Good Things #4: Anthony Bourdain

I must have been the only person to read about Bourdain's suicide and think to myself 'I get it.' This is one of the most beloved Americans of his generation, and it was for a fucking food show. Anthony Bourdain was so original, so charismatic, such an unlikely celebrity, that he was completely unnecessary to the lives of everyone who loved him, and if we lost Anthony Bourdain to scandal instead of suicide, we might have forgotten that we ever needed him. Every celebrity worries that their fall will be just as sudden as their rise, and when the hint of scandal affected Bourdain's girlfriend Asia Argento in the middle of #metoo's height, it must have been far too much for a celebrity as beloved as him to handle. We think we love celebrities, but we don't, we're just infatuated with them the way we might be with a drug. The more we think we love them, the more we hate them when they do something that disappoints us. Celebrities are completely disposable from our lives. If you don't like them, you get a new celebrity crush. Whatever else was true about Bourdain's girlfriend, Asia Argento, she was clearly not good for him, and by all accounts she'd put him through hell already. She had also been raped by Harvey Weinstein and Bourdain wanted to be there for her. The misfortunes of those we love make us love them more, not less. We all want to be there for the people we love who suffer. But in order to be there for her, Bourdan paid off a a guy she had sex with when the guy was 17. For a brief moment, Argento was a lightning rod for #metoo hypocrisy. It didn't last very long, but Bourdain clearly thought the backlash was going to be much worse than it was. He was at one remove not only from the absolute center of #metoo but of the potential backlash to it. He was a former addict in the world of rock'n roll, who bragged in every episode he ever made about the bad behavior of his younger years. There's no way that a guy of his CV didn't have questionable moments with women. If Bourdain fell, he'd have fallen harder than literally any celebrity had - or at least so his demented head reasoned, and have nobody left. Bourdain was just a food guy, not even an actor. There was no one else with a job quite like his, and if he'd fallen from his place atop America's carnival, there'd be no chance of a comeback because without him, would there be a field for a celebrity chef/writer/world traveller/cultural critic who has multiple cable hits? He would just be a distant memory about whom people would say "boy did he fuck that up...". America would forget about Bourdain, about food, about travel, about the whole world of curiosity and opportunity he stood for. A guy with a history of addiction like Bourdan is already more fragile than anybody knows. Bourdain couldn't take that kind of pressure. In his mind, it was either go back to full-time using without even the dignity of people's well-wishes when he goes to rehab, or check out. For nearly twenty years, he'd thrown TV's most wonderful party, and as troubling as his suicide was, he left on such a high note that ever since he'd ascended to god status. Everybody thinks they want celebrity, but the reality of celebrity is worrying at every moment that you can lose everything which you've won. The desire for fame requires a hole in your life so deep that only the love of anonymous people can fill it, so the very people who pursue fame are the least suited to handle it. Bourdain had everything he thought he wanted, only to spend his days, as thousands of celebrities have, bracing himself for a day he'd lose it that may never come. At least the homeless have our sympathy, but celebrity can be the loneliest state on the planet, because you have no idea why anybody in the world loves you. Think of Bourdain's Miami episode: he begins it with saying that he doesn't think he could be a Miami person. He describes Miami as 'the seductions of flash' and how the city is "The manufactured dreams of many television shows made real." Bourdain always said he was repelled by such things, but he was only repelled in the way of someone who found them irresistible. Every paragraph of his writing and TV narration told us how seduced he was by the glamor of sex, drugs & rock'n roll. The high life was his home, and to his eternal surprise, he found it unfulfilling. People don't realize that for all his working class badass affectation, Bourdain grew up a kind of 'New York Intellectual' nobility. His mother was a copy editor for the New York Times. His father was a longtime executive for the classical music division of Columbia Records. He rebelled against it all and became the devotee of William Burroughs and Iggy Pop, but he never really knew any world realer than the glamorous world of Manhattan socialite parties in which he probably grew up. We'd have never even heard of Anthony Bourdain if Bourdain's mother hadn't used her connections to get his first article published in The New Yorker. What made Bourdain compelling is that he was attracted by everything he thought was real, but he never really knew the real world. Everything he thought was real was fake, and his search to find something real in connections he'd have never made without a budget of millions was beautiful and moving for reasons that I'm not sure he understood. He met all these interesting people who told him everything about history and culture and flavor, only to leave them right away before he could get to know anybody. You felt Bourdain's loneliness waft off the screen as the weight of the world stooped on his shoulders, and in his struggle, we saw the struggles of all the people he passed on the street because he only got fulfillment from imagining the effort that goes into their much realer struggles and fulfillment. Both were an effort which he could only appreciate intellectually without experiencing the real thing, because the real thing involves being tied down to a place. What made Bourdain incredible television was that he tried so very hard to be a realer type of person than he was. He was inherently as glamorous and attractive as all the rock bands he loved, he was a playboy's vision of an honest person; he knew it, and it drove him crazy. He wanted real connections and love so badly that he traveled the entire world to find it, only to realize that the only places he could find that is near at hand, the place he left because he couldn't stand it. But by being so empty, he was America's perfect conduit to understand the world: the overprivileged American who doesn't get it, but unlike the rest of us, he really tried. He knew he couldn't build that bridge, but he might have made it easier for future generations. There's no way to build that bridge without effort, and Bourdain was one of the only Americans even trying to build a bridge. And if his picture of other cultures was overly glamorous to everything from kitchens to poverty (even their war footage was beautifully filmed), at least he gave us a view of it. I always thought that Bourdain's show was the most expensive on television because it made everybody who watched it look up flight deals, but the point was that even if he made the world seem a far more glamorous place than it is, he made us far less scared about the unfamiliar. There's no travel like a Bourdain episode, and clearly Bourdain's trips were a lot more like ours than we ever realized. Everybody says that they had more fun on the road than they actually do, and in retrospect, we usually believe our own lies about our trips. By the time everybody gets to the beautiful restaurant, we're all exhausted and usually pissed off at our travel companions. Everybody goes to the churches and museums to appreciate things we take for granted at home and therefore have little idea what we're looking at. What everybody is there for is the very few moments of transcendence when they feel 'the moment of empathy'. Not empathy as social justice progressives define it, but 'empathy' in the old sense which is much more selfish: literally warging into the mind of another person. 'Travel empathy' is the moment when they feel themselves in contact with a completely different kind of life than the one they live, and completely forget the person they are as they imagine themselves into an ephemeral moment of that other cultural outlook they'll never understand. We travel to forget ourselves, and once we have that moment of forgetting, we're never the same. Travel and vacation are very different things. Vacations are for fun. They're where we do the things that give us pleasure and generally live our lives as we'd like to live them more frequently. Vacation is about improving our lives, but travel is about changing our lives. It's about stimulating our imaginations so that we can see our worlds differently, and if you're in bad enough need of a new perspective, you're not going to get that from a mere vacation. Vacations should be as much fun as you can possibly have, but travel takes serious work. To have fun, you have to really know what you're doing there. You have to spend time learning what's unique and wonderful about the places you visit, and you can't be scared of experiencing them. That's very difficult for a lot of people, but without it, your perspective stays the same, and if your perspective is harming your life, travel is the best chance you have to change your perspective. We Americans are deeply incurious about everyone in the world who isn't us; not to mention, us. But Bourdain was the best window this country's had in our lifetime to the benefits of travel, and never have those benefits been more needed than today. The world of Bourdain seemed to end the moment he died. We were living in the international golden age of cuisine when uncurious lower-middle-class people could order food from dozens of countries with a single phone call. That's probably over now. It will take decades for America's restaurants to come back from last year's hit. The pandemic's also ended widespread travel for god knows how long, every dinner in a restaurant's a risk, and as we increasingly understand the connections between food and disease everybody goes on their own personalized diet which cuts out so many kinds of enjoyable meals. Bourdain's shows are no longer about the opportunities of travel but a lost world of food and travel which we may not get back for god knows how long. We are growing ever more distant from everyone but the people we see every single day. The opportunities for lethal misunderstandings with people we don't see are increasing exponentially. Getting out of this virus-infested internet world without war will be an accomplishment, and depend entirely upon moments like the ones we see on Bourdain's world in which people 'do the work' to understand each other from the most different perspectives imaginable. Even if the understanding Bourdain conjured between different people is a false understanding, even if there may not be such a thing as true understanding between people, it's the possibility of that understanding from which progress and peace may draw closer.