I saw my first episodes of No Reservations a little over a decade ago. On vacation with my family, flipping through the TV at night for our post-prandial digestion session, we watched an episode by chance. My parents didn’t love it, Bourdain was vulgar, crass, and opinionated, but his unstilted, open, honest approach to opening cultures to public eyes sank right into me. At this point, about 13 years later, I’ve seen every episode of No Reservations, some of The Layover, and about half of Parts Unknown. The man relaxed over the years into a more accommodating, less-brash appraisal of the world. It is beautiful to see this commentary, Bourdain’s spiritual transformation as the years of travel played on his soul. Now, when a man like him is more necessary than ever, a man with so unique a voice, a man who I grew up with, who informed me and entertained me with greater understanding, he took himself from us.
Right now there are more immigrants in the United States than there have ever been. 43.7 million human beings, ~13.5% of the total population of our nation (as of 2016), was born a citizen of elsewhere. And no human being is native to this land. Native Americans wound up here thousands of years ago, then waves of human sprayed over on boats to find new life. The entire history of this continent is a history of collision, of cultures and languages meeting, of shoulders and hands pressing into one another in joy and suffering and rage and regeneration. We still manage to stick our heads up our own asses to gaze at our navels backwards in the dark. It’s why humans like Bourdain are necessary.
Bourdain made it his career to document all the little pockets of humanity. Starting as a chef, he spoke the fundamental human language of food which allowed him to tap right into the veins of culture wherever he roamed. He started off brash and half-crazed, the chef/ex-addict New Yorker jetting around to explore whatever intrigued and heap shit on whatever offended. An essential first stage. As he aged and the show progressed, we are privileged with a glimpse into the changing perspective of a man whose career prepared him for a new growth. Bourdain relaxed. Snark is impossible to escape in his work, but the perspective shifted; he opened up his show to Rome and Cambodia and the American Midwest as equally engaging, diving into culture wherever the culinary hook was there to catch, then stringing the viewer along deeper into the ocean of humanity.
His shows and commentaries became important pieces of documentary work. I remember Bourdain visiting Vietnam, meeting with a limbless victim of our war, forcing us, with him, to confront some of the horrors we’ve perpetrated on a culture he’s introduced us to the beauty of. There was the episode in 2006 where Bourdain was in Beirut when missiles started flying between Hezbollah and Israel, a bizarre spectacle he caught from a unique perspective and was able to follow up on years later when he visited again to display how the city continued to operate, what the feelings and scars looked like. That last episode on Parts Unknown, where Bourdain visits old fascist structures in Rome, and gauges the feelings of the citizens on Mussolini in 2017, in the present environment of precarious nationalism and Euroscepticism. Hell, even the American desert episode with the Queens of the Stone Age is an absolute classic of television.
His shows produced time capsules. Important documents. Cultural artefacts which could allow every man a certain understanding of peoples wherever he met them. Through fantastic storytelling and personality, through some of the best camerawork I’ve seen on television, through his fits, fuck-yous, hangovers, and passions, we experienced the world, truly the world, through this man’s lens. I’m genuinely saddened, and inescapably angry that he took himself from us. We need men like Bourdain now more than ever, people who are capable of adventuring, of opening their eyes, filtering what they see through their heart, then pouring it out into brilliant broadcasts acquainting humanity with itself.
Regardless of what anyone says, demographics show we’re growing, the American constituency is changing, and that we are an uniquely international population. The politics and cultures of the world are the politics and cultures of the United States of America. The FOOD of America is the food of the world. I literally cannot imagine growing up without Chinese food, Italian food, Japanese food, Indian food, French-style cooking, all the insane varieties of food that make up our diets. Even the bizarre Jewish foods to which I’m accustomed, the gefilte fish and chopped liver and cough syrup Manischewitz. I’m not so far removed from Poland myself. We need travelers to show us the world in our own language, to open our eyes and tongues and ears. To reaffirm that humans are different everywhere, but share the same basic wants, needs, desires, impulses. That humanity is diverse, and it is one. At a time where the American national fabric is threatened by the traitorous rage of xenophobic cretins and the increasing atomization of our population into tiny little self-aggrandizing feedback loops, a person who successfully made his mission the discovery of the world in our language to reacquaint us with humanity by acquainting us with humans, our loss of Anthony Bourdain is a cultural loss.
The only thing to do is follow by example. Keep exploring. Keep learning. Document the experiences. Make something out of them. Learn what unites people and pursue those things as arts.
Now, while we know so little, while the feelings are fresh, it felt important to get them out. I don’t know why he hanged himself yet, and I have this irrational feeling like I’m owed an answer by the dead man. After every major death, thought runs to “how”, then “why”. We may or may not learn, but I doubt I’ll be satisfied with any answer. 61 years were not enough.
Bourdain, I’ll miss you.
-6.8.2018
