[deeptishukla22]

Bourdain had a way of writing that made even throwaway lines feel meaningful, but so much of that era of content is basically disappearing. It’s nice to see someone do the unglamorous work of gathering the fragments before they fade completely.

[t0lo]

It's funny because his, and Chuck Palahniuk's (fight club, etc) way of seeing the world- that brand of anti corporate- pro human- enjoy the waste- cynicism seemed so permanent and authentic- and like nothing could take it away from you- it felt like a staple of the human experience that was a place you could go to in your mind.

It's amazing to see how quickly that all got shovelled away and replaced with productised, streamlined, sterile groupthink- and one in which authentic sexuality and sex jokes are shunned. I think in some part he knew which way this world was heading and made a decision based off of that.

As a young person who stakes a lot of my headspace in the former, it's definitely an interesting, ridiculously two faced and contradictory cultural moment we're in right now.

[jasonwatkinspdx]

If you're lumping together Bourdain and Palahniuk I think you've completely failed to understand Bourdain.

And then diagnosing his suicide as a result of your apparent culture war grievances over sex jokes is just revolting behavior.

[CPLX]

I’m a dyed in the wool GenX-er and I think the comment you’re responding to has insight.

For those of us that grew up in the punk-rock anti-corporate adbusters rage against the machine WTO protest era the current culture around commerce and wealth is a disorienting hellscape.

The boomers and their children, the millennials, were wrong in their belief that fashion choices and good vibe thinking by the affluent set would lead to a better culture.

Should have listened to the Nirvana generation a little more. Turns out the cynicism was justified.

[builtawall]

It was amazing how fast the anti-globalization/anti-corporate attitudes evaporated away in the wake of 9/11.

100,000 mostly normal people traveled to Quebec City to protest the FTAA in April 2001.

By the end of that year that kind of thing was anti-patriotic, and very much a taboo subject, at least in the mainstream culture.

[coldtea]

And by the 2010s what passes for "rebellion" is just things co-opted by corporate interests and established parties.

[lurk2]

Anti-corporate attitudes were completely normalized in the 2000s and arguably only really lulled during the mid-2010s. There were several films from that period that featured countercultural messaging:

Disney’s Incredibles had allusions to Kafka

Monster’s Inc. is a commentary on corporate vampirism.

Kingdom of Heaven was if not a commentary on the Global War on Terror at least a bold film to have released 4 years after 9/11.

The second Pirates of the Caribbean film was a (childish) commentary on global empire and rationalization eliminating places for the human person to live freely.

The Corporation, Capitalism: A Love Story, and Supersize Me were all released post-9/11. They screened Supersize Me in elementary and high schools when it was released.

Anti-globalization as a movement completely collapsed during the Occupy Wall Street protests. These movements had attitudes towards international mobility rights that completely undermined organized labor. Most of them recognized what impacts illegals were having on these industries but took the position that labor solidarity would somehow make everyone better off. This could have worked in theory except that they had no operational plan to enact this solidarity and the illegals were never interested in it to begin with.

Once the bankers realized that they could just pay off the OWS leadership with fake email jobs, you started to see the conventional partisan divide on globalism that we observe today, with liberals being in favor of it and conservatives opposed to it.

[CPLX]

> Anti-globalization as a movement completely collapsed during the Occupy Wall Street protests.

Not quite. Anti-globalization as a movement completely collapsed during the Obama administration and it's more accurate to call those protests the dying gasp.

The blame for taking the momentum away from the anticorporate left has to come most directly from the corporate and neoliberal left.

If you want to pick one thing to zero in on, as an example, pick the complete lack of consequences for the bankers and other architects of the great financial collapse, which was a direct decision by the Obama administration.

It's the direct antecedent of the culture of complete and total elite impunity that has poisoned American politics today.

[jghn]

As someone who is of the appropriate age & resonates with what you say: this doesn't account for the fact that Gen-X is the most MAGA generation.

[coldtea]

Does quite well. MAGA wasn't just the classical Bush-era gun-loving redneck shit, it brought some elements of sticking it to the bipartisan complacency, cynicism, and anti-corporatism. Which is also why big chunk of Gen Z also got on board with alt-right for example

[awesome_dude]

At the risk of stepping into USA POL (which is quite polarised)

MAGA is a Right wing response to corporates - they put all their faith into someone who they thought was going to take to the "elites" who they believed were responsible for the corporates being able to r*pe and pillage through society.

The Left wing response was Occupy Wall street and such.

On a similar note skinheads had a far left branch and a far right branch (the far right is what skinheads are now primarily seen as)

[jghn]

On paper, yes. But just like the tea party, and how "libertarian" has been completely coopted, they're really just tools for the same corporate interests as before.

[ErroneousBosh]

> MAGA is a Right wing response to corporates

No, it's a cynical marketing exercise designed to make people think that.

They're just selling hats. Hats that are costing way, way more than the sticker price, especially for the people who buy them.

[jasonwatkinspdx]

I'm roughly the same age.

Bourdain is much more Hunter S Thompson than Chuck, and while Bourdain used a wry sense of humor his fundamental message was always that humans are pretty much the same everywhere and can connect on more than what separates us.

That fundamentally is not Fight Club style whatever, and I just don't see how you could lump the two together unless you're so reflexively contrarian and anti-establishment you missed Bourdain was actually about something not that even if his rhetoric parallels it at times.

[CPLX]

I think there's plenty of commonality. Some themes include meditations on what makes us human, personal development via hardship and sacrifice, and rejection of cultural norms and expectations as a path to enlightenment.

[coldtea]

Hunter S Thompson is a child of the 60s/70s era and his style and content and most importantly driving forces, are quite different to both Bourdain and Chuck.

Bourdain is closer to Chuck age wise and content wise. And Chuck is not just what some people think Fight Club was (after also having misread it, which is like 1/15th of his literary output anyway, or just saw the movie and only got the big quotes and talking points, not the whole sentiment).

>nless you're so reflexively contrarian and anti-establishment you missed Bourdain was actually about something

And Chuck wasn't? Or you conflate Chuck with Tyler? And maybe Bourdain with just the food show host? Read his books and memoirs? Could just as well be from Chuck's Portland's recollections and late 80s/early 90s sentiments.

[tolerance]

The more I think about it, the less I’m convinced that there was ever such thing as a GenX or “Nirvana” generation to begin with. And the more I think about that, I’m starting to question whether every generation after the Boomers is just “Bang”, “Pop” and now, “Ping”.

[coldtea]

Seems more possible that you failed to understand Palahniuk.

What the parent wrote is spot on.

>And then diagnosing his suicide as a result of your apparent culture war grievances over sex jokes is just revolting behavior.

This quote is a fine example of the cultural decline the parent talks about, and which weighted heavily upon many people. Bourdain lamented this changes and celebrated the past rebellions time and again. So did others, including DFW.

[t0lo]

If you've read Bourdain's books and gone beyond just skimming his TV shows you'll know they share deeply similar writing and irreverent humour- talking about every type of escape and prank- from summers tripping on acid rooting everyone he could find to working for the mafia as a chef to pay off his heroin addiction. And it's reductive to think that just because someone is talking about sex jokes they're interested in 'culture wars'. Is it revolting for him to have essentially predicted his own death in the same way?

I miss him a lot, his passing affected me far more than that of most public figures, but I won't sanitise my memory of him or pretend his humour, or his way of seeing the world was cookie cutter. That, to me, is far more revolting.

[serf]

Palahniuk and Bourdain both talk about the fringes of 'punk' topics, but they have a totally different voice and objectives for doing so.

To me it sounds something like pairing up Brian Cox and Neil Degrasse Tyson, I mean they both talk about black holes..

For what it's worth, and i've read just about everything from both of those authors, Palahniuk is usually trying to illicit a feeling from the reader, be it disgust, ennui and nostalgia for a different time, or anger towards whatever 'the system' is at the momnent. He uses relatable anecdote to do so. His writing, in that vain, is very similar to Phillip Dick (who wrote 'a Scanner Darkly' from a lot of first-hand experiences)

Bourdain had similar prose mannerisms and favorite topics, but his objective was to instill wanderlust and an interest in the human spirit. Camaraderie, and hope for future opportunities to experience far away lands. A desire to seek more experiences regardless of what lesser prices and inconveniences must be paid in order to do so.

as a guy who grew up as a punk rocker in so-cal Palahniuk strikes me as the friend that couldn't make the show because ,even though he loves the band and the venue , there is homework due tomorrow -- whereas Bourdain always struck me as one of the folks i'd have woken up next to in someone elses' car the morning after the show and gone out to get breakfast with and talk about the night.

There is more difference between those two types of personality than I can write about, even if they gravitate around the same stuff.

I miss Bourdain.

[bravura]

Agreed, to me they are very different takes on what is a punk attitude.

Palahniuk: Underneath the veneer of the banal, you will discover everything is rotten and sycophantic but somehow tender and relatable.

Bourdain: Underneath the veneer of the banal, you will discover an honest struggle for something far more respectable than what is typically venerated. Eat their food, dance to their music, and you will enjoy.

[t0lo]

Later on Bourdain definitely moved past a lot of the initial style that gave him prominence (his breakout kitchen confidential was definitely of that moment in time like Palahniuk's) in terms of the shows he produced, but in the end, the thread of finding your own pleasurable interpretation of life- be it in the seedy kitchens, or on riverboats with wong-kar wai's filmographer trying to chase the "real hong kong"- that isn't beholden to anyone else, remained the defining trait of his work. His "authentic" style which wasn't a top 5 things to do in x city and more experiential and human didn't come from nowhere in terms of his personal ideology and life experiences/lifestyle.

I think it's the same mindset but in a different context. He was a well read guy with good creative sensitivities, and a fantastic conversationalist- but he's no analogue to your rick steins and rick steeves- just because he shows up on the same row on your streaming app. I think the desire to be free arrived for him long before he started frequently travelling.

And we're on our own for now- that world and those people get further and further away every year. We're seeing less and less people willing to or being allowed to contribute culturally, in the anti system humanist, mentally and socially free but financially trapped service worker, or anti sensationalist experiencer of human culture way.

[jasonwatkinspdx]

You get it.

[woodruffw]

From my vantage point, Anthony Bourdain is immensely popular with friends of all kinds of political and cultural flavors. I actually can’t think of a single person I know who dislikes Anthony Bourdain. If there’s some kind of cultural headwind against his style, it certainly isn’t manifest in mainstream consumer culture itself.

[decimalenough]

I'm personally a fan of Tony, but there's no denying that he was quite often an asshole. He was notoriously demanding of his crew, dumped his first wife after he got famous, dumped his second wife and child when he met an Italian actress half his age, nepo'd her to shittily direct some episodes and fired his cameraman when he dared complain, etc etc.

[woodruffw]

Yeah, I don't think he was a nice person. I also don't particularly like or dislike him, but I think the idea that he's some sort of representative of a lost time in American cultural values is basically incorrect -- he exists in a large and extremely popular "gonzo" pantheon that is basically a direct production of American cultural values.

[coldtea]

Those are more gossip fodder than things to actually complain about. Was often an asshole? Who isn't? Divorced twice? So, like tens of millions of people?

Fell for a hot italian actress half his age? And his writing and descriptions of his spirit made you think this would be out of character for him, like he was some victorian pearl clutcher or something, and so this dissapointed you?

[EnPissant]

I quite disliked him. He always came off as a smug asshole, and I think the evidence backs that up.

His core shtick was being a food hipster which often involved putting down others preferences to prove how superior he was. For example saying that a Chicken McNugget was the most disgusting thing he has ever eaten.

He treated his staff like trash on one hand while publicly proclaiming "Mistreat the floor staff and you are dead to me." for cool guy points.

Add to that the incredible narcissism of dumping both his wives for younger women as soon as he could, but then playing the victim when his new younger wife cheats on him.

[coldtea]

>His core shtick was being a food hipster which often involved putting down others preferences to prove how superior he was. For example saying that a Chicken McNugget was the most disgusting thing he has ever eaten.

Wow, didn't know he was THAT right about things!

[EnPissant]

So edgy?

[jyounker]

It was only a staple in your mind. Those views you remember were very much reactions against what already existed, and where things were headed. Things never changed direction, and here we are.

[ozgrakkurt]

Have to love the content about how some sociopathic crazy guy is so “successful”.