Anthony Bourdain crossed all boundaries. His métier was food, but he was accomplished and informed in so many other things: politics and history, culture and travel, music and film. Seven years to the day after he passed, his admirers remain young and old, hip and square, adventurous and mild-mannered, armchair travellers and global explorers alike. He remains one of the few public figures to be remembered for inspiring others simply by being himself.
June 8, 2018. It’s not an anniversary anyone here will recall with fondness but there it is. It is what it is. One of the saving graces of the day though, and it’s a big one, is that it affords us an opportunity to pause and reflect, to consider Anthony Bourdain’s effect not just on the culture of the times but on what he meant to so many people, globally, across the world, in countless countries and countless communities, each with its own identifying cultures, customs, languages — and food.
Food, here, is the key. Food is what sustains each and every person on the planet, and Bourdain understood that. He often said the solution to any conflict is to sit down and break bread together, and see the world from the other’s perspective. He gave so much of himself to the world that, in the end, perhaps he gave too much.
I’m no foodie. I didn’t come to Parts Unknown as any kind of expert on fine cuisine, or street food for that matter. As TV viewing goes, I had the Food Network rated somewhere below Discovery Investigation and Animal Planet. And below CNN, for that matter. For it was on CNN that I first stumbled over Bourdain. I had done much travelling in Africa at the time, and had a low opinion of travel shows.
When I saw that CNN was pitching this new travel show, and I saw that this Anthony Bourdain character was going to take on the Congo — DRC, to those conversant with global news headlines — I thought I’d give it a try. The year was 2013. June 9, 2013, to be exact. I didn’t quite know what I’d find, but I did think that watching some Rick Steeves wannabe take on the Congo River, the setting for Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness, the seminal morality play about the effects of colonialism on deepest, darkest Africa in the late 19th century, would be good for a few laughs.
Travel shows are bland and unimaginative and, let’s face it, boring as hell, and Rick Steeves has the formula down cold. That’s why he is the walking, talking equivalent of a guide book — Lonely Planet, for the older crowd. The biggest aim of any travel show is to avoid offending the advertisers. Travel shows have little, if anything, to do with actual travel. They’re there to make money for travel agencies and package tour operators, and for the TV networks that get by on selling ads.
“Well,” one imagines Tony Bourdain saying at the time. “Fuck that.”
I could not have been more wrong, as it turned out. Bourdain’s Congo episode was tight, sharp, evocative, frightening, revealing, gorgeously filmed — self-aware without being self-conscious — and beautifully written. That, I was to learn, was Bourdain’s trademark signature. He was a writer. And a traveller in the truest sense of the word. He didn’t do a food show, or a travel show. His raison d’être was to draw a map of the human heart. And if it didn’t kill him exactly, it certainly played a part.
Congo was my introduction not just to Bourdain but to Zach Zamboni, Morgan Fallon, Erik Osterholm, and Tom Vitale, who drove himself the edge of a nervous breakdown in following Bourdain through thick and thin — literally — for the better part of two decades. Vitale’s arresting, stirring book In the Weeds: Around the World and Behind the Scenes with Anthony Bourdain features an entire chapter on the making of the Congo episode.
For me, the click moment — the moment that made me a Bourdainophile for life — was the sudden realization that Bourdain got it. As a working journalist, or at least ex-journo, I know Africa about as well as I think any outsider this side of Bob Geldof can get to know, for me, the world’s most fascinating, mercurial continent — not Africa as one country but Africa as a continent with 54 countries, each one with its own culture, customs and cuisine.
First with his Congo outing for Parts Unknown and then going back in time to 2012 and re-watching his outing to Mozambique for in No Reservations for the Travel Channel — Mozambique not being an easy country to get a handle on, particularly for a mass audience — I was struck by the authenticity, Bourdain’s ability to feel rather than simply observe, and his uncanny ability to share that feeling with an audience watching from halfway round the world.
I was struck by his grasp of history and eye for emotional detail and, critically, his empathy for people other than himself and his own inner circle. Truth is, he was harder on himself than he ever was with the people he met along the way.
Had Bourdain lived on in perpetuity — unreasonable, as well as impossible — it’s not hard to imagine him “doing” all 54 countries in Africa, and each outing would have been as unique and different from the other as Antarctica was from Sri Lanka. (It’s also not hard to imagine Tom Vitale going full-on Jack Nicholson in The Shining by the time it was over, but that’s a thought for another day. Read about it in In the Weeds.)
There are likely to be many eulogies and comments on this anniversary about what Bourdain meant to the world. If I could suggest just one essay to read, for your own pleasure and edification, right now I would single out Patrick Radden O’Keefe’s essay for The New Yorker, “Anthony Bourdain’s Moveable Feast,” written in February 2017, little more than a year before Bourdain’s passing. (It’s 52 pages long, so don’t expect to read it on your smartphone while waiting in line at a Starbucks, no matter how the line is.)
“In a fit of self-exile,” Radden wrote in what now seems eerie prophecy foretold, “Bourdain flew to France and made his way, alone, to the oyster village that he had visited as a child. He had rented a big villa, with the intention of doing some writing. Bourdain cherishes the trope of the misanthropic émigré. ‘To me, The Quiet American was a happy book, because Fowler ends up in Vietnam, smoking opium with a beautiful Vietnamese girl who may not have loved him.’ …
“But in France he found that he couldn’t write. His body was itchy and swollen from the rash, and he had a throbbing pain in his head. Because he looked hideous, he left the villa only after dark, like a vampire. Finally, Bourdain sought out a French doctor, who gave him a battery of painkillers and anti-inflammatories. After impulsively swallowing a week’s supply, Bourdain realized that he had not eaten in thirty-six hours.
“He drove to a café in a nearby town, Arcachon, and ordered spaghetti and a bottle of Chianti. He was halfway through the wine when he realized that he was sweating through his clothes. Then he blacked out …
“When he woke up, Bourdain was lying with his feet in the café and his head in the street. A waiter was rifling through his pockets, in search of a driver’s license, as if to identify a corpse.
“Bourdain’s father had died suddenly, at fifty-seven, from a stroke, and Bourdain often thinks about dying; more than once, he told me that, if he got “a bad chest X-ray,” he would happily renew his acquaintance with heroin. Taking meds and booze on an empty stomach was just a foolish mistake, but it left him shaken. He stood up, reassured the startled onlookers, drove back to the villa, and immediately wrote a long e-mail to Nancy Putkoski [Bourdain’s ex-wife at the time].
“When I asked him what he wrote, Bourdain paused and said, ‘The sort of thing you write if you, you know, thought you were going to die. ‘I’m fucking sorry. I’m sure I’ve acted like I wasn’t.’ We’ve had very little contact—you know, civil, but very, very little. ‘I’m sorry. I know that doesn’t help. It won’t fix it, there’s no making amends. But it’s not like I don’t remember. It’s not like I don’t know what I’ve done.’’”
And there it is.
Anthony Bourdain, June 25, 1956, to June 8, 2018.
RIP.
Supplementary reading:
https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2017/02/13/anthony-bourdains-moveable-feast
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