윤

I thought this was some session band the studio assembled for Inspector Koo and like Jan Brady would realize their true potential lied elsewhere, because “Chi-Chi’s Theme” below is one of my favorite tracks ever. I wouldn’t be surprised if these kids were there when My Bloody Valentine launched the mbv tour in Seoul.

A single-lane road went around the back of the parking lot, but when I approached it to exit, two sedans were oncoming. The asphalt ahead of them was broken, though, resulting in an abrupt four-foot drop, which neither must’ve seen because the first fell head-long onto the lower ground then the one behind landed on top. It seemed like I stepped out to investigate. The driver of the buried car appeared: he (?) was a hunched humanoid, but his body was covered in a large drum-like steel shell and his head comprised of goggles for eyes and a screaming mouth. Another of its kind emerged from the wreckage and was just as angry. I left the monsters to themselves by promptly departing to their left in the original way out, glad that the dashcam had caught everything.

Has this already been done? A man’s life is linked inextricably to an ancient samurai sword somehow and becomes virtually immortal unless the weapon is broken. Well, that was the premise of the caper I took part in before waking up for good today (then again, it is Sunday), where a female Japanese detective and I uncovered the mystery, then rewound to catch a re-enactment of the origin of the bond between the two, which, to our disappointment, was lacking in special effects: he was a nobody who happened to be around when its crate was broken.

In retrospect it may not amount to much, but there was at least some progress from the Killing Eve remake where the queers were relegated to supporting characters then letting them be the leads, if only “coded” as such and surrounded by the most extreme examples of the opposite sex.

I looked through the doorway and saw a young person’s bare arm suspended unnaturally high above the room, undulating slightly and the fingers wiggling to show that someone unseen was behind it. Suddenly I was attacked by a dozen gray fists, but I fought them back, defiant and insistent that they weren’t getting to me, even as the image of my aggressor in the back changed shape and color.

In quite the change of setting to an anime convention, my friend and I (I think it was Frank Hsu, because he was tall, thin and decked out in motorcycling leathers) were admiring the life-sized mechs on display, and when we learned we could actually climb inside one for photos, queued up thinking that we were first in line. Turned out it already stretched around the display and the others were full-on cosplaying as sentai pilots, so the Shoei or Arai helmet and riding gear looked philistine in comparison. Nearing the end of our wait, a woman with a baby approached and we let her cut ahead of us, but she then tried chaining in a fat relative who waddled up and we objected vehemently. I don’t remember taking any pictures because the very next thing, my buddy looked more like that fucker Steve Bannon and was thanking me; such an abrupt edit in my timeline frightened me that Alzheimer’s had struck and this was how my perception would continue, jumping from one moment to another, unaware of what happened between them.

It’s how I reconcile Severance and Navillera. (Although the former will probably be revealed to be mad science like Dr. Brain, the Trojan Horse implant that has to be “macrodata’d” to override memory or willpower conflicts.) Bread-winning aside, what good are we to our loved ones if we don’t know who they are anymore? What good are we to ourselves?

I refuse the inevitability of contracting a virus whose spread is aided by selfish unmasked anti-vaxxer pricks and almost worse, people who know better but have accepted it, because they’re “tired.” Like those endless videogames of yore, there’s no tiring in the fight against intruder organisms.
And because I probably won’t retain any details about new dreams while I’m still holding onto this one’s, best.client.ever Wing was at odds with her management and while she argued with them behind a glass-doored meeting room, asked me to pick up her drycleaning, which consisted of a branded jacket and was marked on the tag “Very expensive.” She severed her ties and emerged, dressed in a long frilly coat and high boots, with curls like Japanese ne’er-do-wells from the 90’s. I can’t quite place the look—maybe it was one of the ガングロ-type girls the main character saves in オヤジぃ。—but it attracted immediate suitors whom I had to fend off before she got into my car, though I had no idea where to take her in DC.

I was reunited with old co-worker Laura Armijo, maybe because at the time she lived in Lakewood, where we went this weekend to cash in our Bed Bath & Beyond gift cards before they become worthless, and a roomful of Mark Malinski clones, all armed with automatic weapons, waiting for a signal to start blasting away at each other. Apparently we had the ability to restore our consciousnesses into new bodies, so death was nothing to fear, though I concentrated a few more times as if to upload the latest backup, just in case. All I had to make the best of it was to take her gun and give it a go, but before the activity began I succumbed to my doubts and backed out. I left the arena and took a seat at a student’s desk and played a holographic game on the tabletop with my hand, but Shining Knight whose presence I otherwise took entirely for granted approached and startled me by stabbing me in the gut, smirking as he retreated. For this I gave up sexy Wing?

Where else would I turn to for my surrealism fix now that 구경이 has ended, most likely for good? There are more contemporary options, of course, but leave it to me to go back twenty years to a pre-Hallyu time before the Japanese community surrendered the LA OTA market. (I make no claim that developments in this petite niche represent any cultural significance whatsoever; it just so happened to intersect with my many small circles of attention when Sunday nights I began switching channels to 내 이름은 김삼순 and 환상의 커플.) Lynch certainly would’ve made short work of the audio, the episodic format is more in keeping with a cheaper ongoing series than the superior longer-form arc that Koreans sometimes manage without drawing out too much—i.e., I didn’t remember a single one of these stories—and man, was Koo as slick and smooth as its star’s perfect complexion, but I really enjoyed the distractions in the background during the interplay between the two leads and wonder if the later reunions established that one was a figment of the other’s imagination? Pity they played up 美人マジシャン Yukie Nakama’s 貧乳 but not her gorgeous profile:

Just when I thought I was out of weekly TV to watch with the end of Inspector Koo, they pull me back in with the next season! It’s a short one, unfortunately, but then again I’m grateful they don’t drag out the painful reign of the Belter egomaniac between the larger threat beyond the gates. There’s always something, right? I’m reminded of times when this nearest of futures was uncertain, but not only do the content providers always manage to come through, somehow, more miraculously, one of their committee-driven products gets me.Novels had a satisfying finish, thanks Libby! (I’m reminded of blowing through the Ice and Fire books on the Kindle, but the OLED screen’s a vast improvement, as fond are my memories of that device. The service-free unlimited Internet was not long for this world.) Looking back at them I can see the story arcs comprising the narrative of a game it was originally intended, with the player as Holden. An MMO might have had to delve into the 30-year gap or extend the war between universes, but that ending was straight outta Final Fantasy, tentacles and all.

I’ve been hoping the writer of Signal and Kingdom would deliver again with 지리산, but the time traveling ghost story so far has neither the pace of a Netflix season nor sufficient serial killer count; then here comes fabulous fifty-year-old Lady Vengeance 이영애 (with ten years on Sassy Girl 전지현 herself) in a take on Killing Eve that’s at least a decade too early for it to please the shippers yet does a slick job aping its style, right down to the soundtrack, with only the usual anime/webtoon trappings of K-drama holding it back. 근데 왜 나 알은척 안 하니?

Update: That was two episodes in, I still haven’t seen a more stunning moment than that one at the end of them, and with only two to go, I’m handily convinced this is my favorite series of the year. Korean one, ever, for sure, the Oldboy joke and the Chun Doo-hwan certificate framed on the wall of the old-timer sealed it.

Not as strange a segue if you consider that I happened across it again a few weeks back on the ファミリー劇場 channel and it’d been sitting at 83.2% all this time. Wait, wasn’t Ken also 笑わない男 in The Yakuza? I’d like to think it’s some kinda wild coincidence in the tiny universe that I’ve carved out for myself here, but come on, it’s like their signature trade-off for superhuman capabilities. Inquiry on a higher level, perhaps, would be comparing the 수상한 (“suspect”?) 가정부 Korean remake for differences both cultural and superficial like the ones between their Signals. The additional episodes provided valuable main cast connections to the serial killer timelines, but are almost twice as many necessary to draw out side characters and let 최지우 explore Sadako Mary Poppins?