of the experience(s) that shapes that mentality" reasoning is that it's so broad it becomes a cop-out; it's like saying "you had to be there", except it goes even farther and purports that even being there wouldn't be enough-- you'd have to be the person and everything they were up to that point, to experience just what they had in that moment.
So I suppose after a while the human collective can generate universal qualia like "redness" or "black pepper", but for as comprehensively cerebral as a film experience can be, there will always be 99% disconnect. Because realistically, no two people are ever bringing the exact same background to a piece of art, so no two can walk away with the same experience. Thus, even in an environment such as a film school, where participants are hand-picked for a sort of prevailing mentality, the devil remains in the details.
Personally, I haven't grown up on a lot of either high art or mainstream cinema. Even as a teenager, fast approaching the notion that I wanted to study film someday (although that idea wouldn't really be articulated until about three months before I applied), I took far less interest in "the canon" and preferred littler-known, sometimes downright bad movies and series. This wasn't for the purpose of being oppositional or avant-garde or the quintessential teenage rebel: I had gotten into anime from the age of 10 or so and had just developed different tastes as a result.
I can't say what anime did to me was emblematic of that generation of fandom or how it differed from what came before or after. I don't consider myself an anime fan per se because even then I was terribly selective in what I chose to watch. What it did, more than anything, was programme a set of expectations into me that I feel are, at least, far more common in Asian and especially Japanese narrative and far less common in American ones.
It's because of anime's frequently slow, meditative pace that Lawrence of Arabia was my biggest thing when I was 17. I even subjected my film class to it, and was universally reviled as a result. (Take the term "film class" with a grain of salt; in high school, it was just a place for students who were too lazy to take regular literature classes. Plus, we lived in a suburban community Joan Didion might once have written about, one of those places where it's "easy to dial-a-devotion but hard to buy a book"... suffice to say.) And I might suggest that it's because of Japanese formalism that I approached Goethe's Faust and Sherlock Holmes with such ease. Yes, the aesthetic became a way to read oppositionally after a while, but initially it was just the spoonful of sugar that helped that which my peers struggled with go down.
We're reaching a point where the boundaries of national style are quickly blurring. France's cinema du look may be pointed to as one example; Nimrod Antal, an American, making Hungarian's most internationally successful film in decades (Kontroll) is another. Lars van Trier can make films set in America from Denmark just as unselfconsciously as Hollywood has staged the exotic in its backlots for nearly a century. As much as American chic is becoming a sort of aesthetic neutral on the global stage, we're also getting a subtle form of feedback. Anime, for all its pop culture dreck, its utter ignorance of the word "cliche", and of course its unrepentant Anglophilia, is also feeding its new Western-world audience the aesthetic of Kurosawa, Mizoguchi, and Ozu. It's teaching a unique art theory: disparity versus the West's emphasis on balance; negative space as part of the image versus the West's aversion to "emptiness".
Above all, I feel I appreciate anime for teaching me different conventions for romance. Although it's not across the board, often, Asian romances are subdued, restrained, and reminiscent of nothing so much as medieval courtly love. Again, this is nothing to adopt wholecloth (I'm at odds with all standards of romance, particularly in their heteronormativity), but it counterpoints other systems-- and the significant thing about any counterpoint is how it encourages reflection for all sides.
Even if today's "youth" directors --Tarantino and Rodriguez, chiefly, and maybe a little Edgar Wright-- mostly seem to be adopting anime chic in its most superficial forms, change is coming. Yes, and I don't mean something so disingenuous as Afro Samurai-- that shit should burn. I mean change like Avatar. I mean the day when the Academy will cease to overlook the efforts of Satoshi Kon-- it's coming, maybe not as soon as it should, but it's on the horizon.
~
OFFICIAL DISCLAIMER: anime is not a ticket to enlightened filmmaking, nor are anime fans a cut above the rest. Most of them suck, just as most "cinephiles" suck. I should make the point that most anime has little to no redemptive value, but the ratio is about on par with any sort of domestic output. Here are some of the cream of the crop:
the works of Satoshi Kon:
-Memories segment: "Magnetic Rose" (wrote)
-World Apartment Horror (live action; wrote)
-Perfect Blue
-Millennium Actress
-Tokyo Godfathers
-Paprika
-"Paranoia Agent" (TV series)
the works of Katsuhiro Otomo:
-Memories segments: "Stink Bomb" (wrote) and "Cannon Fodder" (wrote and directed)
-Roujin Z
-Akira
the works of Mamoru Oshii:
-Ghost in the Shell
-Ghost in the Shell 2: Innocence
-Avalon (live action)
other:
-Angel's Egg
-The Animatrix segments: "Beyond" and "Detective Story"
-".hack//SIGN" (TV series, written by Kazunori Ito, who also wrote the first Ghost in the Shell and Avalon)
-"Vision of Escaflowne" (TV series)
-"Cowboy Bebop" (TV series)
-Interstella 5555 (feature-length music video animation set to Daft Punk's album, Discovery)
Most of this will be screened during my "Introduction to Japanese Animated Cinema" course this winter at UCLA. If you're interested in attending, please stay tuned for more information.
But that sort of cosmopolitan naivete gets us about as far as deliberate ignorance. An artist can be as worldly or restricted as he chooses, and it won't necessarily bear significantly upon his output. More than anything, understanding one's influences works best when you're trying to communicate.
This goes back to a "qualia" line of reasoning, but only if we're considering qualia in a holistic sense, with the full specific context applied to the experience. I imagine the only reason we don't often default to "everything about a mentality is informed by the entire length and breadth of the experience(s) that shapes that mentality" reasoning is that it's so broad it becomes a cop-out; it's like saying "you had to be there", except it goes even farther and purports that even being there wouldn't be enough-- you'd have to be the person and everything they were up to that point, to experience just what they had in that moment.
So I suppose after a while the human collective can generate universal qualia like "redness" or "black pepper", but for as comprehensively cerebral as a film experience can be, there will always be 99% disconnect. Because realistically, no two people are ever bringing the exact same background to a piece of art, so no two can walk away with the same experience. Thus, even in an environment such as a film school, where participants are hand-picked for a sort of prevailing mentality, the devil remains in the details.
Personally, I haven't grown up on a lot of either high art or mainstream cinema. Even as a teenager, fast approaching the notion that I wanted to study film someday (although that idea wouldn't really be articulated until about three months before I applied), I took far less interest in "the canon" and preferred littler-known, sometimes downright bad movies and series. This wasn't for the purpose of being oppositional or avant-garde or the quintessential teenage rebel: I had gotten into anime from the age of 10 or so and had just developed different tastes as a result.
I can't say what anime did to me was emblematic of that generation of fandom or how it differed from what came before or after. I don't consider myself an anime fan per se because even then I was terribly selective in what I chose to watch. What it did, more than anything, was programme a set of expectations into me that I feel are, at least, far more common in Asian and especially Japanese narrative and far less common in American ones.
It's because of anime's frequently slow, meditative pace that Lawrence of Arabia was my biggest thing when I was 17. I even subjected my film class to it, and was universally reviled as a result. (Take the term "film class" with a grain of salt; in high school, it was just a place for students who were too lazy to take regular literature classes. Plus, we lived in a suburban community Joan Didion might once have written about, one of those places where it's "easy to dial-a-devotion but hard to buy a book"... suffice to say.) And I might suggest that it's because of Japanese formalism that I approached Goethe's Faust and Sherlock Holmes with such ease. Yes, the aesthetic became a way to read oppositionally after a while, but initially it was just the spoonful of sugar that helped that which my peers struggled with go down.
We're reaching a point where the boundaries of national style are quickly blurring. France's cinema du look may be pointed to as one example; Nimrod Antal, an American, making Hungarian's most internationally successful film in decades (Kontroll) is another. Lars van Trier can make films set in America from Denmark just as unselfconsciously as Hollywood has staged the exotic in its backlots for nearly a century. As much as American chic is becoming a sort of aesthetic neutral on the global stage, we're also getting a subtle form of feedback. Anime, for all its pop culture dreck, its utter ignorance of the word "cliche", and of course its unrepentant Anglophilia, is also feeding its new Western-world audience the aesthetic of Kurosawa, Mizoguchi, and Ozu. It's teaching a unique art theory: disparity versus the West's emphasis on balance; negative space as part of the image versus the West's aversion to "emptiness".
Above all, I feel I appreciate anime for teaching me different conventions for romance. Although it's not across the board, often, Asian romances are subdued, restrained, and reminiscent of nothing so much as medieval courtly love. Again, this is nothing to adopt wholecloth (I'm at odds with all standards of romance, particularly in their heteronormativity), but it counterpoints other systems-- and the significant thing about any counterpoint is how it encourages reflection for all sides.
Even if today's "youth" directors --Tarantino and Rodriguez, chiefly, and maybe a little Edgar Wright-- mostly seem to be adopting anime chic in its most superficial forms, change is coming. Yes, and I don't mean something so disingenuous as Afro Samurai-- that shit should burn. I mean change like Avatar. I mean the day when the Academy will cease to overlook the efforts of Satoshi Kon-- it's coming, maybe not as soon as it should, but it's on the horizon.
~
OFFICIAL DISCLAIMER: anime is not a ticket to enlightened filmmaking, nor are anime fans a cut above the rest. Most of them suck, just as most "cinephiles" suck. I should make the point that most anime has little to no redemptive value, but the ratio is about on par with any sort of domestic output. Here are some of the cream of the crop:
the works of Satoshi Kon:
-Memories segment: "Magnetic Rose" (wrote)
-World Apartment Horror (live action; wrote)
-Perfect Blue
-Millennium Actress
-Tokyo Godfathers
-Paprika
-"Paranoia Agent" (TV series)
the works of Katsuhiro Otomo:
-Memories segments: "Stink Bomb" (wrote) and "Cannon Fodder" (wrote and directed)
-Roujin Z
-Akira
the works of Mamoru Oshii:
-Ghost in the Shell
-Ghost in the Shell 2: Innocence
-Avalon (live action)
other:
-Angel's Egg
-The Animatrix segments: "Beyond" and "Detective Story"
-".hack//SIGN" (TV series, written by Kazunori Ito, who also wrote the first Ghost in the Shell and Avalon)
-"Vision of Escaflowne" (TV series)
-"Cowboy Bebop" (TV series)
-Interstella 5555 (feature-length music video animation set to Daft Punk's album, Discovery)
Most of this will be screened during my "Introduction to Japanese Animated Cinema" course this winter at UCLA. If you're interested in attending, please stay tuned for more information.
Inaugural Post
Slightly more than a year ago, I moved from a desert suburb to Los Angeles to attend the UCLA Film School. In contrast to students who have attended UCLA since their wide-eyed teenage years, I have had precious little time to absorb this place in all its splendour. When I graduate in the spring, what will I have left to hold onto, except some remarkably transient memories? I haven't had the time to take this place or its people for granted. I haven't had time to stop noticing how beautiful Kerckhoff Hall is at night or that you can see the ocean from the top of Broad. I'm terribly fearful of leaving this place, because I have a distinct sense things will never be this good again.
I've done what I could, I should hope. I've dedicated my senior year to documentation: I bought a video camera to record my classmates in action; I bought a new camera phone capable of some truly amazing things. I could never profess to such an obsession with photography before this past quarter. And truth be told, as these things go I'm as much a photographer as an okapi is a zebra-- certainly my aspirations are there, but I fall terribly short and onto the disingenuous side.
Whatever. It makes me happy. When my own shortcomings someday prevent me from success and I look back from my crappy life to the summer of my youth, at least there will be awesome visual aids.
~
This is the new blog. I've left livejournal and eschewed similar services because I am no longer famous on the internet and feel little reason to continue the charade.
Important posts will be reposted here as soon as I get bored enough to start caring.
I've done what I could, I should hope. I've dedicated my senior year to documentation: I bought a video camera to record my classmates in action; I bought a new camera phone capable of some truly amazing things. I could never profess to such an obsession with photography before this past quarter. And truth be told, as these things go I'm as much a photographer as an okapi is a zebra-- certainly my aspirations are there, but I fall terribly short and onto the disingenuous side.
Whatever. It makes me happy. When my own shortcomings someday prevent me from success and I look back from my crappy life to the summer of my youth, at least there will be awesome visual aids.
~
This is the new blog. I've left livejournal and eschewed similar services because I am no longer famous on the internet and feel little reason to continue the charade.
Important posts will be reposted here as soon as I get bored enough to start caring.
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