Wonderful Days.

Size: XL
Where: New York Korean Film Festival production office



Why: Read on...

Comment: This shirt doesn't actually exist, officially. Several years ago, back when I was helping (in my limited way) to organize the annual New York Korean Film Festival, one of the members wanted to move away from the typical festival-logo-name-year-type t-shirts and experimented a little with some different designs. She mocked up this shirt pretty quick-and-dirtily just to see how it would look, and then pretty much forgot about it as more pressing matters came to pass. Months later, during the regular post-festival office cleanup, someone else found the shirt sitting on a shelf and asked if anyone wanted it. I said, "Sure."

The image is from the movie Wonderful Days (aka Sky Blue), which I actually didn't think was all that great (basically a pastiche of the far superior plots, characters, and love-mother-earth themes of Hayao Miyazaki's sci-fi films Nausicaa, Laputa, and even On Your Mark), but for all it's faults I have to admit that it looked great. Most of it, anyway. For its time, anyway.

The shirt is way too big and has an "unfinished" quality - seriously, the design feels like someone hot-glued a color Xerox to the front of it - but I've actually worn it out (and washed it) several times in the past. As you can see, it's suffering: fading, running, cracking. The shirt just sits in a drawer for the most part these days.

Anyway, there's a reason why I'm posting this shirt tonight. I am having a complete Twilight Zone-type of day. This morning I was cleaning out some super-old email archives and found a folder full of old messages from way back in those planning days. As I was flipping through the various messages discussing film deliveries and pointing out typos in the press releases, I couldn't help but wonder, What ever happened to these people?

And sure enough, not an hour later I receive a random spam email from one of the other old members talking about some show she's gonna be in!

And a few hours after that, I crazily, randomly run into another one of the old members on the street!

Maybe not such a wonderful day, per se, but definitely one of the weirder ones.