The year was 1970 and Dennis Hopper was still riding the wake of the internationally huge cultural phenomenon of Easy Rider. Clearly, the cat could get away with just about anything including appearing on Johnny Cash’s weekly TV show reading Rudyard Kipling’ poem “If.” Now most of us pop culture obsessives have seen this clip of Hopper on the Cash show. It’s pretty pervasive on the ‘net and you may have already stumbled across it. But some smart cookie by the name of “Gints Apsits” has played around with the Hopper footage and created something that might resemble where Hopper’s psychedelicized head could have been at this particular point in his life.

Not only do words infect, egotize, narcotize, and paralyze, but they enter into and colour the minutest cells of the brain. . . . Rudyard Kipling.

Perhaps we’re watching Hopper watching himself through the eyes of his gas-huffing character Frank Booth. Or is that too damned heavy meta?