Restaurant Blog: Molly's Rise and Shine
Molly's Rise and Shine is finally open.
Yesterday afternoon, Molly’s announced their surprise soft opening on Facebook.
6am this morning, we were out the door for one of the most amazing breakfasts we’ve had in a long time.
Annie went with the breakfast plate while me and our buddy Terry opted for the Grand Slam McMuffin. I highly recommend getting freaky with the extra sausage patty for optimal ‘MERICA.
And, for the love of all things holy, get the collard greens.
Kudos to Mason Hereford and his team. They’ve made magic again.
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.
Bourbon Street
I’ve spent plenty of time in New Orleans over the past year, but always gave Bourbon Street a wide berth to avoid the crowds and connect more with less-touristy parts of the city. But, this past weekend, I was on assignment shooting social content of fans during the Saints/Vikings game. There aren’t a ton of sports bars in the French Quarter, but Razoo’s on Bourbon Street turned out to be the only one I popped my head into that didn’t have a jazz band competing for fans’ attention inside.
Growing up in a conservative home, “Bourbon Street” was rarely used to denote the actual place, but was tossed around as a pejorative. “That person/place/thing looks like Bourbon Street.” It was a catch-all term around the house for anything deemed negative or immoral.
Older now, navigating this wide world for myself, I’ve finally had a chance to create my my own opinion of Bourbon Street. Is it crowded, smelly, cheapened by tourist pandering? Yes. Is it dominated by rubes who order alcohol by the yard and spend too much on cover charges for superficial pagan delights? Yes.
But.
It also makes for one hell of a photo.
Eyes Everywhere
New Year’s Day, 2011
My friends and I stepped down from the bus. The chilly clay crunched under my boots.
The air was hazy. Any illusion of clarity was dispelled when I raised my eyes to see the blacktop highway dissolve into a floating haze of humidity and moisture-bound truck exhaust.
My mind was also hazy. It was morning, and I had awoken only a few hours earlier from a few hours' sleep after being awake for the 56 hours prior. Long layovers though we had, I had not been able to sleep since taking off from Pensacola.
Sir went to a roadside snack shack to restock on Lay’s Tomato Tango, while those of us who had doubled down on morning tea sidled around the back of a shuttered garage to answer nature’s call.
Spike’s voice, always from the diaphragm, fired out from the far corner of the building.
“I’m having performance issues,” he muttered. “That monkey won’t stop watching me.”
I looked overhead and saw a cartload of monkeys spread out across the roof. A few observed our relief with academic disinterest, while one closest to me sat contemplating God’s good potato.
I laughed. Spike continued.
“I hate the monkeys. You should have seen them in Shimla. They’ll attack out of nowhere.”
At this, I sobered a tad and finished my business, one wary eye on the monkey troop.
We returned to a crowd around the bus. We were deep in Bihar, about as far off the tourist trail as we could be without swimming open water. Fresh faces, much less a rag tag gaggle of Americans, stood out in a little town like this. It seemed half the town had turned out to laugh at our sincere-yet-ham-handed attempts at pronunciation of “naya saal shayari.”
The bus’s interior was just as smoggy as the air outside. I adjusted my neckerchief back over my mouth and nose as I cleared the step into the bus.
Before ducking all the way inside the vehicle, I realized just how many faces, mostly kids, were watching us. I grabbed the rickety support bar in the bus door and leaned out to snap a few frames. The diversity of the expressions makes me smile every time.
So began my first full day in India.
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.
