skandalon

art science technology book photographer photography food meat recipes chef restaurant blumenthal

✖ Via Domic Davies: “Saddle of venison” from the Fat Duck Cookbook

Domic Davies is responsible for the photographies displayed in the famous Big Fat Cookbook:

In this enormous, beautiful book, we hear the full story of the meteoric rise of Heston Blumenthal and The Fat Duck, birthplace of snail porridge and bacon-and-egg ice cream, and encounter the passion, perfection and weird science behind the man and the restaurant.

Heston Blumenthal is widely acknowledged to be a genius, and The Fat Duck has twice been voted the Best Restaurant in the World by a peer group of top chefs. But he is entirely self-taught, and the story of his restaurant has broken every rule in the book. His success has been borne out of his pure obsession, endless invention and a childish curiosity into how things work – whether it’s how smell affects taste, what different flavours mean to us on a biological level, or how temperature is distributed in the centre of a soufflé. (from the editor’s website)

See more excerpt from the book over at Daily Icon. Visit The Fat Duck official website (before being a book, it’s a three-Michelin-starred restaurant in the UK). Learn more about chef Heston Blumenthal on Wikipedia. If you can’t afford the full version of this book (it sells at around 150$ dollars on Amazon) don’t worry : there’s a lowered-price edition of it, selling at around 30$:

The cookbook hailed by the Los Angeles Times as a “showstopper” and by Jeffrey Steingarten of Vogue as “the most glorious spectacle of the season…like no other book I have seen in the past twenty years” is now available in a reduced-price edition. With a reduced trim size but an identical interior, this lavishly illustrated, stunningly designed, and gorgeously photographed masterpiece takes you inside the head of maverick restaurateur Heston Blumenthal. Separated into three sections (History; Recipes; Science), the book chronicles Blumenthal’s improbable rise to fame and, for the first time, offers a mouth-watering and eye-popping selection of recipes from his award-winning restaurant. He also explains the science behind his culinary masterpieces, the technology and implements that make his alchemical dishes come to life. Designed by acclaimed artist Dave McKean—and filled with photographs by Dominic Davies—this artfully rendered celebration of one of the world’s most innovative and renowned chefs is a foodie’s dream. (Amazon)

In any case, be sure to take a look at the Big Fat Undertaking blog: someone actually attempting to do more with this book than looking at the picture.

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Our purpose is to find out whether innocence, the moment it becomes involved in action, can avoid committing murder. We can only act in terms of our own time, among the people who surround us. We shall know nothing until we know whether we have the right to kill our fellow men, or the right to let them be killed. In that every action today leads to murder, direct or indirect, we cannot act until we know whether or why we have the right to kill.

✖ Via The Rebel. An Essay on Man in Revolt by Albert Camus, tr. by Anthony Bower, “Introduction” (L’Homme révolté, Gallimard, Paris, 1951, p. 14).

An electronic version of this English translation can be found over at Radical eBook Archive (along with many others).

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Cover

p. 36

p. 37

✖ Via Curious George Takes A Job by Margaret & H. A. Rey, 1947, cover, p. 36 and p. 37

As George is recovering in the hospital, The Man with the Yellow Hat see a newspaper story on it, and alerts the hospital that he would come get him. As George is waiting to be discharged, he finds a bottle of ether, opens it, and the fumes make him high, then dizzy, then knocked him out cold. When The Man and the nurse find him, they had to throw him in the shower to wake him up. (wikipedia)

Scans of the book were found at thisMySpace page. I first became aware of this strip via Etherealisation.

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✖ Via Modernist Cuisine. The Art And Science of Cooking by Dr. Nathan Myhrvold, Chris Young and Maxime Bilet, The Cooking Lab, 2010, 2400 pages (6 volumes) [click for hi-res]

In Modernist Cuisine: The Art and Science of Cooking, Nathan Myhrvold, Chris Young, and Maxime Bilet—scientists, inventors, and accomplished cooks in their own right—have created a six-volume 2,400-page set that reveals science-inspired techniques for preparing food that ranges from the otherworldly to the sublime. The authors—and their 20-person team at The Cooking Lab—have achieved astounding new flavors and textures by using tools such as water baths, homogenizers, centrifuges, and ingredients such as hydrocolloids, emulsifiers, and enzymes. It is a work destined to reinvent cooking. (About)

Download a 20 pages preview of the book (PDF). Learn more about the authors (Myhrvold was the first chief technology officer at Microsoft : check his wikipedia page). The 6 volumes are all sold together. They can be pre-ordered on Amazon for a meer 500$

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Humans like to believe they control the tools they use, even if Socrates, Marshall McLuhan and Ivan Illich are among those who have argued that often they do not. From the alphabet to clocks and printing, every major new technology has profoundly altered the way in which humans think. The digital gadgets on which we now depend, Mr Carr explains, have already begun rewiring our brains.

✖ Via The Economist: “Fast forward. Fear of a fried future” book review for Nicholas Carr’s essay The Shallows: How the Internet is Changing the Way We Think, Read and Remember, Norton, 2010, 276 pages

An excerpt from this book was published in Wired magazine back in May:

There’s nothing wrong with absorbing information quickly and in bits and pieces. We’ve always skimmed newspapers more than we’ve read them, and we routinely run our eyes over books and magazines to get the gist of a piece of writing and decide whether it warrants more thorough reading. The ability to scan and browse is as important as the ability to read deeply and think attentively. The problem is that skimming is becoming our dominant mode of thought. Once a means to an end, a way to identify information for further study, it’s becoming an end in itself—our preferred method of both learning and analysis. (Wired: “The Web Shatters Focus, Rewires Brains” by Nicholas Carr, May 24th, 2010)

About Nicholas Carr:

Nicholas Carr writes on the social, economic, and business implications of technology. He is the author of the 2008 Wall Street Journal bestseller The Big Switch: Rewiring the World, from Edison to Google, which is “widely considered to be the most influential book so far on the cloud computing movement,” according the Christian Science Monitor. His earlier book, Does IT Matter?, published in 2004, “lays out the simple truths of the economics of information technology in a lucid way, with cogent examples and clear analysis,” said the New York Times. He is working on a new book, The Shallows: What the Internet Is Doing to Our Brains, which will be published in 2010. Carr’s books have been translated into more than a dozen languages. (Bio)

Three things: 1) It’s yet another good reason to try and differentiate between information and knowledge (one could say that information is to knowledge what grapes are to wine : its raw material); 2) It would be a mistake to think that gadgets or the Internet are changing our brain configuration. Not because it’s wrong, but because it’s an incomplete statement. What then, should one ask, caused the gadgets to change? What caused the Internet? 3) The form of this post can be understand as an illustration of what the content of the post is about.

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When one individual inflicts bodily injury upon another such injury that death results, we call the deed manslaughter; when the assailant knew in advance that the injury would be fatal, we call his deed murder. But when society [1] places hundreds of proletarians in such a position that they inevitably meet a too early and an unnatural death, one which is quite as much a death by violence as that by the sword or bullet; when it deprives thousands of the necessaries of life, places them under conditions in which they cannot live — forces them, through the strong arm of the law, to remain in such conditions until that death ensues which is the inevitable consequence — knows that these thousands of victims must perish, and yet permits these conditions to remain, its deed is murder just as surely as the deed of the single individual; disguised, malicious murder, murder against which none can defend himself, which does not seem what it is, because no man sees the murderer, because the death of the victim seems a natural one, since the offence is more one of omission than of commission. But murder it remains.

✖ Via Condition of the Working Class in England, by Frederick Engels, ch. VII: “Results”, 1845

First published in Leipzig in 1845. The English edition (authorised by Engels) was published in 1887 in New York and in London in 1891. Source: Panther Edition, 1969, from text provided by the Institute of Marxism-Leninism, Moscow. Transcribed by Tim Delaney in 1998. (more)

A similar (not identical) argument motivates various “murder by proxy” theories regarding mass murders. See for example Going Postal by Mark Ames (2005) and the documentary Murder by Proxy. How America Went Postal.

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✖ Via Techno Tuesday: “Desire”

Techno Tuesday is a comic drawn by Andy Rementer:

Andy Rementer is a creative person based in Philadelphia. He received a bachelors degree from The University of the Arts in 2004. From 2005 to 2007 he worked for Fabrica, while living in Treviso, a small town in northern Italy. He currently divides his time between graphic design, cartooning and illustration. […] Aside from doodling Andy enjoys Italian meals, playing the banjo and drinking coffee. (more)

Check his personal website for more of his work.

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As part of its mission to make the world’s books searchable and discoverable, Google has digitized over five hundred ancient Greek and Latin books. We present them here downloadable as zip files of images and plain text, and as links to Google Books web pages where you can read them online in full or download PDFs. This collection was selected by Prof. Greg Crane and Alison Babeu of Tufts University, and compiled by Will Brockman and Jon Orwant of Google.

✖ Via Google Books

Read more about it over at Inside Google Books: “Google releases 500 scans of Ancient Greek and Latin texts for research” by Will Brockman, Software Engineer, June 25, 2010

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This paradox of the carnival—which in the most general sense is the paradox of emotion, but in the most specific sense is the paradox of sacrifice- ought to be considered with the most critical attention. As children, we have all suspected it:perhaps we are all, moving strangely beneath the sky, victims of a trap, a joke whose secret we will one day know. This reaction is certainly infantile and we turn away from it, living in a world imposed on us as though it were “perfectly natural,” quite different from the one that used to exasperate us. As children, we did not know if we were going to laugh or cry but, as adults, we “possess” this world, we make endless use of it, it is made of intelligible and utilizable objects. It is made of earth, stone, wood, plants, animals. We work the earth, we build houses, we eat bread and wine. We have forgotten, out of habit, our childish apprehensions. In a word, we have ceased to mistrust ourselves. Only a few of us, amid the great fabrications of society, hang on to our really childish reactions, still wonder naively what we are doing on the earth and what sort of joke is being played on us. We want to decipher skies and paintings, go behind these starry backgrounds or these painted canvases and, like kids trying to find a gap in a fence, try to look through the cracks in the world.

✖ Via The Cruel Practice of Art (L’Art, exercice de la cruauté) by Georges Bataille, originally published in Médecine de France, June 1949, reprinted in Georges Bataille Oeuvres Complètes, vol. XI, Paris: Gallimard, 1988. English translation by Supervert.com, 2003. [PDF]

About Supervert.com :

If he were alive today, would the Marquis de Sade have a web site? (120 Days of Sodom, ancestor of the sex blog.) Would Charles Baudelaire employ venture capital for a sinister new internet startup, Fleurs du Mal Inc? Would Arthur Rimbaud use information technology to disorder the senses? Would any of them, were they alive today, find some way to advance literature by means of artificial intelligence?

Supervert is what an author can be when amplified by technology. Creator of books, web sites, and CD-ROMs, Supervert stands at the intersection of literature, technology, and perhaps also abnormal psychology — for in all its endeavors, Supervert utilizes the techniques of vanguard aesthetics to research the pathology of novel perversions. A sort of deviant Bauhaus, Supervert strives to create new experiences through the synthesis of art, technology, pornography, and philosophy. (more)

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We never know anything about anyone. I used to think the same think about your marriage, and look what happened to you and Delia. It’s hard enough keeping track of ourselves. Once it comes to other people, we don’t have a clue.

✖ Via Leviathan by Paul Auster, New York: Penguin Books, 1992, p. 107

It reminds me of a line of dialogue in Alain Resnais’ Hiroshima Mon Amour (1959) (I’ll quote from memory):

On croit savoir, et puis non, jamais.

Previously on Skandalon: Paul Auster’s Leviathan

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