윤

A belated tribute to this most versatile actor, who frightened me with a revisit so long ago and like Laura Palmer, I would see again long after I settled down and stopped rooting for the protagonist of A Clockwork Orange.

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?

Define it as the perception of sound without a corresponding external source, and I’ve had it all my life, that noise I’d just assumed was from the pressure exerted upon my skull I could hear in the silence, caused either by the tides within or the radiation that’s only become more pervasive since the Zenith in the other room. But last week I woke and it was louder, I couldn’t yawn it away, and I’d be lying if I said I wasn’t afraid the cracks were finally starting to show… What am I saying, they’ve been here all along, it’s the damn burst I should be expecting. The soundtrack I had always imagined to be from Curb Your Enthusiasm (or Joker) was instead replaced by the low hum of machinery in the background at a deserted facility, designed by David Lynch. It’s let up somewhat, I’ve noticed it dissipates almost entirely after exercise or orgasm, or I’ve grown to accept its symphony with the computer fan, cracked skylight, WiFi and what I presume are the reverberations of my crumbling reality.

Honestly superhero-saturation has gotten to me, too, but I’ll always appreciate any irreverence it explores, not unlike Lynchian disruption, which face it, has always come from the DC side, unconvincing pastiches aside. Why after all, wouldn’t gods be free to say “fuck” or vaunt their sexual prowess?

Speaking of DC characters with potty mouths (but at least don’t all sound the same as James Gunn), I had a dream I was seated next to Dianne Guerrero—I am unable to do more than that nowadays—whose hair was cut short, pixie-style. Our folding chairs were in a line and on my other side of me was a third wheel.

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:

I still hold to the idea that Lynch packaged his rejected Twin Peaks follow-up with the “it was all just a dream” finish as an FU to the studio.The night terror Ben’s experiencing in Evil (which reminds me a lot of Millennium) has got way too much of the demonic makeup for me: my latest one was just a dark outline of a face pressed against the small window in the door. It seemed pointless keeping it out, because the back of my apartment was always open to a stairwell shared with my neighbors, so I tried a frightening demonstration of martial arts. The door knob turned and the figure entered, still only a shadow.

At least it wasn’t like the kind I’ve been having the past few nights where all I’m doing is looking at screens, watching football on TV—surely a low point of my imagination, even if it was from my perspective as an unprepared player—scrolling through map locations between San Diego and the Mexican border, monitoring the child’s video content that included a Monty Python-narrated skit in which bodies chased one another lewdly inside a couple’s coat, and playing a Pokémon game together. There was a Chansey to catch, but I missed her.

Quite possibly the most gratifying moment in my many years of genre television:

I couldn’t help but think that this very same series (with minor changes for continuity) might have served as a return to the Prisoner back in the 70’s or early 80’s, depending upon McGoohan’s fitness to return for the role.

Edit: I was right.

Mädchen Amick and the track which I just realized reminds me of Joy Division’s “Atmosphere” take me back to 1990 Seattle.Update: Showtime’s since put the first couple of episodes up for free viewing, but they don’t allow embedding with a timecode, so I’ll have to settle for a link.