One of the few people that has a voice (written and otherwise) so distinctive that even reading those lists, I read them in his voice. I miss that guy.
For those who haven't read it yet, the book "In the Weeds" does a pretty good job of showing the hidden side of Bourdain (if there was such a thing). He was as imperfect as you might imagine. I personally enjoyed learning how cruel he could be as I always had a tremendous amount of respect for him and it made him more human to me.
They even cover an incident where the crew played a practical joke on him with a clown (his fear is mentioned in a li.st).
Down and Out in Paradise by Charles Leersen about Bourdain was also very interesting, highlighted how predatory his ex Asia Argento was with him (financial abuse- he constantly wired her money and paid her 400k sexual assault settlement for her statutory raping a 17-year old, cheating on him with multiple people including Hugo Clement, constant drama, supplying him with drugs, emotional neglect when he was struggling with depression).
He dumped his wife and abandoned his child to be with this woman 18 years younger than him, and he used drugs his entire adult life, long before he met her. No, I would not describe her as a predator.
What's the source on the claim that he used drugs his entire adult life? I thought he had been sober from heroin for decades and only drank alcohol. Additionally, I'm not sure doing drugs alone qualifies one as a bad person.
In the book I read about it, people interviewed claimed she would use in front of him and supply him, intentionally sabotaging his sobriety because it kept him more easily manipulated.
From what I understand he wasn’t actively doing hard drugs, but had earlier in his life. Maybe that’s not correct. I’m not sure. But if he was addicted and she or anyone else was further encouraging or indulging his addiction, well, that’s abusive by any definition I hold.
I’m not sure about his personal relationships, and don’t care much besides leaving an internet comment, but why are you so quick to dismiss that he may have experienced being manipulated or taken advantage of?
She was clearly enabling him and playing him, that’s predatory. A similar thing happened between Kurt Cobain and Courtney Love. The friendship between Heath Ledger and Mary-Kate Olsen was very suspicious too.
Bourdain had a way of writing that made even throwaway lines feel meaningful, but so much of that era of content is basically disappearing. It’s nice to see someone do the unglamorous work of gathering the fragments before they fade completely.
It's funny because his, and Chuck Palahniuk's (fight club, etc) way of seeing the world- that brand of anti corporate- pro human- enjoy the waste- cynicism seemed so permanent and authentic- and like nothing could take it away from you- it felt like a staple of the human experience that was a place you could go to in your mind.
It's amazing to see how quickly that all got shovelled away and replaced with productised, streamlined, sterile groupthink- and one in which authentic sexuality and sex jokes are shunned. I think in some part he knew which way this world was heading and made a decision based off of that.
As a young person who stakes a lot of my headspace in the former, it's definitely an interesting, ridiculously two faced and contradictory cultural moment we're in right now.
I’m a dyed in the wool GenX-er and I think the comment you’re responding to has insight.
For those of us that grew up in the punk-rock anti-corporate adbusters rage against the machine WTO protest era the current culture around commerce and wealth is a disorienting hellscape.
The boomers and their children, the millennials, were wrong in their belief that fashion choices and good vibe thinking by the affluent set would lead to a better culture.
Should have listened to the Nirvana generation a little more. Turns out the cynicism was justified.
Anti-corporate attitudes were completely normalized in the 2000s and arguably only really lulled during the mid-2010s. There were several films from that period that featured countercultural messaging:
Disney’s Incredibles had allusions to Kafka
Monster’s Inc. is a commentary on corporate vampirism.
Kingdom of Heaven was if not a commentary on the Global War on Terror at least a bold film to have released 4 years after 9/11.
The second Pirates of the Caribbean film was a (childish) commentary on global empire and rationalization eliminating places for the human person to live freely.
The Corporation, Capitalism: A Love Story, and Supersize Me were all released post-9/11. They screened Supersize Me in elementary and high schools when it was released.
Anti-globalization as a movement completely collapsed during the Occupy Wall Street protests. These movements had attitudes towards international mobility rights that completely undermined organized labor. Most of them recognized what impacts illegals were having on these industries but took the position that labor solidarity would somehow make everyone better off. This could have worked in theory except that they had no operational plan to enact this solidarity and the illegals were never interested in it to begin with.
Once the bankers realized that they could just pay off the OWS leadership with fake email jobs, you started to see the conventional partisan divide on globalism that we observe today, with liberals being in favor of it and conservatives opposed to it.
> Anti-globalization as a movement completely collapsed during the Occupy Wall Street protests.
Not quite. Anti-globalization as a movement completely collapsed during the Obama administration and it's more accurate to call those protests the dying gasp.
The blame for taking the momentum away from the anticorporate left has to come most directly from the corporate and neoliberal left.
If you want to pick one thing to zero in on, as an example, pick the complete lack of consequences for the bankers and other architects of the great financial collapse, which was a direct decision by the Obama administration.
It's the direct antecedent of the culture of complete and total elite impunity that has poisoned American politics today.
> Anti-globalization as a movement completely collapsed during the Obama administration and it's more accurate to call those protests the dying gasp.
Occupy occurred in 2011; Obama was in office from 2009 to 2017. If anti-globalization sentiment had completely collapsed at some preceding point during the Obama years, there wouldn’t have been a dying breath.
> The blame for taking the momentum away from the anticorporate left has to come most directly from the corporate and neoliberal left.
Hence “realized that they could just pay off the OWS leadership with fake email jobs.” The neoliberals were openly in favor of globalization. People left of the neoliberals were nominally opposed to it up until they got paid off. This has shifted in recent years; most neoliberals are starting to realize they need to pump the breaks, whereas most left of them are saying things like “No one is illegal.”
I agree that impunity has its origins during the Obama era, but I’m not sure how much you can blame the administration for that. If financial crimes had occurred, they would have been handled by the judiciary, not the executive.
At the risk of stepping into USA POL (which is quite polarised)
MAGA is a Right wing response to corporates - they put all their faith into someone who they thought was going to take to the "elites" who they believed were responsible for the corporates being able to r*pe and pillage through society.
The Left wing response was Occupy Wall street and such.
On a similar note skinheads had a far left branch and a far right branch (the far right is what skinheads are now primarily seen as)
On paper, yes. But just like the tea party, and how "libertarian" has been completely coopted, they're really just tools for the same corporate interests as before.
> No, it's a cynical marketing exercise designed to make people think that.
The grandparent comment is referring to MAGA the demographic, not MAGA the political machine. How could the political machine have sold hats (or immigration policy, or tariffs) if no one in the broader movement wanted to buy them?
Trump did not create the support for border control and immigration enforcement among the American general public. He won because these policies were third rails for anyone involved in establishment politics, whose donors rely on illegal immigrants to undermine organized labor.
Bourdain is much more Hunter S Thompson than Chuck, and while Bourdain used a wry sense of humor his fundamental message was always that humans are pretty much the same everywhere and can connect on more than what separates us.
That fundamentally is not Fight Club style whatever, and I just don't see how you could lump the two together unless you're so reflexively contrarian and anti-establishment you missed Bourdain was actually about something not that even if his rhetoric parallels it at times.
I think there's plenty of commonality. Some themes include meditations on what makes us human, personal development via hardship and sacrifice, and rejection of cultural norms and expectations as a path to enlightenment.
The more I think about it, the less I’m convinced that there was ever such thing as a GenX or “Nirvana” generation to begin with. And the more I think about that, I’m starting to question whether every generation after the Boomers is just “Bang”, “Pop” and now, “Ping”.
If you've read Bourdain's books and gone beyond just skimming his TV shows you'll know they share deeply similar writing and irreverent humour- talking about every type of escape and prank- from summers tripping on acid rooting everyone he could find to working for the mafia as a chef to pay off his heroin addiction. And it's reductive to think that just because someone is talking about sex jokes they're interested in 'culture wars'. Is it revolting for him to have essentially predicted his own death in the same way?
I miss him a lot, his passing affected me far more than that of most public figures, but I won't sanitise my memory of him or pretend his humour, or his way of seeing the world was cookie cutter. That, to me, is far more revolting.
Palahniuk and Bourdain both talk about the fringes of 'punk' topics, but they have a totally different voice and objectives for doing so.
To me it sounds something like pairing up Brian Cox and Neil Degrasse Tyson, I mean they both talk about black holes..
For what it's worth, and i've read just about everything from both of those authors, Palahniuk is usually trying to illicit a feeling from the reader, be it disgust, ennui and nostalgia for a different time, or anger towards whatever 'the system' is at the momnent. He uses relatable anecdote to do so. His writing, in that vain, is very similar to Phillip Dick (who wrote 'a Scanner Darkly' from a lot of first-hand experiences)
Bourdain had similar prose mannerisms and favorite topics, but his objective was to instill wanderlust and an interest in the human spirit. Camaraderie, and hope for future opportunities to experience far away lands. A desire to seek more experiences regardless of what lesser prices and inconveniences must be paid in order to do so.
as a guy who grew up as a punk rocker in so-cal Palahniuk strikes me as the friend that couldn't make the show because ,even though he loves the band and the venue , there is homework due tomorrow -- whereas Bourdain always struck me as one of the folks i'd have woken up next to in someone elses' car the morning after the show and gone out to get breakfast with and talk about the night.
There is more difference between those two types of personality than I can write about, even if they gravitate around the same stuff.
Agreed, to me they are very different takes on what is a punk attitude.
Palahniuk: Underneath the veneer of the banal, you will discover everything is rotten and sycophantic but somehow tender and relatable.
Bourdain: Underneath the veneer of the banal, you will discover an honest struggle for something far more respectable than what is typically venerated. Eat their food, dance to their music, and you will enjoy.
Later on Bourdain definitely moved past a lot of the initial style that gave him prominence (his breakout kitchen confidential was definitely of that moment in time like Palahniuk's) in terms of the shows he produced, but in the end, the thread of finding your own pleasurable interpretation of life- be it in the seedy kitchens, or on riverboats with wong-kar wai's filmographer trying to chase the "real hong kong"- that isn't beholden to anyone else, remained the defining trait of his work. His "authentic" style which wasn't a top 5 things to do in x city and more experiential and human didn't come from nowhere in terms of his personal ideology and life experiences/lifestyle.
I think it's the same mindset but in a different context. He was a well read guy with good creative sensitivities, and a fantastic conversationalist- but he's no analogue to your rick steins and rick steeves- just because he shows up on the same row on your streaming app. I think the desire to be free arrived for him long before he started frequently travelling.
And we're on our own for now- that world and those people get further and further away every year. We're seeing less and less people willing to or being allowed to contribute culturally, in the anti system humanist, mentally and socially free but financially trapped service worker, or anti sensationalist experiencer of human culture way.
From my vantage point, Anthony Bourdain is immensely popular with friends of all kinds of political and cultural flavors. I actually can’t think of a single person I know who dislikes Anthony Bourdain. If there’s some kind of cultural headwind against his style, it certainly isn’t manifest in mainstream consumer culture itself.
I'm personally a fan of Tony, but there's no denying that he was quite often an asshole. He was notoriously demanding of his crew, dumped his first wife after he got famous, dumped his second wife and child when he met an Italian actress half his age, nepo'd her to shittily direct some episodes and fired his cameraman when he dared complain, etc etc.
Yeah, I don't think he was a nice person. I also don't particularly like or dislike him, but I think the idea that he's some sort of representative of a lost time in American cultural values is basically incorrect -- he exists in a large and extremely popular "gonzo" pantheon that is basically a direct production of American cultural values.
I quite disliked him. He always came off as a smug asshole, and I think the evidence backs that up.
His core shtick was being a food hipster which often involved putting down others preferences to prove how superior he was. For example saying that a Chicken McNugget was the most disgusting thing he has ever eaten.
He treated his staff like trash on one hand while publicly proclaiming "Mistreat the floor staff and you are dead to me." for cool guy points.
Add to that the incredible narcissism of dumping both his wives for younger women as soon as he could, but then playing the victim when his new younger wife cheats on him.
It was only a staple in your mind. Those views you remember were very much reactions against what already existed, and where things were headed. Things never changed direction, and here we are.
Hands down the funniest thing I ever saw, live and in person, was Anthony Bourdain staring with naked, enraptured joy at the woman doing the American Sign Language translation of what he’d just said, then stopping just after she did to let us all know that “I just had to know what it looks like to sign ‘felching Mrs. Butterworth.’”
Thank you, Tony, wherever you are… if for nothing else, then for the Pho Chay I the Lunch Lady made just for my newly vegetarian self in Saigon.
I went to the 'Obama restaurant' in Hanoi for bun cha (not vegetarian) more so because Anthony Bourdain. Like a good American I smoked a Cuban cigar afterwards in a cigar bar under an image of Che Guevara I passed on the way back to the hotel which was out of the way likely guided by Tony's spirit if such things exist. Nonetheless, the Bun Cha up in the mountains of Sa Pa is better as are Dominican cigars.
I’m a local from Hanoi, always surprised with Bourdain picking that place to eat with pres Obama (I still believe because of presidential food safety standards). I’d not pick that place any day of the week. Having lived in Singapore as well, RIP Anthony, but your picks aren’t that great.
They picked it because it was a spur of the moment decision -- not planned. Their concern according to Boudain was not having the president in line of sight from the outside of the building.
Awesome. I refer to https://bourdain.greg.technology/#food-im-thinking-about about once a year. One of my favorite vacations was going to a different hawker stall on his list each night in Singapore. Unsurprisingly, his picks are all pretty good, and #1 is justified in crowning the list.
Also for general bourdain tourism- eat like bourdain is a really passionate and fleshed out blog that tells you where and what he ate in each city/country.
I use it pretty frequently.
Chicken and rice is anything but bland. I haven't had Hainanese style but the Thai style khao man gai that Nong's serves in Portland is a flavor that I still remember more than a decade later.
chicken and rice has oil and some savoriness but it's not jacked to the tits with spice like an indian curry or any thai food - in that regard, compared to other asian cuisines, yes it is bland. compared to midwest mac & cheese, sure, maybe it's less bland but even then I bet a midwesterner could pleasantly eat the dish where they would be on the struggle bus eating indian food
The chicken is indeed bland, although the non-canonical roasted version is more flavorful than the traditional poached one. The rice, which is cooked in chicken stock and spices, is anything but, but it's the fresh chili sauce that really makes it zing, in the same way that wasabi makes "bland" sushi work.
Tian Tian is overrated and not worth the lines though. Every Singaporean has their favorite but I like Loy Kee, partly thanks to their amazing slogan, "Chicken Lickin' Good".
There used to be a mirror of the Wayback Machine [0][1] hosted at the new Library of Alexandria in Egypt [2]. Sometimes you could pull pages from them that otherwise errored out on the main archive.org site. Sadly, it seems the mirror has been offline [3] for some years now.
I was lucky enough to meet him in 2013. A truly good guy and a massive loss. No Reservations and Parts Unknown are still some of my favorite shows to binge.
In the SCARY SHIT!!! Things I find genuinely terrifying section:
> Switzerland: I think I must have experienced some awful childhood trauma in view of a mural of snow capped peaks and Lake Geneva. I live with a persistent dread of alpine vistas, chalet architecture, Tyrolean hats, even cheese with holes in it. You will notice I have never been there. That’s because Switzerland frightens me.
Huh. He was just over the border from there when he was finished.
I never heard of Anthony Bourdain until years after he died. I guess I wasn't the right age, I was having a family and at work all day whenever his shows took off. He seems like a genuinely interesting person, but there are so many other interesting thoughtful people that don't have relatable cooking shows and I think Anthony Bourdain, as great as he is, gets quite a bit more attention than he probably warrants. Don't take that the wrong way, he's genuinely thoughtful and interesting, but he gets a LOT of attention OVER AND OVER.
I'll throw out Tim Kreider (author of We Learn Nothing, among other books) as someone else you might find worthwhile to checkout.
As someone who was mildly familiar with Bourdain ("some sort of American TV cook", some badly-dubbed shows in our private TV channels which didn't really catch on, because 'cooking show') until he decided to end it ...
... it is fascinating to me that one person, especially in a very niche profession, has had that kind of cultural impact that his random writing is being discussed seven years after his death.
He is famous for his writing, and not for being a chef.
His 2000 book, "Kitchen Confidential," was a New York Times best seller, and it's what put him on the map. It's still one of my favorite books, and I cannot recommend it highly enough. The chapter on his bread baker, "Adam Real Last Name Unknown," is one of the funniest things I've ever had the pleasure to read.
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