Standing in the back of a line about 150 people long, I'm swirling a $6 drink of cheap whiskey and Coke, nicely purchased for me by Wendy the Bendy. It's a cold night and people are milling around the tall lamp heaters, huddling and sipping fancier drinks. I'm underdressed, as usual. Around me are hundreds of other people dressed in black denim and shiny, smooth leather, in skirts and knee-high boots, the kind the lady on TV said would be so fashionable this time of year. And random men and women wrapped in Wizard outfits stand pointing, directing and guiding these fashionable people in many directions with the long- lashed, multi-colored orbitals with shrunken pupils on their robes. The line isn't moving too quickly, so there's plenty of time to check out the huge banner bearing the same design as those Fantasia outfits--those disembodied red, orange, blue, teal, olive, green, lime, peach, pink, and violet eyes floating around the white sheet like clown sperm through a microscopic lens. In what is the most highly anticipated art opening for the GR crew since the last one, Super Flat is seemingly inscrutable from the outset.

Super Flat, the theory, refers to the tendency toward two dimensionality in art forms, especially those dealing with popular icons or modern ideas. There is an inescapable entropic process toward two-dimesionality in film, animation, photography, illustration, even sculpture--it is the compression of layers, all things far and near, and smooshing them onto a piece of canvas. And there is a constant struggle to depict the illusion of three dimensionality into a two-dimensional form, like hammering a wooden cube into a wooden block hole. Super Flat, the art opening, is the eccentric, heavily pop-culture influenced art installation Groovisions president/artist Takashi Murakami has been kind enough to bring it to the Pacific Design Center in West Hollywood, the likes of which are difficult to ground anywhere else but the country of Japan. Stuffed like spinach gyoza from Eric's mom's restaurant, the installation is full of hundreds of photographs, smooth-skinned sculptures, a crumpled Zero Fighter airplane, loop upon loop of video production, huge wall-covering murals and paint-by-numbers style portraits, and more than a few little anime girls running around in their underpants. I'm looking for the man responsible for the endless march of little anime girls across the pages in the Super Flat book, the guy who only draws girls aged 7-14, the guy whom Eric says is afraid to have kids of his own someday. This is the enigma known as "Mr." Do I want to draw like him? Not really. Is he a great artist? He's alright, I guess. So why do I want to meet this pervert? Am I a pervert, too? Maybe, but the truth is I just want to meet weird people. I'm tipped off to be on the lookout for a pair of lavender cateye glasses from the start.

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