We Needed Bourdain
“I’m just having this late-in-life childhood of getting to go to all the places I dreamed about and read about. I grew up reading books about pirates and explorers, so of course, given the opportunity, that’s pretty much what I’m doing on the show.”
150 years ago, Mark Twain was America’s cool uncle gone abroad. He traveled extensively, wrote with playful honesty, and presented his stories to live audiences. He captured a moment and helped define a zeitgeist.
There will never be another Mark Twain, but Anthony Bourdain was as close as anyone will ever come.
Bourdain’s early entries into television felt like the results of a clerical error, conjuring up an image in my head of a strung-out TV executive muttering “Johnson signed the wrong form, and now this guy who cooks steaks in Manhattan has a budget and a crew and is drinking himself to death all over the world.”
But Tony made it work. He experienced cultures most people only dream about, but he didn’t stop at exposition. He remained unapologetically himself. He poked fun at things he saw. He poked fun at his producers. When he and his crew weren’t borrowing storytelling techniques from their favorite films, they experimented with new kinds of cameras or imposed technical constraints in themselves just for the hell of it. Bourdain and Co. closed the door on the polite “Rick Steves in a sweater” era and dragged documentary television into the 21st century with a meat hook.
Bourdain’s projects entertained me, but his honest, curious approach to people inspired me. There’s a difference between experiencing other places and learning from them. Bourdain taught, by good and bad example, to always learn. To engage honestly, and to never, ever be intellectually dishonest in a journey.
The shows themselves were a real-time log of Bourdain’s personal growth. With the full heft of CNN’s journalistic keys to the world, Parts Unknown, a dirty/clean restart after No Reservations, captured Bourdain’s evolution from a snarky anti-tour guide to cultural conversation starter. Instead of show where conversations were about meals, the meals were vehicles for conversations.
And conversations carried real value. They opened doors to hear the reality of each place and the people therein.
My excitement was genuine when I saw him visit my parents’ hometown of Greeneville, Mississippi, not only eating at Doe’s, but dining there with an old classmate of my mother's who had carved her own path as a journalist.
Further afield, his conversations in the Middle East were uncomfortably raw, and made me ask my own questions in my own sphere about foreign policy, about human rights. The human experience took front and center.
Through it all, Bourdain’s presence was haunting because he carried the weight of his sins. Recovered from hard drugs, but still partaking in whatever vices de jour he found in the road, his face always flicked back and forth between a warm smile and a thousand yard stare, and as much as I knew he wasn’t the kind of human who would pass in his sleep at the age of 75, I hoped that Bourdain would find his peace.
My hope peaked during one on-camera conversation, between Bourdain and Iggy Pop, stands out in my mind. Standing on a quiet beach in Miami, the television persona, which I’m fairly good at detecting through my own videography experience, seemed to fade away, and the conversation drifted to a very honest place and I realized we were seeing Bourdain 3.0.
Roots of Fight hoodies had replaced the band tshirts.
Jiu jitsu Bourdain.
Non-smoker Bourdain.
“Drinks less” Bourdain.
Reflective Bourdain.
The humor and the winking remarks remained, but Bourdain as a human seemed both grateful and… awestruck. He stood there, next to one of his own heroes, and together they mused in wonder at their both still being alive, and expressed gratitude for a second chance at a full life.
But writers’ minds are dangerous landscapes. History shows. I was always a bit fearful that some old demon would chase Tony down, no matter what he expressed on camera.
Today I woke up to that fear fulfilled. It’s been eleven hours since I saw the news and I’m still in a fractured state of mind. I want to write while this is fresh, but, God in heaven, it is difficult.
I don’t hesitate to think tragically of Bourdain as among the ranks of Papa Hemingway, Hunter Thompson and Kurt Cobain: another brilliant mind who chose to leave early. If anything, he was the spiritual descendent to all three. He was an adventurer-writer-rocker of the first order.
Collectively, Bourdain’s life and work tell an incredible story.
Kitchen Confidential, is, effectively, his origin story; a madcap rundown of kitchen life in the 70s and 80s. Sex, drugs and rock and roll in chef’s whites. In an alternate timeline, Bourdain could have easily faded into obscurity as just another manchild in that dysfunctional playground. But the smirks and impish remarks we saw on television belied a man who made a powerful choice halfway through a life.
In a car with four friends, he heard a statistic on the radio that heroin would claim the lives of three out of four addicts. All four friends were addicted to heroin. Bourdain wrote that, in that moment, he decided to be the survivor.
17 years after writing that book, the man who once sold his record collection for hard drugs, who used to smoke paint chips off the floor, was clean of drugs and leveraging the full weight of his access to document fraught places like Iran, Cuba and the Congo.
The older he grew, the deeper his interest in humanity became. This is why Bourdain resonated. This is why his death hurts us.
Bourdain wasn’t just the materialization of every hipster’s travel fantasies. On paper, it is hard to believe m that he lived past 35. Years of his life were spent making every possible choice that could accelerate his own demise.
But he escaped his own self-destruction. Not by accident, but by choice.
And we were privileged to see him introduce us to many, many special people, and eventually grow into a legend.
In his own way, Bourdain used the strategies of a drug dealer to lure in the audience and hold us captivated. The television persona pulled us in with snarky remarks about bad hot dogs in Chicago or merciless comments about tourist trap restaurants in Italy. Then, before we were quite aware of it, we were hearing dinnertime debates in Jerusalem over the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. And I can’t remember a single episode where he parted with his hosts on bad terms.
A younger person, a less experienced person, a less internally ragged person, could not have brought the sensibility that Bourdain brought to his documentation of the world. He knew the value of life, because he was painfully aware of how much of his own he had wasted.
The arc of Bourdain’s accidental career, from the unpolished beginnings of A Cook’s Tour, to the genre-bending work he did on Parts Unknown, was so much more than advertised.
It wasn’t about Emmys and bigger budgets.
It wasn’t just about food and booze.
It wasn’t just travel.
It was a redemption story.
Out of the slough of addiction, he found a voice, and with his crew and his words, Anthony Bourdain took us to dinner in a different city a week for seventeen years.
We don’t mean to be, but we are cynical. Our phones give us near unlimited access to data and information. We can make judgements and be reductive without ever leaving the house. Bourdain reminded us that people across the world are as layered as we are ourselves. He reminded us of our humanity.
Beyond the snark, beyond the persona, the totality of Bourdain’s life and work serve to inspire us and give us hope.
We needed him.
We will miss him.
It's about the work.
I heard something good the other day.
"If you want to succeed at something, be obsessed by it."
I take comfort in that statement.
I heard something good the other day.
"If you want to succeed at something, be obsessed by it."
I take comfort in that statement.
My work--photography, videography, content creation--is an obsession for me.
For the past four years, I have worked 40-60 hour work weeks, while also shooting weddings, friends' small businesses and personal creative projects after hours.
In short, I've followed the Gary Vaynerchuk approach of paying the bills with a 9-5, and building something for yourself 6-2.
Cool thing: it works.
I get up at 4:30am most mornings. I exercise. I work. I stay up late. I shoot. I edit. I follow up. I deliver.
I consume medically inadvisable amounts of caffeine and live a life booked edge to edge with work opportunities that create more work.
Alternatively, I could work a polite 40 hours a week, drink cocktails on Friday nights and laze around on Saturdays and Sundays, but that’s not really my style. To put it quite bluntly, it bores me.
This kind of lifestyle, that yields raised eyebrows and consistent remarks of “I don’t know how you do everything you do” and “you should take some time for yourself” is exactly the kind of life that gives me the most satisfaction.
Big breaks don't happen. Maybe it's a purely American sentiment, that classic trope of "waiting for your big break" or "waiting for things to change." It dovetails with more recent, social media-friendly ideas of "reaching out to the universe" or “sending out good vibes" to effect change.
No.
The universe is an ordered system of gas and carbon. It has no personality and trends a little more toward disorder every nanosecond.
Those expressions are a handy psychological trick to change your own attitude or mindset, and a positive mindset is integral to the process, but change comes from your work. And lots of it.
Good work creates opportunities for more good work. If you tell me that you want to effect a change in your life, and yet you’re always on Snapchat advising that you’re bored or drunk, I’m going to stop listening. You’re wasting your time.
If you have time to be at a dedicated “networking event” at 5:02pm on a Thursday, you’re probably not working hard enough.
There is an ownership deficit in culture right now. Your life is your life. What you make of it is on you.
What will define 2017 for myself and Annie?
This is the year we took ownership and pumped the brakes. After four years of employment with intense commitments of time and energy, first to fund our wedding and later to simply explore opportunities, we have decided to stop moving with the crowd, and we are building.
With the full support of the marketing team at Innisfree, I am stepping away from full-time, salaried employment and myself and Annie are launching our company.
Move Media is about to emerge from dormancy and experience a rebrand as a content production studio and marketing resource. Annie and I are making ourselves available and the response so far has been unanimously positive, and, frankly, overwhelming.
Camera and Flask will continue and will see some changes inside the coming month.
Annie is working on a number of exciting projects that are hers to tell when the time is right.
The Dark Horses Podcast returns this coming week and I’m lining up guests as we speak. It’s going to be awesome.
We’ve accomplished an incredible amount and made a lot of stuff look good as a sideline to salaried employment.
You’re about to see what kind of fireworks happen when we give it our full attention.
Wear shades.
Quit talking and do something. Balance is boredom. Status quo is the fast lane to a slow death. Get obsessed.
Back Home
Sometimes, coming back is the hardest part. It has been a very...unique year for me. I have to come right out and say it: I'm exhausted. Not that I'm complaining, I mean, good Lord, I've had opportunities open up this year of which I didn't have the audacity to dream before they did. I graduated from UWF in the spring, went to India over the summer, went to Britain for a couple of weeks after that, came home to find the new family home ready for occupancy; I mean, who'da thunk? Needless to say, I thank God for these blessings.
The only downside to this year has been the discovery that I am a homebody as much as I am a wanderer; I think it's a 50/50 split. I love to travel, but in the three weeks I spent at home between India and the UK, I felt like every day was a race to experience as much "homeness" as possible before leaving again. I wanted to eat my favorite meals, see all of my friends, go to all of my favorite places and do it all now. Now that I am home to stay for a while, I feel more at peace than I have felt since I began seriously preparing to go to India four months ago in June. And it's a good thing too, because as tired as my body is, the last thing I want is a restless mind. And, after the trip to the UK, my funds are sufficiently depleted so as to afford the luxury (weird enough sentence for ya?) of having no choice but to stay in my hometown for a while.
In a way, India messed up my five year plan. My plans, post-UWF, involved developing my photography work into a more profitable venture and simultaneously finishing a novel over the fall, seeking publishing, and applying to work for a television production company after the new year. Neat and clean. But now, I feel tugged in a slightly different direction. I saw too much and established too many relationships during my service in India to proceed with a completely conventional career. No matter what I end up doing long-term, I want to support missions overseas, India and otherwise. I cannot tolerate the idea of a career that will eclipse my ability to help meet needs in India, because in my perhaps-too-emotionally-biased opinion, the needs of my brothers and sisters overseas are far more important than working my way up to a corner office on the top floor.
Life has checkmated me into facing some hard decisions. My perspective is different than it used to be; perhaps in a good way, perhaps in a less-good way. Time will tell. Coming back to the US, I view the priorities of many people as absolutely absurd, and the hysteria on both sides of the upcoming election is, for lack of a better word, laughable. I have a hard time both listening to and talking with people about certain subjects.
So, that's where I am right now. Whenever internet service is reestablished at the new place, I will resume my standard routine of displaying photographs and inflicting my written rambles upon the public via the blog; in the meantime, I'm currently ghosting in and out of coffee shops to write and edit. Pray for me, if you like, as I look inward, look forward and look around for the best path to take. Real life is tough.
India, Day 2 - The lonely way to travel.
I have a love/hate relationship with transatlantic air travel. I like having nine hours to relax, but I dislike doing it in a metal tube filled with recycled air.
I like movies, but I dislike four-inch screens.
I enjoy conversations with new people, but planes always carry the threat of a seatmate whose bulk occupies both his own seat and part of mine. Worse yet, I've previously been caught next to talkative sad sacks, and with nowhere to run or hide, they depressed me with their life stories for hours at a time.
All that said, I generally enjoy the experience of air travel, even flying coach. Even at its worst, flying gives me dedicated time to catch up on some reading. Post-college, reading has taken on a new significance, because I finally have the luxury of choosing my own books. Based on the recommendation of a friend, I chose to bring a book on the trip that was very, very special: Shantaram, by Gregory David Roberts. Set in India during the 1980s, there was little difference between what was on the pages and what I saw firsthand in India every time I put the book down. If you have not read it, I highly recommend that you do so, sooner rather than later.
Aside from a reading and some intermittent movie-watching, my flight from Miami to London was uneventful. I managed to sleep a little bit as well, which always helps kill time. Someday I'll learn to take some Tylenol PM every time I fly, so I can just go right to sleep and be blissfully unaware of the passing time. After nine hours, I touched down in London early in the morning and was met by a familiar sign.
As I entered the terminal, following the familiar path through the "B Gates" in the international terminal, I grinned for a couple of reasons. The first reason was the knowledge that I would be returning to Britain at the end of my trip, and for the first time, I would actually get out of the airport and see England itself. As many times as I had connected through Heathrow, I had never actually set foot on English soil.
My second reason for grinning was the sight of several information screens held hostage by my old arch-nemesis, the Blue Screen of Death. I had no idea the old blue screen still afflicted modern computer systems, much less in airport terminal displays, but there it was, big as life.
As I said, it was early. Early enough to eat breakfast, although my body clock was so confuzzled by the time change that I might have actually been craving lunch or dinner. This is one point of my travel recaps that will remain problematic. On a good day, I am hopeless at processing numbers. Dramatic time changes and long flights exacerbate this weakness and make it even harder for me to remember details that aren't logged in my journal or with photographs. Details like exact times.
Where was I? Oh yes, breakfast. Or, "brekkie," as they say in the UK. I love that term. "Brekkie." Fun to say.
One of my favorite things about England is, honestly, the food. I don't know why England's traditional fare has been the black sheep of world cuisine for so long, because I find it delicious. Traditional British food is certainly simpler and less magazine-ready than, say, French or Italian cuisine, but that is actually what I love most about it. There's been a renaissance in British cooking in recent years, and top-tier gastronomy is dramatically changing the modern opinions regarding British cuisine, but I will always be a fan of the classics. From the delicacies and to the pub grub, it is simple, hearty fare, always savory and always satisfying. Especially the traditional English breakfast. Eggs, sausage, bacon, beans, tomato and potatoes. I can't think of a more comforting eating experience.
Breakfast moved to the top of my action list, I entered Giraffe, had my brekkie (I love that word) and a cup of good coffee. The repast over, I sat in the atrium of the terminal with my journal and wrote. As I got still and focused on the blank page, I became aware of an odd feeling. The last two times I had flown--including the last time I had gone through Heathrow--I had been with friends. I was retracing the same path to India, but I was doing it alone.
Alone. That's a naughty word when you're traveling. I've traveled alone plenty of times, and had fun doing it, but after several trips in a row with other people, I missed the company. I missed them badly, in fact. I have to confess that my trips to India aren't just mission trips. Selfishly, I look forward to the chance to spend ten days at close quarters with good friends from another state who I don't see at any other time during the year. And now I was doing the India thing again, but they weren't there with me. In the film The Third Man, Orson Welles' character, a sociopathic gangster, says from atop a ferris wheel: "Don't be melodramatic. Look down there. Tell me. Would you really feel any pity if one of those dots stopped moving forever?" In that moment, tired and listless and with no one to talk to, I felt like a dot.
This was the first of several such moments that I had during the course of my journey. When I was actually in India, I returned to several places where I had served on earlier trips. Coming back was strange, because the paradigms were so drastically different. Whereas the first time I went to this or that place, I was with friends, and often arrived there after a bus ride filled with conversation, laugher and even the occasional song. On this trip, however, I visited these places as the "silent partner" of various hosts, with almost every word out of my mouth requiring translation into Hindi or a local language before they could be understood. Having such strong memories so far from home, and even in a place like Heathrow, was a new and surreal experience, made slightly depressing by the removal of all the familiar and positive emotional associations. It almost felt like I had lost something, or someone.
In this incredibly positive state of mind (irony alert!), I sat in Heathrow and journaled my thoughts onto paper. My plane left in the late afternoon, and before departure, I also translated my mild sadness into a bit of emotional eating by buying a cappuccino and a bar of dark chocolate for an early dinner--my last Western indulgence before committing myself to India for six weeks. That decision has not gone down in the annals of "Steven's Personal Best;" to the contrary, the assault of milk and sugar on my stomach, unaccompanied by any other solid food, made the flight uncomfortable and set me up for a very tired landing in India.
My re-entry into Incredible India will be covered later this week. I am slowly realizing that my writing consecutive entries as long-form narratives is a little too time-consuming, so you may look forward to shorter but more frequent entries in coming weeks. Stay tuned!
Bob Dylan - "Mississippi"
Something about Bob Dylan's music always works its way into my soul and calms me down. I would have loved to post a link to the gentler, acoustic version of this song from the Tell Tale Signs bootleg collection, but this is the best that YouTube could provide. Both sides of my family hail from Mississippi, and I plan to spend some time there in the fall doing some research into family history.
Every step of the way we walk the line Your days are numbered, so are mine Time is pilin’ up, we struggle and we scrape We’re all boxed in, nowhere to escape
City’s just a jungle; more games to play Trapped in the heart of it, tryin' to get away I was raised in the country, I been workin’ in the town I been in trouble ever since I set my suitcase down
Got nothin' for you, I had nothin' before Don’t even have anything for myself anymore Sky full of fire, pain pourin’ down Nothing you can sell me, I’ll see you around
All my powers of expression and thoughts so sublime Could never do you justice in reason or rhyme Only one thing I did wrong Stayed in Mississippi a day too long
Well, the devil’s in the alley, mule’s in the stall Say anything you wanna, I have heard it all I was thinkin’ 'bout the things that Rosie said I was dreaming I was sleepin' in Rosie’s bed
Walkin' through the leaves, falling from the trees Feelin' like a stranger nobody sees So many things that we never will undo I know you’re sorry, I’m sorry too
Some people will offer you their hand and some won’t Last night I knew you, tonight I don’t I need somethin’ strong to distract my mind I’m gonna look at you ’til my eyes go blind
Well I got here followin' the southern star I crossed that river just to be where you are Only one thing I did wrong Stayed in Mississippi a day too long
Well my ship’s been split to splinters and it’s sinkin' fast I’m drownin’ in the poison, got no future, got no past But my heart is not weary, it’s light and it’s free I’ve got nothin’ but affection for all those who’ve sailed with me
Everybody movin’ if they ain’t already there Everybody got to move somewhere Stick with me baby, stick with me anyhow Things should start to get interestin' right about now
My clothes are wet, tight on my skin Not as tight as the corner that I painted myself in I know that fortune is waitin’ to be kind So give me your hand and say you’ll be mine
Well, the emptiness is endless, cold as the clay You can always come back, but you can’t come back all the way Only one thing I did wrong Stayed in Mississippi a day too long