I have never been particularly fond of Bourdain, nor have I fully understood the widespread fascination with his jet-setting New York hipster persona.
He played a significant role in popularizing a now-familiar posture among affluent Americans: the earnest declaration that "travel is my passion", followed by carefully curated excursions to economically disadvantaged countries, enthusiastic consumption of the local cuisine, and a subsequent return home marked by self-congratulatory reflections on how much they have supposedly "learned" about other cultures.
The phenomenon is difficult to admire. It resembles a kind of cultural primitivism - an unintentional revival of archaic rituals in which consuming the body of the enemy was believed to confer insight, power, or spiritual essence. In this modern iteration, wealth functions as the enabling mechanism: privileged travelers fly abroad to ingest cuisines, aesthetics, and experiences, mistaking consumption for understanding and appetite for empathy.
One returns, enriched - spiritually, one assumes - having eaten well.
Your snark is misplaced to such an extent that I suspect you have not actually read his books. Bourdain is genuinely obsessed with food, and when Kitchen Confidential entirely unexpectedly became a megahit and shot him from borderline poverty to wealth and fame, he was genuinely delighted to be able to (I quote) "travel around the world, eat a lot of shit, and basically do whatever the fuck I want." His admiration for (most) other cultures is genuine and many of his favorite destinations are also places that can hardly be called economically disadvantaged (Singapore, Japan, France, etc).
> popularizing a now-familiar posture among affluent Americans
So would it be preferable if they stayed at home, didn't share any of their wealth with less developed countries, and marinated in completely ignorant bliss of the world outside the USA instead?
> He played a significant role in popularizing a now-familiar posture among affluent Americans: the earnest declaration that "travel is my passion", followed by carefully curated excursions to economically disadvantaged countries, enthusiastic consumption of the local cuisine, and a subsequent return home marked by self-congratulatory reflections on how much they have supposedly "learned" about other cultures.
I only dislike these people if they blog about it. None of them are nearly as insightful as they think they are, and most of them aren’t self-aware enough to realize that this whole shtick hasn’t been “cool” since 2010.
> mistaking consumption for understanding and appetite for empathy.
This disparaging attitude towards tourists is in vogue among Europeans right now; there’s a group of anarchists in Barcelona that have spent the last year or two scrawling: “TOURISTS GO HOME, REFUGEES WELCOME” on the sides of buildings.
The theory goes that tourists are a net negative to cities because they cause neighborhoods to gentrify and displace those who intend to actually live within the city. The money coming in is a negative because it causes the city to deploy resources intended to cater to tourists, the tourists fundamentally change the character of the neighborhood by their very presence (the cannibalism you are alluding to), the tourists are rude, the tourists look funny, etc.
Disdain for tourists is just a socially-acceptable way for progressives to practice the xenophobia that is now in vogue among reactionaries. They can’t blame all of their problems on foreigners writ large like the reactionaries do, so they “punch up” at the only sort of foreigner that is likely to make a positive contribution to their country.
> economically disadvantaged countries, enthusiastic consumption of the local cuisine, and a subsequent return home marked by self-congratulatory reflections on how much they have supposedly "learned" about other cultures.
There can certainly be a quite shallow "instagram" quality to some traveler's trips, but it's also clear an economically disadvantaged country benefits mutually from this, and if it wasn't they'd be restricting tourist visas, etc
> it's also clear an economically disadvantaged country benefits mutually from this, and if it wasn't they'd be restricting tourist visas, etc
Countries are not a monolithic entity. The people in control of the flow of tourists are a tiny minority, and whatever incentives they have to open or close the borders do not reflect what the people who deal with tourists on a daily basis want.
It depends on the county of course, but in my experience service workers at many “touristy” countries seem to benefit directly from tourism.
For example, some of the workers at resorts in Thailand went to college and studied Tourism, a major I didn’t even know existed, and their wages come directly from the tourist industry.
What countries in particular are you thinking of where the locals are very unhappy to see more tourists? I’ve heard Japan might be in that category, and the United States certainly feels that way, but did you experience this yourself?
Oh wow! Did not know that—I went off the original post by Greg and he mentioned to me after I sent him this link that someone looked at Common Crawl as well.
Either way, I updated both the git and the webpage to shout-out the week-before-this findings! I linked directly to your website, lmk if that's how you prefer it.
A companion to https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46054879, we now had successfully recovered all the remaining li.st entries of Anthony Bourdain that were thought to be lost to time.
Loved his series until he visited my hometown and completely misrepresented it. I get his style was anti establishment and mainstream, but he ended up hanging out with the wrong crowd in town, one of them known for being a fraudster, a spoiled child running bad restaurant after bad restaurant. Somehow these guys managed to be featured in the show as the progressive minds of local cuisine. It made me question everything else I have watched from Bourdain.
I had the same sense. I can see why people like the shows, but to me there's a subtle arrogance to the rich, white American guy just holding court everywhere he goes and explaining local matters as if he's an expert. The food aspect of his shows was often secondary.
> I had the same sense. I can see why people like the shows, but to me there's a subtle arrogance to the rich, white American guy just holding court everywhere he goes and explaining local matters as if he's an expert. The food aspect of his shows was often secondary.
My most memorable moment from the show was when Bourdain visited some poor farmer to see how they were harvesting yuca (or maybe yams, I forgot) and he went into the typical (I am paraphrasing) "oh look, this is the life, so perfect being one with nature, etc...". And the farmer shut him up pretty quickly with something like "How about a trade: you stay here and farm yams in the rain, in the perfect unity with the nature, and I go to live in your apartment in New York?"
It's always funny when I watch stuff about some foreigner visiting my home country and they either focus on something not all that important, or get something completely wrong.
The funniest part is trying to present some dish as "traditional" that everyone here eats, while it's some super niche thing only one region does, occasionally, if you have grandma that remembers how to make it
He probably didn’t personally vet the politics behind each person, the production team would’ve organised it in advance and he just turns up and goes along with it. That being said it’s still grounds to be skeptical of his shows. Also, please tell us your town
I appreciate that must have been difficult. If you could set the record straight, where would you have taken him? Love to hear your reccos and thoughts!
Maybe it's just the similarity in appearance and cause of death to Carradign and Epstein making me see patterns that aren't there, but I cannot watch a Bourdain clip without getting the sense something is deeply wrong.
I know we shouldn’t be discussing website design, but using light grey font on a white background is not only ugly, it is basically illegible for anyone with oldster eyes.
The page does not have light grey text for me. Checked on desktop and mobile.
The #2B2B2B color should not look like "light grey" or be hard to read on a white background unless your display setup has a severely broken color calibration or gamma curve.
Site looks fine, in my opinion. The HN comments complaining about site design are probably best ignored.
I thought the same thing but noticed my dark mode extension changed the dark gray font into light gray. It looks fine to me with that extension turned off. Not sure if that happened to you.
If it's bothering the eyes, like many more of other websites would, feel free to pull up your favorite browser's reader mode with your preferences. Cheers!
i think the white dots add another factor to my brain i have to decipher.
It doesn't make or break the site but its like id rather not have to deal with a pattern and text. Just make the background white.
If you really love it, keep it. I dont know anything. Im just a human
I am big fan and it was sad to me when he died. It’s bizarre to me how much CNN runs content featuring him without ever acknowledging he is dead. You’d think he was alive based on how often they flaunt his content.
A real Kramer is often much, much more than $2,500. Kramer’s mid-line knives go, even used, for $10–$30K while his high-end, rarer stuff goes for much more. In fact, Bourdain had a real Kramer with meteorite used in its construction that sold at auction in 2019 for $231,500.
People who abandon their kids don't really have anything to teach you. There's isn't much worse you can do. But in this case Anthony did that also:
> Anthony Bourdain paid a $380,000 settlement to actor Jimmy Bennett in 2018 to silence allegations that Asia Argento had sexually assaulted him in 2013, when Bennett was 17 and Argento was 37
Great role model. People see a guy that looks cool and says edgy shit and that's it, he is now a great person, lol.
thank you very much for doing this. I'm a huge bourdain fan, and despite many of his shortcomings as a human i think he was one of the MOST interesting people in the zeitgeist. just seemed so authentic, real, and visceral. his parts unknown series is some of the best human anthro content ever put on TV. this was a very interesting read!
At the risk of being downvoted… for the uninitiated among us, what’s interesting about these or the person? I understand he was a chef and had several TV shows. Is it just celebrity fascination?
Hard to summarize. He created the impression of being authentic. He had an unpretentious New York accent. He was happy in and advocated for unpretentious areas, which goes against some of the stereotypes of overly social media friendly foodie stuff. He encouraged his audience to travel and understand other people.
His struggles and imperfections also evoked sympathy. He spoke about how he used to have a drug problem. His death by suicide was sad. He certainly would have had lots of interesting things to say in the last 9 years, had he been around.
He also covered up his girlfriend's abuse of underage people by paying to silence them and protected her to the end when he knew she was guilty. The shame of doing this got to him instead of setting the record straight also.
Very mixed bag of a guy imo but the internet loves him because he came across genuine.
He was the last cultured dude before tech made everyone into a superficial arrogant lmgtfy'er, disinterested in true discovery. (Heap your downvotes on me HN, I've seen what makes you cheer!)
MY BOURDAIN LI.ST:
1) Masculinity without cringe: Tough, profane, credentialed through actual kitchen labor (not culinary school pedigree), but also emotionally literate, openly vulnerable, willing to cry on camera. He modeled a masculinity that wasn't apologetic but also wasn't performative.
2) Articulate outsider: Self-educated. Could reference Conrad, punk rock, and Apocalypse Now while maintaining blue-collar credibility. His book Kitchen Confidential read like a war memoir/crime novel.
3) Permission: He made it acceptable for men to care deeply about food, travel, culture -- interests traditionally female coded. The guy had done heroin and worked the line and was 'allowed' to opine about pho. This was before the internet or at least before the internet got ultra stupid.
4) Wanderer: Not tourism, not expat pretension, something closer to seeking, now dead thanks to social media influencers, and he was curious not escapist.
5) Recovery: Open about addiction, chaos, bad decisions. A redemption narrative for men who've made mistakes.
6) Tragic: Suicide landed hard because many recognized something in him of themselves in him.
P.S. He's more elder millennial/genx coded for a lot of reasons so don't feel bad about not getting it but definitely read his book and watch his show, it's different than the slop you're probably used to.
> 6) Tragic: Suicide landed hard because many recognized something in him of themselves in him.
I would like to put it out there that his depression or whatever mental illness he had was on full display the whole time, and this probably resonated with people as well.
A couple years back I started re-watching all of his shows, start to finish, after watching Roadrunner. Especially the early seasons, there was rarely an episode he didn't joke about dying, being killed, or killing himself. (In the film, there was a quote from Tony about how an acquaintance observed they'd never met someone who wanted to die so much)
I think a lot of people picked up on that, and it made the whole the whole thing work. The grit, the machismo, the empathy for the plight of your fellow man. A lot of people who worked with him said he was an asshole, too. This is also not surprising that he would be at times when the cameras were off.
Bourdain actually joked about killing himself in the exact manner and location in, which he did. When I heard it happened, my wife and I both recalled the same times he'd mentioned it. It wasn't a surprise really.
Bourdain had been referencing Hunter S Thompson and the way he went out for years. He'd also repeatedly mentioned wanting to go out in southern France after a great day. Bourdain generally had the same "vibe" as Thompson as well. Here's Thompson's last note to his wife:
> No More Games. No More Bombs. No More Walking. No More Fun. No More Swimming. 67. That is 17 years past 50. 17 more than I needed or wanted. Boring. I am always bitchy. No Fun—for anybody. 67. You are getting Greedy. Act your old age. Relax — This won't hurt.
To me, it wasn't a surprise at all. My wife and I even had discussed when we thought it would happen. The main thing about Bourdain was that people could relate to him and he wrote excellent prose. He seemed authentic and he went out on his terms, which is what he wanted and was the way he lived.
> He was the last cultured dude before tech made everyone into a
I enjoyed Bourdain, but this level of hero worship is really excessive. Not to mention antithetical to much of what Bourdain stood for.
He was enjoyable to read and watch, but claiming he "made it acceptable" for men to care about food, travel or culture is weird.
He was an entertainer. An interesting guy. A great storyteller who lived an interesting life. Charismatic and fun to watch. But he was not the "last cultured dude" or some demarcation point between the past and present.
Holding a celebrity and television personality up as the realest, most genuine person feels like missing the point. Everything you saw of this man was carefully crafted and curated. Even the "unfiltered" takes were designed to sell you on some story. You didn't know this man as a person or a friend.
An interesting question is whether any of this is good and worthy of emulation. I've been treating Bourdain as an cautionary tale and a reminder to check one's own priorities rigorously.
I asked google if he was religious, and got this: "He grew up in a home where God, sin, or damnation were never mentioned, leading to a lack of religious upbringing and belief, focusing instead on food, travel, and human connection."
And I think that's kinda the issue. The elevation of food and travel to the status anywhere on the same plain as deep religion (which I do think was the case here) is not going to lead one to good places.
You might assume you have known depression, but you would not speak such cruelties had you truly experienced the depths of sadness that a human being is capable of feeling.
The idea that suffering will somehow make you noble is quite awful. Depression isn't some kind of cleansing fire that opens you to empathy. It affects good people and assholes and people in every phase of life.
It doesn't have to make you noble, but there's a certain level of suffering experienced where you stop making comments such as that toward someone who's committed suicide.
This is the no true scottsman fallacy of mental health. Oh my god if only you knew how worse it can get.
Like you have no comparison, maybe what makes you despair and consider suicide won't make anyone else even budge. The same way you have no way of knowing if I see more or less intense green color, you cannot tell someone they haven't suffered enough.
You won't be downvoted by me. He wrote a fun book (Kitchen Confidential, which I enjoyed) and it was downhill from there. He detailed some of his sketchy ethics in that book and it was refreshing.
Essentially, he seemed to me to be a bit of a &*$% and people liked that, confusing it for something admirable and for authenticity. He's till celebrated, especially by CNN, who paid a fortune for his show and then lost out on the chance for future episodes... now they peddle his old content on their landing page. Probably to try to recoup their probable losses.
He was a super hipster who pretended to be an anti-hipster.
This combination allowed him to make people feel like they were getting let in a little secret and were now part of a club that was better than everyone else.
He wrote honestly about a profession he worked at all levels. His travel/food programmes sampled the fanciest of foods as well as the greasy spoons, local cuisines, and all without arrogance or false humility. He was very relatable for many people.
I would recommend reading Kitchen Confidential. Alternatively watch any of his travel shows although I think understanding the man through the book first makes it easier to appreciate the shows.
Regarding this specific find I don't see anything particularly special but for many it's one final glimpse into the life of someone they admire.
His really early ones were kind of rough. Like you could see he was still figuring it out. There was one episode where he just narrated a lonely planet guide.
He played a significant role in popularizing a now-familiar posture among affluent Americans: the earnest declaration that "travel is my passion", followed by carefully curated excursions to economically disadvantaged countries, enthusiastic consumption of the local cuisine, and a subsequent return home marked by self-congratulatory reflections on how much they have supposedly "learned" about other cultures.
The phenomenon is difficult to admire. It resembles a kind of cultural primitivism - an unintentional revival of archaic rituals in which consuming the body of the enemy was believed to confer insight, power, or spiritual essence. In this modern iteration, wealth functions as the enabling mechanism: privileged travelers fly abroad to ingest cuisines, aesthetics, and experiences, mistaking consumption for understanding and appetite for empathy.
One returns, enriched - spiritually, one assumes - having eaten well.
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