Bourdain in Iran

“Good to be here… finally. It’s taken some time ... like, a lot of time ... like, four years I’ve been trying. Finally.” This was Anthony Bourdain in Iran, “a big blank spot on nearly every traveller’s resume.”

It was never just about the travel, or even the food.

Anthony Bourdain was always after some kind of deeper meaning, even if he — he of all people — struggled at times to find the right words. For someone who kept to much to himself that was personal, Parts Unknown opened the wider world to countless people from all races and all cultures across the globe, to not just other cultures but a different way of thinking. “The journey is part of the experience, an expression of the seriousness of one’s intent,” he once said. “One doesn’t take the A train to Mecca.”

That’s why one episode of Parts Unknown in particular resonates to this day.

Iran premiered on the 2nd of November in 2014. Still, within the first 10 minutes of the program, it is clear — even if it may not have been clear to Bourdain or his hosts Jason Rezaian, at the time the Washington Post’s Tehran correspondent, and Rezaian’s Iranian-born journalist wife Yeganeh Salehi during their long lunch together at a sitdown eaterie in the mountains overlooking the outskirts of Tehran.

Over chelo-kebabs, saffron rice and flatbread, Bourdain recalled in a pithy — and exquisitely personal — op-ed in the Washington Post, weeks after he and his producer/director Tom Vitale, cameraman Zach Zamboni and other ZPZ crew members had returned home, but weeks before the episode aired on CNN.

“There was a family mood to the afternoon,” Bourdain recalled, “parents with children, older couples and teenagers — all happy to be at leisure on a beautiful day.

“They delighted in pointing out for our cameras all the names of dishes which had originated in Persia (kebab, biryani, etc.),” Bourdain wrote in a pithy — and personal — op-ed in the Washington Post in August that year. “There was a family mood to the afternoon, parents with children, older couples and teenagers — all happy to be at leisure on a beautiful day.”

As was Bourdain’s habit — and, remember, journalists do like to talk, at least those journalists eager to share with the world what they have learned about life and life’s deeper meanings — the conversation took on a life of its own and broadened and widened to include Bourdain’s curiosity about one of the world’s oldest cultures and the unique part in history ancient Persia and present-day Iran alike have played owing to its geographical, spiritual, political and culinary location between East and West.

“They acknowledged the difficulties of living in a nation very different from the United States, where they had last lived,” Bourdain wrote.

“But they were clearly in love with Tehran, and they spoke respectfully and affectionately of the country they lived in. They had not let the difficulties of reporting for an American newspaper get them down — and they did their best to explain what, for outsiders, would appear inexplicable. At one point, I asked if they planned to move back to the States any time soon. No, they told me, because it was so easy to love the city and the country. This feeling, they said, was widely shared. They were content. They were not agents provocateurs.”

One has to understand that to get to this point in the program — and this is just 10 minutes in, remember — Bourdain and Vitale needed to introduce first-time viewers possibly unfamiliar with Iran and why it has played such a seemingly outsized role in the news headlines, then and now. told the history of Iran in the style of one of those Academy Award-winning short films, drawn in jittery, scratchy charcoal-and-ink stick figures while a small girl tells the story of Iran’s modern-day history in a halting, lilting child’s voice, a story told from a child’s point of view in a style reminiscent of then 11-year-old child activist and Nobel Peace Prize laureate Malala Yousafzai in David Guggenheim’s 2015 animated film He Named Me Malala.

“Once upon a time, there was an ancient kingdom where they found a lot of magical black stuff under the ground. But two other kingdoms had the key to the magical black stuff. And when they wouldn't share, the people of the ancient kingdom got mad.

“They voted, and their leader said the magical black stuff is ours to keep. But the other kingdoms were afraid of losing all of the magical black stuff, so they gave money to some bad men to get rid of the leader. They put back in power another leader. And they gave him money, too.

“To some, he was a good king. But to others, he could be very cruel. After many years the people of the kingdom got mad. This time, even madder. So they scared the king away forever.

“And then things started to get really messed up.”

“OK,” Bourdain says simply in the program, in voiceover.

“OK, that’s a simplistic and incomplete way to sum up the last 100-odd years of Iranian history. But the point is there were a lot of issues and differing agendas leading up to the explosion of rage known as the Iranian hostage crisis.

“Look, we know what Iran the government does. George W. Bush famously called them part of the Axis of Evil. Their proxies in Iraq have done American soldiers real harm. There was no doubt of this.

“But I hope I can be forgiven for finding these undeniable truths hard to reconcile with how we are treated on the streets everywhere we go.”

Because, as Bourdain noted in his show-opening voiceover, “I am so confused. It wasn't supposed to be like this.

“Of all of the places, of all the countries, all the years of travelling, it's here in Iran that I am greeted most warmly by total strangers. The other stuff is there: the Iran we've read about, heard about, seen in the news. But this -- this, I wasn't prepared for.”

And the food!

“So forget about the politics if you can, for a moment. How about the food? The food here is amazing.

Chelo-kabob is as close as you get to a national dish and the king of kabobs. Ground lamb with spices is a good place to start. …

“(And) chelo-kabob wouldn't be complete without Persian rice. Fluffy, long-grained, and perfectly seasoned with saffron, the rice in this country is unlike anything you have ever had.”

“As print journalists, our job is difficult,” Rezaian told him. “But it's also kind of easy. Because there is so much to write about. You know it, the difficult part is convincing people on the other side of the world that what we are telling you and seeing in front of our eyes is actually there. When you walk down the street, you see a different side of things. People are proud. The culture is vibrant. People have a lot to say.”

And then. Moments later.

Bourdain again: “Despite the hopeful nature of our conversation, six weeks after the filming of this episode, Jason and Yeganeh were mysteriously arrested and detained by the police. Sadly in Iran, this sort of thing is not an isolated incident.”

Little less than an hour later, after an episode of Parts Unknown that showcases the show at its finest, by turns warm and witty, alluring and acerbic, exciting and sad, and enthralling to watch, as in a massive, thunderous sandstorm surrounding the Milad Tower, Iran’s tallest building at 1,000 feet and a source of national pride, with Bourdain, his crew and government minders trapped briefly in the tower’s glass-walled observation deck (“Stay away from the the glass!”), that puts CGI-generated special effects in Hollywood movies to shame. This is real. There are moments in Iran, good and bad, that are just about unforgettable. And sad.

Remember the name Nika Shakarami, a teenager who was arrested and died while in custody during the 2022 anti-government protests in Iran. She was 16.

“After ten weeks,” Bourdain says at the program’s end, “Yeganeh was finally released. But as I read these lines, Jason remains a prisoner. His future and the reasons for their arrest are still unknown.

Fast-forward to the here and now.

Rezaian, as it turned out, was released in January 2016 in a prisoner exchange with the US government. He had been charged with espionage, which was bogus, charges, Rezaian has gone to pains to point out since he had nothing, absolutely nothing to do with his interview with Bourdain. In fact, he said, his interview with Bourdain — widely known and well respected worldwide — was a kind of protection. During Rezaian’s months and years behind bars, Bourdain was a tireless advocate for his safety and eventual release. In a 2018 interview with media columnist Brian Stelter, host of CNN’s Reliable Sources, Rezaian made the point abundantly clear.

“The show actually had nothing to do with us being arrested,” Rezaian told Stelter. “If anything, I think our appearance there — with really one of the most beloved television personalities and people of our generation — raised awareness in a different kind of way that nothing else could have.”

Rezaian himself wasn’t able to see the Parts Unknown episode until after his release — obviously.

“I mean, it aired originally while I was in prison,” he told NPR in an interview years later. “So the first time I watched it was a few days after my release, and I thought it was fantastic. I still do. …

“I'm so glad that I was able to take part in that production, and that there's this sort of indelible historical document that Yegi and I were part of that and part of that moment in Iran. And yeah. I mean, for me, I think of it as one of the most important things that's happened to us in our lives. I also think it's probably the best representation of modern Iran that's ever appeared on American television.”

Now, in the weeks, months and years after Bourdain’s passing, the shoe is on the other foot.

Rezaian asserted, in not so many words, that it has almost become a sacred responsibility to keep Bourdain’s memory alive.

"We should keep reading him, we should keep watching his shows, we should keep travelling around the world.”

Hail and amen.

Supplementary reading, in Bourdain’s own words:

     https://explorepartsunknown.com/iran/field-notes-from-iran/

     https://explorepartsunknown.com/iran/field-notes-from-iran/

CNN

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Bourdain in Tanzania

“I went looking for the dream of Africa. I woke up in Tanzania.” This was Anthony Bourdain on East Africa, in 2014. As with so many explorers before him, from David Livingstone to Sir Richard Francis Burton and Henry Morton Stanley, he found what he was looking for.

This one was personal for me.

I have been to Tanzania numerous times as a wildlife photographer, a wanderer curious about the birthplace of humankind, and an admirer of Anthony Bourdain’s work and life outlook.

Palaeoanthropologist Mary Leakey’s discovery in July 1959 — the year I was born — of the Laetoli footprints, 3.75 million-year-old fossilized hominid remains at Olduvai Gorge in the Serengeti plains of northern Tanzania, included a jaw bone of one of our earliest recorded ancestors, Zinjanthropus boisei — literally “East Africa man.”

The name was later revised to Australopithecus boisei, the australopithecines being the closest known relatives of modern humans and potentially the missing link between the hominid split from the apes of the mountain forests to Tanzania’s west and who we are today.

If nothing else, this is where humans learned to walk upright, on two legs. That’s a big deal!

It makes perfect sense that the lure of Africa — “I went looking for the dream of Africa. I woke up in Tanzania,” Bourdain said in Tanzania’s opening voiceover in a CNN Parts Unknown episode from 2014 — would prove irresistible to a philosopher traveller who, in four consecutive episodes in what would prove to be Parts Unknown’s arguably strongest season, lifted the veil on Paraguay, Vietnam, Tanzania and Iran over four weeks in October and November 2014.

As an admirer of Tony Bourdain’s work and life outlook — albeit as a latecomer to the Bourdain oeuvre — I was curious how he would approach Tanzania. What, if anything, would he get wrong?

Nothing, as it turned out.

It’s a strong episode, one of his finest, but possibly only someone close to it can truly understand just how much thought went into it, much of that thought not evident on the screen. This is not your typical touristy what’s a good place to stay and eat TV travelogue (“and now a word from our sponsors”). This was deeper. This was Bourdain.

For starters, take another look at the name Zinjanthropus. Zinj is the ancient Arabic word for the East African coast, and it was from here — Zanzibar, to be exact — that many of the early European expeditions were launched. It was from Zanzibar, in January 1866, that David Livingstone, of “Dr. Livingstone, I presume” fame and (mis)fortune, ventured into the heart of Africa, tasked by the Royal Geographical Society in London to map the country between Lake Nyasa and Lake Tanganyika to solve once and for all the dispute over the exact location of the source of the Nile. It was from Zanzibar, too, that Henry Morton Stanley ventured into the heart of Africa in March 1871 with no fewer than 192 porters by some accounts, to suss out what the hell had happened to Livingstone after Livingstone was reported missing and presumably lost to history.

This is the first thing that Bourdain and Parts Unknown’s producers got right: He begins his journey to the Serengeti plains and Ngorongoro highlands in Zanzibar, in the winding alleys of Stone Town, an old, stone-walled city redolent with the atmosphere and cultural influences of Islam, India, Asia and mainland Africa, a semi-autonomous island state just 30 miles off the African coast and birthplace of the Swahili language, an amalgamation of Bantu, Arabic, Portuguese, English and German “loanwords” and the unofficial national language of the entirety of East Africa. Little known fact:

Zanzibar is world famous — and rightly so — for its seafood; its fish market is one of the busiest, noisiest, most crowded, most active markets on the entire continent of Africa (54 countries, if anyone’s counting, depending on military coups, civil wars, regional splits and the redrawing of international borders). In Tanzania’s opening section, in the shadow of the actual stone house where Livingstone stayed on numerous occasions and where, as a commemorative plaque notes, “his body rested on its long journey home,” Bourdain goes potty for seafood, perhaps mindful that, as delectable as Zanzibar’s cuisine is, he won’t see anything like it once he ventures into Tanzania’s interior. In the Maasai tribal lands of Ngorongoro and Ol Doinyo Lengai, the Maasai “Mountain of God,” the food is pretty much as it has been since the 15th century, name: basic.

Fun fact: The hardest section by far of those early European explorations of the African interior from Zanzibar was the first 200 miles — basically, snake-infested, insect-ridden, hot-hot-hot, humid, virtually impenetrable swamp, home to virtually every tropical disease known to science and humankind, a stretch of African wilderness so gnarly and nasty and outright unfriendly to human habitation that many 19th-century expeditions simply gave up, turned around and tried to make it back to Zanzibar in one piece. Most weren’t able to manage even that.

So Bourdain, a 21st-century man living in the 21st century, does the prudent thing: He flies.

Another fun fact. The flight, by single-engine bush plane from Zanzibar to the safari outfitting town of Arusha in Tanzania’s northern district, is arguably one of the most stunning scenic flights in the world, because it takes you over the Maasai Steppe — itself no fun to cross in the 19th century as the local tribesmen were only too happy to waylay and shiskebob passing Europeans — and over the shoulder of Mt. Kilimanjaro, a mountain so vast that to fly right over its shoulder is a stunning, and sobering, sight in its own right. Landing in Arusha, Bourdain hops into a 4-by-4 on the long and winding road to Ngorongoro and from there, into the Serengeti plains.

Bourdain is acerbic, cynical, sharp as a tack and rarely at a loss for something to say — we know this. There’s something about the proximity of so many wild animals of so many different species, though — lions, elephants, hippos, giraffes, zebras and 1.5 million wildebeest (this, hard as it may be to believe, is actual fact) — that he’s stunned into a kind of silent reverie.

His host for this section of his expedition is not some cloying, overly chatty tour guide but Ingela Jansson, a Swedish field biologist with the Serengeti Lion Project (lionresearch.org). These are not zoo lions or circus lions but the real thing.

In my own travels through Africa’s wilderness regions, I’ve found that field biologists and conservationists working in the field, in places like the Ngorogorongo Conservation Area Authority (https://www.ncaa.go.tz) and Serengeti National Park make the most reliable and forthcoming hosts, should one be fortunate enough to meet them and convince them you’re not wasting their time — something Bourdain and his producers clearly got.

Bourdain spends time in a Maasai village, breaking bread to speak with the village chief and, in one poignant scene, appearing visibly shaken by being invited to participate in the killing, skinning, dismembering, cleaning, and cooking of a goat for the ceremonial meal provided to village guests of certain repute and status in Maasai society.

Bourdain also touches on the political tensions between the Maasai people and the national government in Tanzania’s capital, Dodoma. Official policy is to favour tourism and regional development over the rights of indigenous people who actually live on the land, a policy that, if anything, has become even more fraught today, in June 2024.

A young Massai moran running over the savanna both begins and ends the program, a kind of moral, philosophical and spiritual bookend.

The effect is pure Bourdain — visual and yet subtle and heartbreaking by turns. No, this is not your typical TV travel documentary.

I’ve penned a number of “look back” reviews of Parts Unknown for the group in recent weeks. If I seem to have been particularly inspired by this one, it’s in no small part because I wrote this while listening to the music of Mali guitarist and singer/songwriter Rokia Traoré — thank you, Spotify — and as anyone with even a passing familiarity with wild lions will tell you, music hath charms to soothe the savage breast.

I remember the first time I saw the chain of green, mist-laden volcanoes that, viewed from a distance, form the spine of the Ngorongoro highlands, a chain of sloping green hills that rise from the dusty plains of this part of East Africa, like a vision out of Jurassic Park, if dinosaurs rampaging across a jungle island were actual dinosaurs rampaging across a jungle island. I remember thinking, as Bourdain himself may have thought, in his own words, holy f**k, this is where it all began. It’s impossible to look at the misty hills of Ngorongoro and not think, something happened here.

Bourdain felt it, clearly. It’s one of the reasons why, for me, Tanzania represents some of his finest work.

The green hills of Africa came first in the development of humankind. Mesopotamia, the Mediterranean, ancient Egypt, the Levant, the original civilizations of Babylon and Persia and the violent turmoil that roils the Middle East to this day, all came later.

At the outset of Tanzania, I worried about how Bourdain might screw it up, especially considering the impossibly high standards he set in his other, earlier Parts Unknown programs. I feared it would prove something of a disappointment.

No worries there, as it turned out. Trust me when I say this — Bourdain nailed it bang-on. That’s who he was. That’s why we recognize him and respect him and honour him to this day.

Supplemental reading, in Bourdain’s own words:

    https://explorepartsunknown.com/tanzania/bourdains-field-notes-tanzania/

    https://explorepartsunknown.com/tanzania/bourdain-off-the-cuff-tanzania/

CNN

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Bourdain in Vietnam

“Fellow travellers, this is what you want,” Anthony Bourdain said at the outset of one of his most poignant, stirring episodes of Parts Unknown. “This is what you need. This is the path to true happiness and wisdom.” Good morning, Vietnam.

First of all, how good is this background music?

One of the first things— among many — that strikes one on first viewing Anthony Bourdain’s Parts Unknown episode Vietnam, the fifth episode of Parts Unknown’s breakout fourth season, is how sweet the sound be. None of this lazy, ratty, by-rote, AI-generated “music” that marks so many of today’s documentary programs — hello, Netfilx! — but rather a carefully crafted soundscape in the vein of so many of Bourdain’s Asia-based programs, which introduced music aficionados as well as foodies to the musical stylings of Lekha Rathnakumar, Wayan Udayana, Haitham Hamwi and Gokhan Kirdar. This ain’t  Nickelback.

It’s worth remembering that Parts Unknown’s fourth season, which aired from September through November in 2014, featured Shanghai, the Bronx (“Hip hop came from nowhere else; it could have come from nowhere but the Bronx”), Paraguay, Vietnam, Tanzania, and Iran back-to-back-to-back — no fewer than three of the four episodes Bourdain himself was most proud of throughout Parts Unknown’s entire run.

Vietnam marked Bourdain’s seventh foray into Vietnam for the TV cameras, beginning with A Cook’s Tour (three episodes, starting in 2002) and winding through No Reservations (three episodes, dating from August 2005 through March 2010) but his first to the former Vietnamese imperial capital of Huê, the country’s cultural, culinary and spiritual heart, and scene of some of the fiercest, most intractable fighting of the Vietnam War.

That’s worth noting, too, because Bourdain managed to bridge the quiet reflection and soft-spoken beauty of central Vietnam  in the first half and the harrowing yet strangely restorative second half that focuses on the pain and anguish of a jungle war replete with one of the heaviest bombing campaigns in the history of modern warfare, and how the entire region has managed to recover — and forgive — in the war’s aftermath.

That’s a hard line to walk, and yet it’s that very shift in tone that speaks to Bourdain’s remarkable ability to be all things to all people, without pandering to popular opinion or relying on cheap sentiment coupled with moral outrage. Vietnam is an astounding hour of television, and it’s easy to see how Bourdain won the hearts and minds of hardened, experienced war correspondents like Christiane Amanpour (Amanpour, lest we forget, was instrumental in reporting the Siege of Sarajevo, from Sarajevo itself during the mid-1990s,  during the carnage of the Bosnian War — reporting that played no small part in Western leaders’ decision to intervene and end the war, by force if necessary.)

Vietnam’s first half finds Bourdain navigating the flat grey, mist-shrouded streets of central Huê on his trusty scooter (“One of the greatest joys of life is riding a scooter through Vietnam”) before pulling off the street on a whim to stop at a street stall and share a bowl of com hén, (clam rice, a Huê classic) with Vietnamese-American writer and author Nguyên Qui Dúc.

From there, Bourdain wends his way through a bowl of bún bò Huê (a spicy beef noodle soup Bourdain dubs “the greatest soup in the world”), and he’s clearly in his element, at peace with the world.

And then. A tonal shift, dramatic and unforgettable. Bourdain pays his respects at the tunnels of Vin Moc in Quang Tri province, ground zero in the battle for Huê in the bloody, bitter aftermath of the 1969 Tet Offensive, where at one point some 3,000 Huê civilians and alleged collaborators were massacred by North Vietnamese fighters, their bodies buried in a mass grave outside the city. One local witness, who lived through the worst of the worst, recalls his experiences of being born and living the first nine years of his life in the tunnels during some of the most intense bombing of the war (“The earth moved, but the noise was not loud. In here, it would not collapse. This side vibrated strongly. These two sides only gently. All was vibrating like that, but did not collapse.”)

Bourdain is introspective — the quiet American. How could anyone with a pulse and some semblance of a heart not help be introspective, given Americans’ involvement in the war.

Bourdain is a man of the future, though, and not just the past — it was one of his many saving graces — and you can’t help but sense that Vietnam, the country and not just the episode, has come full circle by the time the hour comes to a close.

“My place of dreams,” Bourdain began. “My spirit house. The city of ghosts.

“Huê is a place I've never been before, but it's still Vietnam, with all the things, the smells, the sounds, the details I love so much.

“I've been all over Vietnam, a place I feel a special connection to. My first love is a place I remain besotted with, fascinated by. … Hit (me) with some hot clam broth, and you're on your way. I'm back. Back in Vietnam, s**t-eating grin for the duration. A giddy, silly, foolish man beyond caring. A cold local beer. Huda, my preferred brand, in every way. Clams with pork cracklings. How could that not be good?

“This is the way so many of the great meals of my life have been enjoyed. Sitting in the street, eating something out of a bowl that I'm not exactly sure what it is. Scooters going by. So delicious. … Where have you been all my life?”

“So we wish you have a good trip,” Bourdain is told. “A good fly. Will you come back after you return to New York?”

Bourdain: “I'll come back to Vietnam, always. Cheers, everybody, and thank you, all of you, for all your help.”

And then, in voiceover:

“This is who came out of the ground, out of the jungle, the darkness, when it was all over.

“And this is what they did.”

And how.

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Bourdain in Paraguay

Parts Unknown meets Finding Your Roots in an hour oft described as one of Bourdain’s more underrated outings, as he ventured down the jungle rivers of Paraguay to find out exactly what happened to his great-great-great granddaddy Jean Bourdain in the 1850s. Cue the Apocalypse Now music.

Please spare a thought, if you will, for Anthony Bourdain.

There he was in Paraguay, a land-locked country of sweaty, impenetrable jungle, murderous heat and humidity, mosquitos the size of wasps, virtually every tropical disease known to science, a long history of, in Bourdain’s words, “an unending line of dictators,” not to mention a long, colourful history (it is rumoured) of cannibalism. Talk about Kitchen Confidential and the need to keep certain practices, well, confidential.

Bourdain was searching for whatever happened to his long lost great-great-great grandfather, Jean Bourdain, hoping against hope that the missing link in his family lineage would turn out to an adventurer with a storied past worthy of the tao of Bourdain.

Then, midway through the Parts Unknown episode Paraguay, which aired 10 years ago this October, he learns that great-great-great grandad was a chapelier.

A hat maker.

“A hat maker?” Bourdain looks, if not downcast exactly, something close.

“I have to say that disappoints me. Like, a lot.

“The whole elusive wing of mysterious South American Bourdains were the Project Runway contestants of their day?”

The word disappointment doesn’t even begin to cover it.

It’s as if you had a Finding Your Roots episode devoted to your own family history, only to find out that you come from a long line of certified public accountants. Honest ones, mind, but seriously, how exciting can that be?

But wait, there’s more, Bourdain learns just moments later.

It turns out that at some point during Jean Bourdain’s seemingly somnolent, short life in 1850s Paraguay — yes, he died there — it turns out that he requisitioned a shipment of 200 boxes of fireworks.

Wait, what?

Fireworks?

There were not even more than 200 or 300 wealthy families who, living in Paraguay at the time, might,  sometimes on a birthday perhaps, pop off a firecracker or two. But 200 boxes worth? And how big are the boxes?

No, no, no, you’ve got this all wrong, the local private investigator Bourdain enlisted to help him in his search tells him. It turns out that feux d’artifice — the French word for fireworks — was Paraguayan code for something else.

“So are you suggesting something untoward?” Bourdain asks hopefully.

“Weapons.”

“Weapons?”

“Yes.”

“He was a merchant of death? Awesome. You know, my aunt always said he was a gunrunner.

“We figured she was full of s**t. I mean, she also said she was in the Resistance, you know, but everybody in France said that.”

Maybe great-great-great grandad wasn’t a boring guy after all.

The revelation is almost enough — almost — to make this 21st-century river expedition seem worthwhile. Bourdain always said Apocalypse Now was his favourite film. One of them, anyway.

There’s something about these journeys up jungle rivers in search of god-knows-what that appealed to him.

That, and the ancestral angle.

Bourdain: “Sometime in the mid-19th century, 1850s, Jean Bourdain emigrated to South America, first in Argentina but apparently came here. That's really almost all I know for sure.

“Did he die by the sword? Did he die of old age? Did he die of syphilis? I have no idea. I'd like to know. I would like to find a gravesite. That would be great.

“You know, my father died at 57. His father in, I think, in his 20s, I believe. I'll be 58 in June. I think I am the longest-living male Bourdain in possibly ever.”

“So you're lonely in the world?” his fixer asks him.

Bourdain: “I am lonely in the world, yes. If I could solve the mystery of the elusive Jean Bourdain, it would make me very happy.”

Here’s the thing.

In 104 episodes over 12 seasons, Paraguay is often cited as one of Bourdain’s most unfairly overlooked outings.

In a 2019 interview with The Takeout food website, Tom Vitale, Bourdain’s director-producer, father confessor and spiritual consigliere for some 16 years, cited Paraguay as one of his personal favourites of the Parts Unknown episodes he made with Bourdain. (Libya, Copenhagen and Iran were the others.)

As recently as five months ago, a Bourdainophile posted a subreddit on Reddit calling Paraguay Bourdain’s most underrated episode.

Some of the follow-up comments ranged from, “I really like it when he (went) to non-touristy Latin American countries,” to, “As someone who lived there (Paraguay), that is a favourite of mine as well. (He) did a pretty good job of communicating the feel of the place. Got a few things wrong … for instance, some of his conclusions about Paraguayan history are wrong.

“Early presidents that he calls unhinged dictators” — well, to be fair, Bourdain’s actual words were, “the most maniacal, megalomaniacal pisspot dictators …  — “are widely regarded as national heroes within the country. Though to an outsider, I could see how you would see them that way. They were a bit unhinged, and they were certainly dictators.”

Oookay…

“Foodwise (though), he did a great job. Nearly everything he ate was common and typically Paraguayan.

See? Tastes likes chicken.

Back to Jean Bourdain.

You could be forgiven for wondering at this point, why would a dashing dandy and would-be adventurer from small-town Bordeaux with a yearning for exploration and danger consider moving half a world away to a disease- and insect-ridden tropical jungle to find his destiny? Funny you should ask.

The mystery of what happened to great-great-great granddad in the jungles of Paraguay consumed Anthony Bourdain and his younger brother Chris for the best part of their adult lives. Bourdain might never have actually believed he would get there one day but, hey, CNN was paying the bills, and this annoying guy Vitale kept insisting it would make good TV, so why not?

Besides, the history of the Colony of Nueva Burdeos — its actual name, by the way, not the “Nouveau Bordeaux” bandied about in the show — is, well, real.

According to no less an authoritative source than encyclopedia.com,  the colony was an “abortive colonization experiment in the Paraguayan during the 1850s aimed to improve relations with Europe and increase agricultural production, but failed on both counts.

“The opening of Platine waterways after the fall of the Argentine dictator José Manuel de Rosas in 1852 enabled Paraguay to reach out to foreign nations for diplomatic and commercial contacts. The 1853– 1854 European tour of Francisco Solano López sealed several such agreements and opened the door to European immigration into Paraguay. French representatives, responding to López's overtures, agreed to permit the transport from Bordeaux of some four hundred settlers who, with the material aid of the Asunción government, would build an agricultural colony in the Gran Chaco. The French settlers began to arrive in May 1855 … but from the first, everything went wrong.”

Really? What could go wrong?

“A lot of people have ventured to Paraguay over the years in search of some sort of dream,” Bourdain later wrote in his Field Notes. “I’ve looked for (my) mysterious ancestor before — in Uruguay with my younger brother, Chris. We were disappointed when our trail ran cold. We were left with a cryptic reference to the news that Jean had died in Asunción, Paraguay, which begged the question: What the hell was he doing in Paraguay? And where is Paraguay anyway?”

Where indeed.

Is Paraguay one of Parts Unknown’s finest hours?

Mais oui. Certainly.

It’s funny, too. Often when least expected. As in the moment when Bourdain considers buying a shotgun while making his way up the jungle river.

“Let’s see … I am tempted by the offer of a cheap shotgun for sale. Me: Fear, hot sunny day, a shotgun, a producer. That’s not a good mix.”

Oh dear. Cue the producer. Tom, over to you.

CNN

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Bourdain in Shanghai

“What are our expectations? Which of the things we desire are within reach? If not now, when? And will there be some left for me?” Ten years ago, Anthony Bourdain asked existential questions of the rising economic power that is Shanghai in Parts Unknown’s 4th season opener.

When Anthony Bourdain raised the curtain on Parts Unknown’s fourth season of culinary globetrotting by holding his life’s lens to Shanghai, financial capital of China’s merging of the Old World and New in September 2014, 10 years ago, give or take, the die was cast. Regular CNN News viewers and Bourdain acolytes alike knew what to expect — or at least thought they did.

Hardly anyone would have expected that the season opener’s look at modern China would open, not with Bourdain’s by-now familiar voiceover, acerbic and laden with a sharp, cutting wit, but with a single, spoken musical note, a mezzo-soprano — nǚ gāoyīn — rising into an almost ethereal realm while Bourdain, wearing a coloured pocket square or foulard, made his way through the densely packed nighttime streets of what is now arguably the 21st century’s seat of economic power. Not New York, Bourdain’s hometown. Or London. Or Hong Kong. Shanghai. “This is not, you might have noticed, normal for me,” Bourdain would later admit in his field notes — not in the program itself — for CNN.

Right from the beginning, viewers would have noticed the change. This was going to be a different Bourdain. More reflective. Confident but gracious.
“What are our expectations? Which of the things we desire are within reach? If not now, when? And will there be some left for me?”

Comfortable in the company of outrageous wealth — everyone appreciates a dinner companion who can hold a conversation with style and wit, even those with enough money that they don’t have to care what anyone else thinks — and yet still close to his working-class roots. Here, today, more than five years after his sudden passing, newcomers to the Tao of Bourdain, of which I’m one, are singing his praises on Reddit, Instagram and the other present-day town halls of social media.

“There is a method to my madness,” Bourdain wrote — words that would not make it into the actual show. “These tiny notes of colour are our first venture into actual production design — a calculated effort to give the episode a specific look.”

Shanghai would not be TV. It was cinema. One can only imagine what the business suits inside CNN’s executive offices thought when they first saw Shanghai in its final cut. One doesn’t have to imagine what people in Shanghai, or what the increasingly inscrutable government seat in power in China thought, yesterday or today. By this time, everyone, anyone with a working TV and access to the Internet — which includes virtually all 26.32 million people (2019) of China’s most wired, most socially, economically and politically influential city — knew who Bourdain was.

Back to the episode itself.

Bourdain was a rock star by this point, but he understood, as well as anyone did or could have, that it is about the band, not the frontman.

“I have long been besotted with the works of Chinese director Wong Kar-wai and his frequent cinematographer Christopher Doyle,” Bourdain continued in his Field Notes. “Their films In the Mood for Love and Chungking Express are gorgeous meditations on longing and desire and missed connections. They are spectacularly shot — and a while back I noticed how tiny elements of colour in the foreground of the frames are often connected to similar colours in the background, giving scenes a lush, unified atmosphere that feels natural and undesigned.

“So we tried — as best and as cheaply as possible — to do that. You will notice scenes tied together by colours.

“Cameraman Mo Fallon and cameraman/editor Nick Bridgen did, I think, truly epic work on this one.”

The familiar Parts Unknown signatures are there. The food, for one. Starting with FuChun XiaoLong, where, joined by Professor Zhou Lin, dean of Shanghai Jiao Tong University at the time, Bourdain talked about Chinese economic growth and global geopolitics over steamed soup dumplings and fried pork chops with brown sauce.

Bourdain’s odyssey continued from there to Chun Restaurant, a restaurant with “no menu and no waiting list,” as he described it, “and you only get served if the chef and proprietor knows and/or likes the look of you.”

As the website Eat Like Bourdain posted this past January, the food was served hot and ready: you bao xia (wok-fried whole shrimp with ginger, garlic, salt, and soy), hong shao rou (braised pork belly with cinnamon, sugar, and anise), yan du xian (clay pot soup with bean curd stock, pork belly, tofu, and bamboo), and snail, duck, and fish dishes with rich sweet and soy sauces.

The coup de grace: French oysters in champagne at Shanghai’s Roosevelt Sky Bar as the special guest of Roosevelt China Investments president and CEO Tim Tse, followed by an elegant sitdown meal at Bund 27 and House of Roosevelt with a gathering of some of Shanghai’s more successful and politically connected citizens, among them architect and designer Zeva Wang and real estate developer Daniel Yung.

Crossing over to the other side of the street — literally, as well as figuratively — Bourdain shared a dish of ziran paigu (cumin-rubbed ribs) with hacker-turned-entrepreneur Thomas Yao at Di Shui Dong restaurant. The two talked about freedom on the Internet and the future of technology, dangerous topics to discuss in public, then as now.

Bourdain again:

“I mentioned longing and desire. And in many ways, that’s what this episode is about. China is experiencing an explosive period of change and growth as millions of people are joining the middle class. Millions and millions of people who want and will soon demand the cars, TV screens, apartments, gasoline, access to information, and mobility most of us take for granted.

“China — Shanghai in particular — is a very different-looking place every time I go. And I believe that the world as a whole, largely because of what’s happening in China, will be a very different-looking place. If you live in New York, as I do, and think you live in the most modern, sophisticated city in the world — or even at its centre — Shanghai can come as a rude surprise. In spite of its nominally communist system, it is the most go-go, unfettered, money- and status-mad, materialistic place on Earth. Its skyline alone is confirmation that money talks loudest. In no other city could you build the world’s largest, tallest ominously curved phallus —stick it right up into the clouds like a giant F**K YOU! to the world — and not have trouble with the NIMBYs.”

Oh dear. No one wants trouble with the NIMBYs. Except, of course, when they do.

The thing about Shanghai is, they no longer care. They don’t have to.

Bourdain ended Shanghai as he began it:

“What are our expectations? Which of the things we desire are within reach? If not now, when? And will there be some left for me?”

Nǐhǎo.

CNN

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