Neither an index, representation, nor copy, as conventional studies would have it, the photographic image is an analogy. This principle obtains at every level of its being: a photograph analogizes its referent, the negative from which it is generated, every other print that is struck from that negative, and all of its digital "offspring.
The photograph moves through time, in search of other "kin," some of which may be visual, but others of which may be literary, architectural, philosophical, or literary. Finally, photography develops with us, and in response to us. It assumes historically legible forms, but when we divest them of their saving power, as we always seem to do, it goes elsewhere. The present volume focuses on the nineteenth century and some of its contemporary progeny.
It begins with the camera obscura, which morphed into chemical photography and lives on in digital form, and ends with Walter Benjamin. Photography is one of the principal filters through which we engage the world. The contributors to this volume focus on Walter Benjamin's concept of the optical unconscious to investigate how photography has shaped history, modernity, perception, lived experience, politics, race, and human agency. In essays that range from examinations of Benjamin's and Sigmund Freud's writings to the work of Kara Walker and Roland Barthes's famous Winter Garden photograph, the contributors explore what photography can teach us about the nature of the unconscious.
They attend to side perceptions, develop latent images, discover things hidden in plain sight, focus on the disavowed, and perceive the slow. Of particular note are the ways race and colonialism have informed photography from its beginning.
The volume also contains photographic portfolios by Zoe Leonard, Kelly Wood, and Kristan Horton, whose work speaks to the optical unconscious while demonstrating how photographs communicate on their own terms. The essays and portfolios in Photography and the Optical Unconscious create a collective and sustained assessment of Benjamin's influential concept, opening up new avenues for thinking about photography and the human psyche.
In late seventeenth-century London, the most provocative images were produced not by artists, but by scientists. Matthew C. Hunter brings to life this archive of experimental-philosophical visualization and the deft cunning that was required to manage such difficult research.
Ultimately, Hunter argues, the craft and craftiness of experimental visual practice both promoted and menaced the artistic traditions on which they drew, turning the Royal Society projects into objects of suspicion in Enlightenment England. In asking what it would mean to take this rhythm as an ontological force in its own right, she creatively draws on thinkers such as Giorgio Agamben, Roland Barthes, Gilles Deleuze, and Luce Irigaray.
Transform Your Body. Commit to Grit. Ebook PDF. Tolkien Ebook PDF. Download Who Moved My Cheese? Important Documents. Day 1 - Landing in London Photo Gallery. Things I want to See. Where Should I Go Next? Peta Situs. Up to the Minute! Use this gadget to give up to the minute changes in your plans, inspirational thoughts or simply a quick update of your latest adventure. Ways to Reach Me. The second part is a careful study of how classic cocktails work: the basics of shaker, mixing glass, ice, and liquor.
The third part is an overview of newer techniques and ideas and how they relate to classic cocktails. The last part is a series of recipes, mini-journeys based on a particular idea.
At the end you will find an annotated bibliography of cocktail books, science books, and cookbooks, plus journal articles that I find interesting and germane to our subject. Often I perceive an irksome problem in an existing cocktail, or become entranced with an idea or flavor, and my journey begins. I ask myself what I want to achieve, and then I beat down every path to get there. I want to see what is possible and what Im capable of.
In the initial phases of working through a problem, I dont much care if what Im doing is reasonable. I prefer to go to absurd lengths to gain minute increments of improvement. I am okay with spending a week preparing a drink thats only marginally better than the one that took me five minutes. Im interested in the margins. Thats where I learn about the drink, about myself, and about the world.
Sounds grandiose, but I mean it. I am not unhappy, but I am never satisfied. Theres always a better way. Constantly questioning yourselfespecially your basic tenets and practicesmakes you a better person behind the bar, in front of the stove, or in whatever field you choose.
I love it when my dearly held beliefs are proved wrong. It means Im alive and still learning. I hate compromising, and I hate cutting corners, but sometimes I have to.
You need to keep hating compromise at every turn while knowing how to compromise with minimum impact when necessary. Always be focused on the critical path to quality, from raw ingredients to the cup. I am often surprised by how much work someone will put into making ingredients for a drink, only to destroy all that work at the last moment.
Remember, a drink can be ruined at any stage of its creation. Your responsibility for vigilance as a drink maker doesnt end until the drink is finishedand your responsibility as an alcoholic-drink maker doesnt end until the imbiber is safe and sound at home. Measurement, Units, Equipment Having access to cool equipment has helped me develop ways of achieving good results without the equipment.
In this section well look at the equipment I use at home and at my bar, Booker and Dax. Almost no onenot even well-heeled professional bartenderswill want or need all the equipment on this list. In the technique-based sections of the book Ill give you workarounds for the bigger-ticket and hard-to-find items as often as I can.
At the end of this section youll find shopping lists organized by budget and interest. A note on measurement, before we launch into a discussion of tools. I am a big believer in cooking by weight, but I mix drinks by volume, and so should you. Pouring out small volumes is much faster than weighing a bunch of small ingredients.
Furthermore, the densities of cocktail ingredients vary wildly, from about. For the bartender, the weight of the finished beverage isnt important, but the volume is. The volume determines how close the top of the finished drink will be to the rim of the glass. This liquid line is called the wash line, and maintaining a proper wash line is essential to good bartending. In a professional setting, it is essential that your drinks be consistent.
Having standard wash lines for each drink you prepare gives you an instant visual check that everything is okay. If your wash line is wrong, something is wrong with the drink. Consistent wash lines are also important to your guests well-being. Two people get the same drink, but one drink sits higher in the glass: do you like the person with the taller pour more, or are your techniques just a bit shaky?
Advocates of the free-pour dont measure their drinks with measuring tools. Some free-pourers gauge how much they have poured by looking at the liquid levels on the side of glass mixing cups. These bartenders recognize through practice what liquid increments look like in a standard mixing glass. Other free-pourers use speedpour bottle tops, which produce a steady stream of liquor. Speed-pour mavens judge how much they pour by counting off the length of time they pour: so many counts equals so many ounces.
These bartenders practice for hours and hours to attain a consistent counting technique. Why do free-pourers eschew measuring cups? There are four main schools of thought: the Lazy, the Speedy, the Artist, and the Monk.
The Lazy just dont care if they are accurate; enough said about them. The Speedy believe that free-pouring is accurate enough and saves valuable time behind the bara couple seconds saved on each drink. The Lazy and the Speedy free-pourers wont achieve accurate and repeatable results.
Free-pour techniques are particularly inappropriate for the home bartender, who doesnt pour out dozens of drinks each night, hasnt practiced a lot, and should be spending the time to get each drink right.
Free-pour Artists believe that measuring cups make them look unskilled, unpracticed, and lacking in finesse. I disagree. Masterful jigger-work is a pleasure to behold, and being accurate doesnt make you robotic. No free-pourer can be as consistent over as many different drinks in as many different conditions as someone who measures.
The most intriguing argument in favor of free-pouring comes from the Monk, who believes that drinks should not be constrained to easily remembered recipes given in quarter-ounce increments. After all, why should we believe that exact quarter-ounce increments provide the ideal proportions for a drink?
Monks pour by feel, tasting as they go, establishing the correct proportions for each drink individually by intuition and by how they size up their guests tastes. I like free-pour Monks, but in daily practice it is much better to have a standard recipe that you can remember and consistently follow than to worry about the constraints of the measuring system.
Fixed recipes can still allow for nuance while. While it is impossible to remember that a recipe should contain. Similarly, two-thirds of the way from to 1 ounce can be called out as a short ounce. Some recipes that call out even smaller quantities have smaller but easily remembered increments: we use the bar spoon, the dash, and the drop. In answer to the Monks main premisethat measuring doesnt guarantee a perfectly balanced drinkthe good measuring bartender tastes each and every drink he or she makes.
The pros use a drinking straw to extract a small sample of each drink to ensure that the measured proportions have produced the required effect. Notice that in the above discussion my units are in ounces and not in milliliters. American cocktail recipes are always written in ounces. Before my metric friends get in a tizzy, let me say that in a cocktail recipe the word ounces is really just another way to say parts. Cocktail recipes are all about ratios, and ratio measurements are in parts: 2 parts booze plus part syrup and part juice and the like.
In this book, 1 part equals 1 ounce equals 30 milliliters. The size of an actual ounce depends on whom you ask. Even without considering the various now-obsolete international ounce definitions, the United States by itself has a bewildering array of differently sized ounces that all hover around 1 fluid ounce equaling 30 milliliters. It turns out that the 30 milliliter ounce is an extremely convenient part size for making cocktails.
So when I am making individual drinks, I usually speak in ounces. When Im making large batches, I use a calculator or spreadsheet to convert my ounce-based recipes to any size I need, and I calculate in milliliters at 30 milliliters to the ounce.
In this book, 1 ounce of liquid equals 30 milliliters. My jiggers are sized this way as well. If you have a jigger set that uses a different-sized ounce, your measurements will be consistently slightly different from minenot usually a problem. Heres my decoder ring: Volume is fluid ounces, milliliters ml , and liters l ; but in this book, a fluid ounce is 30 milliliters.
The persnickety will note that, unlike the ounce, the gram isnt a unit of weight; it is a unit of mass. Weight is a measure of force. Force, not mass, is actually what a scale weighs. The unit of mass in imperial units is the awesomely evocative, seldom-. Pressure is in psi pounds per square inch and bars atmospheric pressure is roughly Fahrenheits proper place is in weather forecasts, baking, and frying. Energy and heat are in calories. Sorry, science world, but calories make intuitive sense when you are heating and cooling water a lot of the time.
The standard unit, the joule, does not. One calorie equals 4. The jigger set I like to use consists of two vessels, each a double cone. They follow the convention of the 30 milliliter ounce. The smaller jigger has a -ounce cone with a -ounce internal line and a -ounce cone with a -ounce internal line. These two jiggers are all you need for most measurements.
If you are measuring to an internal line in the jigger, pour all the way to the line. If you are measuring to the top of the jigger, pour all the way to the top. People tend to underpour when they are measuring a full jigger.
Tip: have your jigger over your mixing vessel as you pour to prevent yourself from spilling precious, precious booze. Three jiggers and a graduated cylinder. Surprisingly, all three jiggers have the same volume. Because it is narrower, the tall one in back is much more accurate.
The jigger in front is more accurate than the one on the left because its sides are straight near the top. The graduated cylinder is a paragon of accuracy.
Given a choice between tall, skinny jiggers and short, squat jiggers, I always choose the tall. They are far more accurate. A pour thats a millimeter higher or lower. The same principle applies to the next piece of equipment I recommend you acquire: a graduated cylinder. Even with a tall, accurate jigger you must pour consistently to the top.
The jigger on the left is holding 2 ounces 60 ml. They range from tiny milliliter about ounce guys to 4-liter behemoths. Graduates are very accurate. Measuring cups and beakers are sloppy by comparison. I use them for recipe development and for batching large quantities of cocktails accurately.
The ones I use most are 50 ml, a little under 2 ounces, which is a good jigger replacement for fine-tuning a highly technical recipe or adding very concentrated flavors to large batches; ml, a little more than 8 ounces, which is perfect for mixing up to four cocktails at a time or measuring the smallervolume ingredients in larger batches; and 1 liter, a little more than 1 quart, for when Im batching by the bottle.
Clear unbreakable plastic versions are available at modest prices; glass ones cost more. Most people wont need one, but I really love my micropipette. Micropipettes allow you to measure a small volume of liquid very quickly and very accurately. Mine is adjustable to measure any liquid amount between 1 ml and 5 ml and is accurate to. Using one takes only seconds, and unlike digital scales, micropipettes require no batteries. We use one every day at Booker and Dax for juice clarification.
I also. I use a micropipette to help figure out the proper recipe by adding small, well-defined quantities bit by bit. The most traditional mixing cup, a standard pint glass, has many advantages: it is cheap and fairly rugged, you can see through it, and it can be used for shaking. Many professional bartenders use pint glasses because they already have them on hand for serving beer.
The main arguments against the pint glass are threefold: 1 they are made of glass more on that in a minute ; 2 they arent supersexy; and 3 they have a rather narrow base, so theyre easy to tip during a vigorous stirring bout. Many fancy alternatives can combat the last two issues. The two most popular are the cut-glass crystal Japanese mixing cup, shaped like a beaker, and large, stemmed mixing glasses, which look a bit like squat, overgrown wineglasses.
Many of my bartenders at Booker and Dax use the cut-crystal mixing glasses. They look great and have stable wide bases and useful pour spouts. They are also quite expensive, and only one careless drop away from the garbage bin. A third option is a beaker from a scientific supply house, which makes a good, if goofy, mixing cup with a wide base and helpful, fairly accurate volume measurements on the side. These measurements are especially handy for the occasional home.
Fancy mixing cups are an investment. If you are making drinks in front of guests, nice gear enhances their experience and gives a better overall impression of you as a bartender, and can therefore increase the guests enjoyment of the drink.
If you dont plan to mix in front of your guests, dont bother spending the extra cash. My preferred mixing vessel is affordable and unbreakable: an ounce metal shaker commonly referred to as a tin, even though they are almost all made of stainless steel. I favor metal because it has a much lower specific heat than glass. It takes less energy to cool or heat a gram of stainless steel than a gram of glass.
Most glass mixing cups are thicker, and weigh much more than the average ounce metal tin, so you can see that glass mixing cups represent a significant thermal massone that will affect the temperature and dilution of your drink.
If you were to stir two drinks, one in a chilled glass mixing cup and one in a room-temperature glass mixing cup, there would be a noticeable difference between the two. To make sure that your drinks are consistent and consistency should be one of your main bar goals , you must either always use chilled mixing glasses, or never use prechilled mixing glasses, or be some kind of savant who can autocorrect between the two. Metal tins require so little energy to cool down or heat up that they have very little effect on your cocktail.
For stirring drinks I prefer the metal tin. The lovely glass vessels have a large thermal mass, which can throw off your chilling unless you consistently prechill them. This Parisian shaker is pretty cool looking, but is not as versatile or inexpensive as a standard set of metal shaking tins. You build your drink in the small, top section, add ice to it, and then tap the larger cup on top. As you shake, the cup will chill, contract, and seal around the top.
The cobbler shaker is good for people with small hands and people who like fancy-looking shakers. They are not very versatile and I dislike the integrated strainer.
To break a set of tins, smack the larger tin right where the seam between the two tins starts to turn into a gap. The primary shaker criterion: it must withstand violent agitation without spilling liquids all over you and your guests. The two main styles of cocktail shaker are the three-piece and the two-piece. A third style, the Parisian shaker, looks really cool but is rather rare. Three-piece shakers, or cobbler shakers, consist of a mixing cup, a top with an integral strainer, and a tiny cup-shaped cap sealer.
You build the drink in the cup, add ice, put the sealed top onto the cup, shake, and then remove the top and strain into your glass through the integral strainer. These shakers come in a wide range of sizes, from single-drink shakers to large, multiliter party shakers.
We dont use three-piece shakers at Booker and Dax, and I dont know many professional American bartenders who favor them. They dont strain as quickly as a two-piece setup, dont offer control over straining more on that later , are prone to jamming after shaking, and are infuriatingly incompatible from set to set.
You havent had fun shaking drinks until youve had to shake a partys worth of cocktails with a random batch of nonstandard 3-piece shakers. Poorly made three-piece shakersand most of them arealso tend to leak. On the upside, cobbler shakers, especially the small ones, are easier for bartenders with small hands to manipulate with skill and aplomb.
Some bartenders who follow particular Japanese schools of bar artistry believe that the shape of the. Nearly all professional three-piece shakers are made of metal, but there are exceptions.
A bartender at one of the most renowned bars in Tokyo served me a cocktail from a neon-pink plastic cobbler shaker. The reason, a student of the Japanese school told me, is that the plastic, being soft, creates fewer and different ice crystals than a metal shaker would.
I have yet to test this hypothesis, but Im skeptical. Two-piece shakers, or Boston shakers, are the most popular choice for professional bartenders in the United States. I use them at home and at work. They consist of two cups, one of which fits inside the other to form a seal. It is difficult to believe that a good seal will form the first time you use a Boston shakeryou fully expect to spray cocktail all over the roombut believe me, two-piece shakers seal reliably day in and night out. Ill save the physics for later.
Metal-on-glass uses a large ounce metal tin and a standard U. You mix your cocktail in the glass part, then put the metal tin over the glass and shake. I dont like the metal-onglass setup because the pint glass might break, all that glass has a large thermal mass, and its hard to shake a metal-on-glass setup one-handed unless you have orangutan hands. Some people like the mixing glass because it lets them see how much liquid they have added to the cocktail.
I dont care about this, because I measure my cocktails. I prefer metal-on-metal shakers, specifically the two-piece type known as a set of tinsa ounce tin and an ounce tin. The ounce tin is often called a cheater tin by the pros because in a pinch it can be used as a strainer. These suckers are indestructible, have a low thermal mass, are fairly easy to handle, and look and sound good while shaking.
A set of tins has a large internal volume, so while making one drink at a time is the norm, making two drinks, even three, in one shaker is no sweat. You build the drink in the smaller tin, add ice to the rim, place the larger tin over the top, tap to initiate the seal, and shake. After shaking, you break take apart the tins. Good bartenders break their tins with much flair and an audible commanding crack that makes my mouth water as if I were one of Pavlovs dogs.
I myself am still working toward tin-breaking mastery. This is a skill you will never regret acquiring. Until fairly recently, two-piece metal-on-metal tins werent easy to find as matched pairs. You needed to scrounge around kitchen and bar supply shops to find two tins that worked well together.
Now it is easy to find tins that go together, seal well, and are stiff enough to give a nice break. Poor-quality tins with noodlelike flexibility are notoriously difficult to break; they just slide back and forth against each other. Julep Strainer The julep strainer is an oval with rather large holes intended for straining stirred drinks. The large holes allow fast straining, and because the whole strainer fits inside the mixing cup, the pouring lip of the mixing cup is unobstructed.
Hawthorn Strainer The hawthorn strainer has a spring around its edge that lets it fit into a metal shaking tin and into many mixing glasses. In general, that spring makes the hawthorn better at straining out unwanted bits, such as chunks of mint and small ice pieces, than a julep strainer. Almost all hawthorn strainer springs, however, are too large to capture everything that the caring bartender worries about, so many bartenders use the hawthorn in tandem with a fine tea strainer.
I use a Cocktail Kingdom hawthorn with a very fine spring that obviates that problem. Some hawthorn strainers are made so that the flow of cocktail can be broken into two streams, enabling the bartender to pour two drinks at once, like a barista pouring two espresso shots into different demitasse cups.
Hawthorn strainers are more difficult to use than julep strainers because they sit on the outside of the cup and are prone to drips and spills, but in skilled hands they provide much more control than a julep strainer. The bartender uses his or her index finger to slide the strainer up and down, changing the width of the pouring gap between the hawthorn strainer and the cup. This action is called adjusting the gate. Pouring with a closed gate holds back ice crystals. Pouring with an open gate allows more ice crystals to float on top of your drink.
I have been a party to many heated arguments. For many years crystals were a strict no-no, a sign of poor craftsmanship. Today the tide has turned, and many people, including me, proudly proclaim their love of a beautiful, shimmering layer of crunchy crystals. The argument against the crystals is that they melt quickly to form unwanted excess dilution at the top of the drink.
I say, Drink faster! Shaken drinks deteriorate immediately after they are shaken. Like cherry blossoms, they are dead before you know it. They should be made in small portions and consumed quickly. This new hawthorn strainer has a very tightly wound spring for capturing small ice crystals that would make it through a standard hawthorn. Why have springs at all instead of mesh? Because the spring conforms to the shape of your mixing tin.
With practice you can use a hawthorn to pour into two glasses simultaneously. More of a gimmick for slow nights than a useful skillbut fun. Tea Strainer The third strainer youll need at the bar is a tea strainer, or any small fine-meshed strainer, to filter large particulates out of your drink. In the anti-ice-crystal days the bartender would use the tea strainer to insure that no ice particles entered the drink.
At Booker and Dax, we use tea strainers to keep big herb particles out of our nitro-muddled drinks see the section on nitro-muddling, here. Before I knew better, I thought they were dumb and unnecessary. I know now that these spoons make elegant stirring possible, and they make stirring results more repeatable. Nothing looks clumsier than a hamfisted stir. Believe meIm not very good at stirring and am often stirring next to masters.
Great stirring technique appears effortless, and it is efficient and, above all, repeatable. Proper stirring requires precise repeatability. Really great stir fiends can accurately stir two drinks at a time.
Some ninjas can do four. This sort of high stirring artistry cannot be performed with a run-of-the-mill teaspoon. You need a well-designed, well-balanced bar spoon with a shaft that suits your style. In addition to stirring, you can use your bar spoon to measure.
The bar spoons I use are 4 ml a little more than ounce. Measure yours. Another tip: use your bar spoon to fish the cherry or olive garnish out of that irritating jar. Dont use your fingers! Your hand never swirls around. Focus on always pushing the spoon against the inside wall of the glassif the back of the spoon is in contact with the glass, the spoon will turn when you push. They are cheap and awesome. I dont care how good a bartender you are, you will spill stuff.
When you spill onto a countertop, you look like a slob and your counter becomes slippery. When you spill into a bar mat, it looks like nothing has happened at all. The bar mat stays nonslip, no matter what.
At the end of a night or after a particularly bad spill , carefully pick up the mat, dump it into a sink, and rinse it off. Good as new. Bar mats also make primo drying mats for cups and dishware. Buy a bar mat. Most of them are of limited use, but some are cool enough to search out.
Muddlers: Get a good muddler to smash ingredients in the bottom of a mixing cup. Most muddlers are crapthey dont have a big enough crushing area, so they just push ingredients around. This large, solid cylinder lives up to its name. My second favorite muddler is a simple, straight-sided rolling pin. If you are going to muddle with liquid nitrogen, avoid cheap plastic or rubberized muddlers; the liquid nitrogen makes them brittle and shatter-. By connecting our AI with a liquid physics simulation, we were able to create a world of rich fidelity in Vessel that formed the foundation of all the puzzles and gameplay.
This talk will first look at how we created an engine where all of the game's AI characters were composed of simulated liquid. We will then follow through to how that influenced design, resulting in gameplay that was a natural consequence of interacting physical rules and AI behaviors.
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