strive to equal.
William Gibson, Pattern Recognition:
The Rickson's is a fanatical museum-grade replica of a U.S. MA-1 flying jacket . . . created by Japanese obsessives driven by passions having nothing at all to do with anything remotely like fashion.
Cayce knows, for instance, that the characteristically wrinkled seams down either arm were originally the result of sewing with pre-war industrial machines that rebelled against the slippery new material, nylon. The makers of the Rickson's have exaggerated this, but only very slightly, and done a hundred other things, tiny things, as well, so that their product has become, in some very Japanese way, the result of an act of worship. It is an imitation more real somehow than that which it emulates.
Later:
She concentrates on her breakfast, eggs poached to perfection and toast sliced from a loaf of slightly alien dimensions. The two slices of bacon are crisp and very flat, as though they've been ironed. High-end Japanese hotels interpret Western breakfasts the way the Rickson's makers interpret the MA-1.
He's right; the Japanese version of the Western breakfast, while tasty, is somewhere in the uncanny valley. But it's the Japanese spaghetti that really impresses me. There's nothing quite like it. Just pull up to the bar and ask for "meat sauce", and it comes out looking rich and perfect, with finely ground beef throughout -- as if they'd re-implemented spaghetti based on pictures in cookbooks. The flavor's different, in some way that I don't know enough about cooking to describe. Well worth having.
The Rickson's is a fanatical museum-grade replica of a U.S. MA-1 flying jacket . . . created by Japanese obsessives driven by passions having nothing at all to do with anything remotely like fashion.
Cayce knows, for instance, that the characteristically wrinkled seams down either arm were originally the result of sewing with pre-war industrial machines that rebelled against the slippery new material, nylon. The makers of the Rickson's have exaggerated this, but only very slightly, and done a hundred other things, tiny things, as well, so that their product has become, in some very Japanese way, the result of an act of worship. It is an imitation more real somehow than that which it emulates.
Later:
She concentrates on her breakfast, eggs poached to perfection and toast sliced from a loaf of slightly alien dimensions. The two slices of bacon are crisp and very flat, as though they've been ironed. High-end Japanese hotels interpret Western breakfasts the way the Rickson's makers interpret the MA-1.
He's right; the Japanese version of the Western breakfast, while tasty, is somewhere in the uncanny valley. But it's the Japanese spaghetti that really impresses me. There's nothing quite like it. Just pull up to the bar and ask for "meat sauce", and it comes out looking rich and perfect, with finely ground beef throughout -- as if they'd re-implemented spaghetti based on pictures in cookbooks. The flavor's different, in some way that I don't know enough about cooking to describe. Well worth having.