Anime Pancake

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...