Distrust That Particular Flavor Read Online Free PDF Page A

as if in imitation of his character's costume. Or, rather, as if they had no need for imitation, being already there. Like the character, they are all buttoned into beautifully cut cashmere overcoats. Black.
    I never saw Takeshi again, and then, months later, I heard that he had been terribly injured in a motorcycle accident, and was at firstnot expected to live, and then, when he did live, was not expected to be able to act again.
    It made me very sad.
    I thought of all this, this past summer, as I watched his film
Brother
in the Vancouver Film Festival, one of the only films I've seen which captures the micron-thin veneer of city-over-desert that one sees constantly in the parts of Los Angeles one never sees in films. Takeshi had survived his motorcycle crash, with the newly limited mobility of his features turned to full advantage as he takes us on his character's somberly delirious kamikaze run into a simpler and more hauntingly realized vision of night-side America than our own directors have given us for quite a long time.
    Toughness has been rather out of fashion, as a masculine virtue, and Takeshi simultaneously radiates it and suggests its wounded core. There can in fact be no depiction of genuine toughness (not brutality but a sort of excess of substance, of soul-stuff) without this concomitant indication of that wound, else the piece becomes simply the pornography of fascism.
    Takeshi is simultaneously tougher and more wounded than you or I will ever be. Given the ever deeper and more precise reach of the spectral hand of marketing, I suspect that he's tougher and more wounded than any Hollywood star is ever likely to be allowed to be.
    When I wrote this, I hadn't yet realized that Bruce Sterling, when he spoke of translations, was paraphrasing Jorge Luis Borges.
    If you'd like to see a Takeshi Kitano film, I recommend Sonatine .
    Johnny Mnemonic, as cut for the film's Japanese release, is some minutes longer, all of that in the service of delivering more Takeshi Kitano, and is of course the better for it.

SAY IT'S MIDWAY through the final year of the first decade of the twenty-first century. Say that, last week, two things happened: Scientists in China announced successful quantum teleportation over a distance of ten miles, while other scientists, in Maryland, announced the creation of an artificial, self-replicating genome. In this particular version of the twenty-first century, which happens to be the one you're living in, neither of these stories attracted a very great deal of attention.
    In quantum teleportation, no matter is transferred, but information may be conveyed across a distance, without resorting to a signal in any traditional sense. Still, it's the word "teleportation," used seriously, in a headline. My "no kidding" module was activated: "No kidding," I said to myself, "teleportation." A slight amazement.
    The synthetic genome, arguably artificial life, was somehow less amazing. The sort of thing one feels might already have been achieved, somehow. Triggering the "Oh, yeah" module. "Artificial life? Oh, yeah."
    Though these scientists also inserted a line of James Joyce's prose into their genome. That triggers a sense of the surreal, in me at least. They did it to incorporate a yardstick for the ongoing measurementof mutation. So James Joyce's prose is now being very slowly pummeled into incoherence by cosmic rays.
    Noting these two pieces of more or less simultaneous news, I also noted that my imagination, which grew up on countless popular imaginings of exactly this sort of thing, could produce nothing better in response than a tabloid headline: SYNTHETIC BACTERIA IN QUANTUM FREE-SPACE TELEPORTATION SHOCKER.
    Alvin Toffler warned us about Future Shock, but is this Future Fatigue? For the past decade or so, the only critics of science fiction I pay any attention to, all three of them, have been slyly declaring that the Future is over. I wouldn't blame anyone for assuming that this is akin to the