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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZRNEUc5k7Jw
If anyone can find a contact for Devin Flaherty, let me know! Cheers
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).
https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/59366129-down-and-out-in...
His final text to her was "you were reckless with my heart."
https://people.com/food/anthony-bourdain-asia-argento-last-t...
Take care of your loved ones (but also take care of yourself)!
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.
And then diagnosing his suicide as a result of your apparent culture war grievances over sex jokes is just revolting behavior.
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.
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)
No, it's a cynical marketing exercise designed to make people think that.
They're just selling hats. Hats that are costing way, way more than the sticker price, especially for the people who buy them.
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?
Otherwise how would a serial failed businessman get so much traction? It's all marketing.
100,000 mostly normal people traveled to Quebec City to protest the FTAA in April 2001.
By the end of that year that kind of thing was anti-patriotic, and very much a taboo subject, at least in the mainstream culture.
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.
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.
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.
I miss Bourdain.
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.
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.
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.
https://eatlikebourdain.com/
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".
https://order.loykee.com.sg/
rest in peace king.
Also: "Karaoke should only be performed with people who have already seen your genitals." :D
0: https://www.bibalex.org/en/News/Details?DocumentID=1550&Keyw...
1: https://www.bibalex.org/isis/frontend/projects/ProjectDetail...
2: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bibliotheca_Alexandrina
3: http://web.archive.bibalex.org
https://web.archive.org/web/20181204232645/https://li.st/Bou...
Anyone who rates "Dr. Strangelove" as a great movie is OK by me.
> 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.
... 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.
There's this one chapter where he just rolls through a day at work, it's so good. A phenomenal writer, much missed.