“TRavel is not always beautiful.” Anthony Bourdain once said that one episode of his show ends with a distinctive staccato narration. “It’s not always comfortable. Sometimes it hurts. It breaks your heart. But it’s okay. Travel changes you.” I took them to places they were unlikely to meet and introduced them to people they were unlikely to meet. At his best, he removed the filters that superpowers impose on the world (good and bad, winners and victims) and found the essential humanity we all share. In an age where social media raises bombastic voices about their legitimacy, Bourdain offered a vaguely reassuring ambiguity. I looked and suggested that it is possible to make it better.
Americans tend to reserve a place in their culture for certain types of men (mostly men) who carve their own way. Bourdain, while familiar, is an unlikely addition to that category. A former heroin and crack addict and a celebrity chef who didn’t get much attention as a cook, he burst into the public imagination in 2000 as a writer. kitchen secret story, a 20-year-old gonzo journalism trip working in the kitchen. He excelled as a celebrity, readying provocative sarcasm and projecting the bewildered demeanor he winked at audiences when he was a guest of gossip journalists and host of a caffeinated talk show. We all know these people are full of shitYet he continues to produce serious, exploratory television shows, taking viewers everywhere from West Virginia to the Democratic Republic of the Congo, with unique voices and expressions that break through the constant noise of our culture. I found the shape of
Americans also have a morbid fascination with celebrities who have died by suicide. Perhaps such a death speaks to a poignant sense that there is a spiritual void at the epicenter of the capitalist American dream. Since Bourdain died in a hotel room in Alsace, France in 2018, there has been something of a tug-of-war over how to remember him. Are you focused on the work? Or are you obsessed with the mystery of why the same person who showed us all of them finally said no to his life? How do we reconcile the endless journey that took us with the sad destination it led us to?
The tragic irony of Bourdain’s life and death is that it’s the same inner darkness he succumbed to enabling the alchemy he played on television over and over again. I was originally obsessed with Bourdain’s show during my later years of insomnia working in the White House for President Obama. So much was destroyed that was important to the community. This was someone who offered no false optimism or ignorant distraction. It seemed imperfectly looking for the same simple things: , authenticity, and honesty. It didn’t make me feel alone.
Men Down and Out in Paradise: The life of Anthony Bourdain, Charles Leerhsen chooses to see Bourdain primarily through the lens of his suicide. Throughout the book, various aspects of Bourdain’s life and personality are cast as foreshadowing his demise. A controlling mother and a life-failed father. An addictive personality and its self-destructive darkness. Longing to be loved and displeasure for those who loved him. The story progresses towards a seemingly inevitable ending punctuated by text messages exchanged by Bourdain and Asia Argento. “I can’t believe you have so little love and respect for me,” he wrote.
By concluding with a text, Leerhsen succumbs to obscenity and undermines a stylized, exhaustively researched celebrity biography. former editor of sports illustratedLeerhsen has the ability of a magazine writer to put us into the lives of famous people. Perfect! This is how Tony wanted to lose his heroin virginity in 1981. He also makes an interesting choice to focus on Bourdain’s early years before we knew him. In contrast to other recent Bourdain books and documentaries, which rely heavily on his late and proud production company and celebrity collaborators, which he derogatory calls “Bourdain Inc.”
Whether you’re a fan of Bourdain or relatively unfamiliar with his story, you can better understand what made this guy. Sometimes I think I’m a little overzealous about shrinking to life-size, which is easier to do. For example, learning that he didn’t invite some of his high school friends over to his house, completely replicating his one of his bad college poems. For the latter, the judgment of a poet whom Leerhsen consulted is given.
In fact, it may be an apt summary of Bourdain’s own stubborn determination, if unintentional, to transform himself into an extraordinary man. He lacks confidence and can act jerky. But he is also an avid lover of food, music, movies and writing, a reckless and charismatic man like Hunter S. Thompson, the archetype of his 20th-century American man whom he admires. I’ve been searching for decades for a way to match. Or Marlon Brando. Like his hero, he strove to overcome the hardships his Leerhsen details and found success in his own way in the hygienic, profit-hungry landscape of American culture. After a half-baked career as a chef and one-off success as a memoirist, Bourdain surprisingly expanded his outlet as a host of his unlikely 21st-century medium, travel television. I found.
Leerhsen understands how Bourdain’s vices and neuroticism helped him bond with his audience. “For viewers, it was comforting to realize that the coolest-looking man in the world really wasn’t getting his life licked,” he wrote. But Leerhsen hasn’t been very successful in taking the next step. TV is this kind of guy who never really traveled much until he hosted the series tells how or why. Bourdain brought the eyes and hearts of aficionados wherever he went, showing a deep empathy for those who, like him, found it difficult to reconcile the likes and dislikes of the world.
Leerhsen tells us how Bourdain asked the market-obsessed TV exec to let him basically do whatever he wanted with the camera. “It turned out to be a winning formula,” he writes. He misses the point significantly. Indeed, in his early days on television, a large part of the appeal was watching this tall, rowdy American swear, eat a still-beating cobra heart, and drink too much. did.But as his show goes on, Bourdain definitely Did it Give a shit. He had a knack for going places along geopolitical fault lines. Years before Xi Jinping came to power, he exposed us to China’s newfound overconsumption, and to Libya, which was poised between the downfall of Muammar Gaddafi and his descent into a second civil war. Took us and invited us to dinner with Russian dissident Boris Nemtsov. The year before he was assassinated, the nations of the global South found their identities despite the inequalities and unexplained governments that continue to be the legacy of European colonialism and American adventurism. I have shown that I am struggling with
In doing so, Bourdain often seemed to struggle with what it meant to be American. We are eating together. Bourdain is asked if he is afraid to see the consequences of what his government has done. “Fear? No,” he replies. “All Americans should see the results of war … I think the least I can do is see the world with my eyes open.” At that moment, as with many other Bourdain shows, This personal story is given the same importance as the stories of people usually on television, such as politicians and celebrity chefs. No. On camera, he was curious and willing to listen. And I got to see in real time how the journey changed him.
That’s what makes Bourdain interesting and enduring. What’s missing from this new biography is the possibility that Leehrsen’s dark backstory contributed not only to Bourdain’s suicide, but to his as well. abnormal empathy: I knew the depths of my heroin and crack addiction and I couldn’t dislocate or feel comfortable. look People fighting a force too big to control.
Ultimately, it’s also the most disturbing thing about his suicide: Leehrsen pays attention to devastating detail. And most shocking to me was the fact that Bourdain had a “makeshift” Google alert for his name and how he spent the last few hours of his life searching his Google. It is a fact that Asia Argento Hundreds of times, maybe staring at the same paparazzi pictures over and over again. How sad that Bourdain, who promised an escape from the run-of-the-mill social media addiction of our time, spent his final days staring at a screen and triggering himself. After his life of exploration, his final journey was down an online rabbit hole about his own failed romance.
Storyteller Anthony Bourdain would have understood that his own life was bigger and more complex than how it ended, thanks to the empathy he showed with the subject. Like the typical American man who tried to rate, he was able to find voices that defied convention and find salvation in the stories he told. was able to outrun the weight of his past and celebrity… until he couldn’t. As with travel, it’s up to us to decide what to take away from it.