Recovering Anthony Bourdain's Li.st's

You could run something like https://motherfuckingwebsite.com/ but contrast doesn't mean to run with black/white, http://bettermotherfuckingwebsite.com/ is better on the eyes.

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!

[1] https://coolors.co/contrast-checker/2b2b2b-f7f3ee

[2] https://webaim.org/resources/contrastchecker/

Complaining 24/7.

A regular hero.

I enjoyed Bourdain, but this level of hero worship is really excessive.

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. Charismatic and fun to watch. But he was not the "last cultured dude"

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.

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.

That doesn't seem right. Tons of travel content existed before he got popular. Endless summer wasn't for women

Very mixed bag of a guy imo but the internet loves him because he came across genuine.

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.

give us a real location or else we should assume you're spouting BS

for the record I believe Bourdaine could get roped in by scammy local fixers, but "could" doesn't mean "did"

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

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?"

Yeah, he was struggling with mental health problems.

What a way to publicly slander a dead guy that didn't commit any crimes that we know of.

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.

No, actually, I find it impossible to make sense of that.

A core problem is that an influx of tourists hits the housing supply. Short-term tourism incentivises conversion of local housing to accommodate them (AirBnB, etc.) and long-term tourism results in foreigners buying local housing as their permanent or long-term holiday home.

The result is obviously a relative shortage of housing and rising prices, both of which make it harder for locals (who are often relatively poorer) to live where they need to. This pattern has been repeated from small villages in scenic areas, to big cities (e.g. Barcelona), to whole islands (e.g. Mallorca).

I’m probably one of the people that has contributed to this to some extent over time; and yet I fully understand the frustration of the locals.

It may result in apparent xenophobia in some, but its roots are rational and economic.

Honestly I doubt they are punching up in many cases. Sure, the Americans who holiday in Sicily are probably pretty well off, because that's expensive. But a lot of the tourists who visit the large Spanish cities or coastal towns are working class people from northern Europe for whom it may actually be cheaper to get a Ryanair flight and an Airbnb for a couple of days than to take a trip within their own country. I don't know anything about the kind of person who sprawls this graffiti around Barcelona but I suspect there's a good chance they (or their families at least) are wealthier than the tourists they are raging against.

There’s no equivalent for this feeling in the U.S. The closest we ever had to this were Japanese tourists in the late twentieth century that were known for taking pictures of everything, and that was localized to tourist destinations. Migrants from the Mexico and Central America that move here and don’t assimilate into the culture or language are not the same either, because they more here for opportunity and don’t have the time or resources to learn English, so it’s quite understandable that many stick to themselves and their tiendas.

As an American that has travelled overseas years ago, I understand that others in the world could do without us visiting. They just want to have their normal day to day without an American speaking American English and commenting on things like an American and tipping wait staff, asking for ice, expecting things that aren’t provided, generally acting more entitled, etc. I did my best to try to fit in, but we just don’t fit in; we are taught typically only a little bit of one other language in school, without real immersion, and we don’t grow up traveling to other countries, so most of us just aren’t prepared.

After the impression American tourists gave me during my visit to Pisa last summer: Yes, please.

I can kind of relate to the GP, I went back and rewatched a lot of Bourdain’s shows recently and I felt a kind of revulsion I hadn’t previously. I don’t think it’s necessarily fairly aimed at Bourdain himself but at the kind of person that has since latched onto his vibe and meme’d it to death on social media. Yet another iteration of the mall goth in a Misfits t-shirt that doesn’t know who Glenn Danzig is, only this time Bourdain is a very clear icon behind the style to cringe at in hindsight.