"heaven spanky long emmerica"

that's "Hello Stranger" to you

One could put together a splendid coffee table book from t-shirt sayings regularly encountered on the street in Seoul. Christine (Grace) just spotted "heaven spanky long emmerica" at a subway station. Sometimes I get the camera deployed in time to capture these gems, but they are often fleeting dream-like encounters. Last night on the subway I spotted a guy in a baseball hat with an embrodered facsimile of a Michigan temporary vehicle permit. You just never know.

This week's theme seems to be visual entertainment. The Seoul Fringe Festival is going on, but (he sheepishly admits) we haven't made it out to any of it's events yet, despite living in Hongdae, the hub of the Fringe scene. I know, I know. I can legitimately cite an increasingly crazy schedule. Really!

There was an entire Thai film crew staying at our guest house through the spring, a fact that was hard to ignore. Their shooting schedule was intense, so they'd return in the wee hours and wind down on the deck with beer (immense bottles of Cass or Hite) and cigarettes from the Family Mart down the street, augmented with spicy dried Thai snacks from a big care package one of their mothers had sent them. We had the good sense to join them the few times we could stay up that late.

The working title for the romantic comedy they were shooting was "Knowing Me, Knowing You", but it's opening in Thailand this week as "Hello Stranger", presumably because ABBA wanted too much loot. Don't Benny and Bjorn have anough helicopters and white jumpsuits already? Anyway, I had a small walk-on in an early scene, where I'm a backpacker trying to extract my shoes from under the main character, who is sleeping off his binge in a hostel's front doorway. Because my own shoes wound up in the shot, I had to go home afterwards in my sandals in the rain so they could keep my shoes around for continuity. My scintillating performance wasn't quite enough to earn me an invitation to the premiere (let alone the spiffy little motorcycle they bought for the film), although they did give me about 40,000 won and a very nice box lunch at the time. There's a trailer on Youtube as of this writing - it looks like a nice fun rom-com. We hope it does well, as the cast and crew were great people - tons of fun.

The two of us will hopefully get some good screen time in the horror film we were involved in this week. Our friend Maggie had told us last weekend that she'd just been a demon in a film, and was doing also sound for the production. She texted us a couple of days ago as we were just heading out for a Fringe event (no - really!) asking if we wanted to be demons. Having a family policy never to antagonize the undead, we agreed and climbed on the subway for the lengthy journey across Seoul to Gangdong station.

Our elaborate makeup was applied in a tiny, barely-furnished apartment by a small group of volunteers, over the course of about two hours. From what we gathered, the main character had been killing off a couple of demons a night, so the makeup people were getting quite adept at applying the latex, scars, long pointy fingers, and blood. We also learned early that WE WERE NOT ZOMBIES, who apparently occupy a decidedly lower tier in the hierarchy.

The blood, by the way, was a mixture of corn syrup, Nestles Quik, and red food coloring. It had a stunningly realistic half-coagulated appearance, and didn't taste too bad either. This was for the best, as we spent the next few hours having the stuff spooned into our mouths in staggering quantities. As demons, we had to adopt finger- and neck-intensive animalistic movements, and chase two Korean women down the darkened alleys of Gangdong. Christine killed one of them, and the other one gouged my eyes out. All in a night's work. Actually, all the chasing and scuffling got everyone's adrenaline going, so there were quite a few scrapes and bruises. My eyeballs still ache.

Apart from the unparallelled experience of delighting Seoul's healthy insect population by lying on the ground for extended periods covered with corn syrup and chocolate, the highlight of the non-zombie-movie shoot had to have been the director's screaming fit when a huge cockroach started to fly towards him. He almost dropped the camera, which was running at the time. Of all the scenes shot that night, the unplanned roach attack earned the most replays when we were reviewing the evening's footage at 3am.

Last item on the screen theme: Christine/Grace and I just got involved in re-voicing a Korean cartoon called "Chipa the Robot". Animation gigs of this type can be a bit challenging, as you have to read the script while watching the screen and trying to make the English words match the Korean mouth movements. I have vague childhood recollections of watching what must have been re-voiced cartoons from distant countries, usually when I was home from school with a cold. The fever, the truly bizarre cartoons, and the alcohol-enriched red cough syrup we used to get all swirl together in a muddled hybrid image, complete with unfamiliar characters crying, sweating, burping and farting at random intervals through inexplicable plots. It wasn't a dream. At least one more generation of North American children is likely to share this kind of experience, and I'm glad to be a part of the weirdness.