Bourdain in Hawaii

Ohana. It’s a Hawaiian term meaning “family,” and family is probably not what devoted Anthony Bourdain followers expect if they come across a Parts Unknown episode dedicated to Hawai’i, that heavily touristed island state found in the Pacific Ocean some 3,200 km (2,000 miles) southwest of the US mainland.

For Bourdain, family was both personal and private. However, the idea of family as both a social ideal and a balm from the vicissitudes of life lies at the root of this reflective and unusual episode of Parts Unknown, which first aired on CNN on June 14, 2015. This was a strikingly different hour of television than Bourdain’s foray to Hawaii for No Reservations in March 2008, some seven years earlier.

Bourdain was the same man he was then, of course — none of us really, the philosophers say, we simply become more of who we are — but the Hawaii of 2015 caught him in a more reflective mood. Hawaii is one of my favourite Parts Unknown episodes for that reason, and not just because it both opens and closes with Bourdain breaking bread with one of my favourite writers, Paul Theroux, New England born, a resident of London, England for much of his early writing career, and now an avowed — and passionate — resident of and advocate for the island state.

Fun fact: Theroux first discovered Hawaii for himself while paddling a sea kayak around islands in the equatorial Pacific — this is true — for his 1992 book The  Happy Isles of Oceania. Theroux’s doctor at the time diagnosed him with terminal cancer and gave him a year to live; Theroux, somewhat of a philosopher himself, decided to vanish somewhere in the Pacific, never to be seen or heard from again. A year later, it turned out, his doctor sheepishly admitted he had got the diagnosis completely wrong. Theroux emerged from Oceania healthier and happier than when he left, and he would go on to write nine more travel books and a dozen more novels, including this year’s Burma Sahib. He is now 83. That doctor’s diagnosis was off by some 32 years, and the clock is still ticking — an irony Bourdain himself would have likely appreciated if not laughed out loud at.

It’s not as if Theroux hasn’t tried: In 2019, at age 79, he drove his beaten-up old car through cartel Mexico, taking copious notes along the way, for On the Plain of Snakes: A Mexican Journey, and managed not to get himself murdered in the process. When you’re old, he noted wryly at the time, people tend to ignore you, even drug cartels.

Back to Hawaii. Theroux, who knows a thing or two about island life, is quick to explain the island mentality to Bourdain in Hawaii’s opening moments.

“Hawaii is America,” Bourdain says, “as American as anything could possibly be, yet it also never shed what was there before in the layers and layers that have come since. It's wonderful, tricky, conflicted, and what, for lack of a better word, you'd have to call paradise.”

“Paradises don't exist,” Theroux corrects him. “Paradise is kind of in your head.”

“Wait a minute,” Bourdain replies. “You look at your window here. You look at those hills, those mountains, all that green, that blue sky, the gin-clear sea, it sure looks like paradise to me. Does it matter that it's America?”

Theroux: “The big thing is that it is America. It has elements of the Third World. The nicest elements of the Third World, which is the self-respect, the pride. There are things that don't work at all. But then it's mainstream USA. Where we are now, there are PTA meetings here. They get together and watch the Super Bowl. It’s the most Main Street USA as much as you will find. …  To be Hawaiian to me, there needs to be a sense of connection to a place. Some sense of responsibility for it. It should be about being honest to a place, to be honest to what you love and to be honest to what you value is a road that's constantly trying to be more and more informed … what I love about the oceans, that's my pathway. That I go on the ocean to seek that sense of truth.”

Bourdain is both curious and passionate about the native Hawaiian campaign for political and social autonomy, most evident on the island of Molokai —one of the most evocative and heartfelt sequences in the entire episode — and Theroux takes pains to explain what makes Hawaii so unique, and special, and why, in a strange way, for those willing to look below the surface and see past easy answers, Hawaiian nationalism is not the simmering cauldron of repressed violence that is New Caledonia, a French territory to the west of Tahiti — or French Polynesia as the official maps label Tahiti — in Melanesia.

“It's not a particularly welcoming or friendly part of the world. Contrary to the aloha myth. No island is. Nantucket isn't. The island of Hawaii isn't. The Isle of Wight. Name an island that wants foreigners there. Sicily. Do they want foreigners there? No way. Did anyone come to an island with good intentions?

“Captain Cook put his sailors ashore, just to the northwest of here. He was the first haole. Like Magellan,  Hawaii killed its first tourists. The Philippines killed their first tourist. People born on the islands view anyone who comes ashore with suspicion.

“To go back to what defines a Hawaiian, maybe we should go back in our imaginations, it could have been 2,000 years ago. … you get (the idea) that these were very productive people. They were industrious, healthy, strong. They had time for the arts. That was a large population, more than half of what we have in Hawaii today. Fully sustainable, because there were no other choices. So over time, the native Hawaiian population grew. It's the same story. Diseases were introduced from outside …, and the inability to deal with them caused people to die. In 1926, the public school system outlawed language and the practice of culture in public schools. The road to extinction was already being paved.”

Later in the hour, Bourdain spends quality time with native Hawaiians who warmly and gently share their concept of ohana with Bourdain, and it’s one of Parts Unknown’s most telling — and poignant — moments.

“The ocean is all around for thousands of miles,” Bourdain says. “It’s a humbling feeling knowing, at all times, the ground upon which you live and breathe is but a tiny speck in the middle of all this. So in Hawaii, (you learn) you’re able to handle yourself in the ocean no matter what it throws at you. It implies you're capable of almost mythical things. The ability to live in the water, handle its many moods above or below the surface.”

A lot has been written and said about Bourdain’s struggles with substance abuse and addiction over the years and whether he was physically worn down by the time it ended for him, but there’s a moment in Hawaii when, tanned and fit and looking a man half his age, is helping paddle a traditional Hawaiian canoe, far out at sea, when he is purely in his element — a man high on life, a discoverer and ocean explorer, learning about new cultures and coming ever closer to finding the meaning of life.

“Always bring the ohana. Bring the family, bring the kids. You rarely ever see a party here where there aren't kids.”

For me, Hawaii marked one of the high points of his entire run on Parts Unknown.

Aloha, and mahalo.

Supplementary reading:

     https://explorepartsunknown.com/hawaii/bourdains-take-hawaii/

     https://explorepartsunknown.com/hawaii/episode-intel-from-hawaii/

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Bourdain in Madagascar

“He was a poet of life.” Filmmaker Dareen Aronofsky on Anthony Bourdain, after the two visited Madagascar and then Bhutan for CNN’s Parts Unknown.

Over the years, Anthony Bourdain allowed a great many extraordinary landscapes — his words — only to have them fade into a blur outside his windows. “I’ve looked, maybe seen, maybe noticed, then gone,” he intones in his opening voiceover for Madagascar, the fifth-season episode of CNN’s Parts Unknown that first aired in May 2015.

“We all carry different experiences inside us. We see things differently, don’t we?”

Madagascar, the world’s fourth largest island by area, left an indelible impression on Bourdain’s psyche, and the result is plain to see in Parts Unknown. The journey which Bourdain undertook with avant-garde filmmaker Darren Aronofsky (Pi, Requiem for a Dream, Black Swan, and others) caught him in an unusually pensive, reflective mood, even by his standards. The break-up of his first marriage affected him deeply, and Madagascar, an island of almost unparalleled beauty — and scene of almost apocalyptic environmental ruin — will remind long-time Bourdain followers of his 2011 visit to Haiti for No Reservations, which he undertook during a cholera outbreak shortly after an earthquake killed 3,000 people in a single day, and with a hurricane looming on the horizon. A moment toward the end of Madagascar, in which Bourdain and Aronofsky are surrounded by hungry children while sampling a smorgasbord of local food delicacies, has uncomfortable parallels with a similar moment in that No Reservations episode in Haiti, where Bourdain broke bread and talked social injustice with Sean Penn, who was running a local aid project at the time.

“Madagascar,” Bourdain continues in his opening monologue, “exotic, unspoiled paradise, or microcosm for the end of times?”

Real life is no Disney cartoon. This much we knew, of course, but this Madagascar really breaks it down.

Over the years, there have been any number of reasons to watch Parts Unknown, even a decade after its making, but Madagascar is unique in that it provides viewers a glimpse into the process of making one of these episodes — a look, if you will, of how the sausage is made.

That’s in no small part because Bourdain wanted the episode to reflect Aronofsky’s signature style of filmmaking — surrealism, rooted in social consciousness. Visually striking but also emotionally involving. Entertaining and reflective by turns.

In an essay Bourdain penned for CNN’s Field Notes at the time, he shared some of the deepest thoughts of his entire 12-season odyssey with Parts Unknown.

“Travel is not always comfortable,” he wrote, “even when the scenery is at its most beautiful. Look out the window, get too close, and the reality of the situation — the world you will soon be leaving behind — intrudes.

“On Parts Unknown … we make choices all of the time. Choices about what I will show you of what I saw and experienced during my limited time in a destination, and choices about what I won’t. It’s my show. I decide where we go. I decide what we do when we get there. And I decide what we show you when we edit down 60 to 80 hours of footage to 42 minutes.

“That is a manipulative process. And not, inherently anyway, a bad one. I want you, the viewer, to feel the way about a place the way I want you to feel. I want you to look at it and see it from my point of view, if at all possible. Or at least consider other points of view.

“But it is, almost always, one point of view—or one lens through which you see: mine.”

At the time time, people often asked Bourdain what it would be like to accompany him on a film shoot.

“Now you will see. We look at Madagascar, in many ways, through Darren’s fresh set of eyes. It’s a useful reminder, worth having, that what you see on the show is not the only angle. That we are looking at the world out my window, but that there are other windows — that maybe I’ve omitted or shaded something, if only to present myself in a more flattering light.”

Aronofsky approached Bourdain interestingly, not the other way around.

Bourdain was “thrilled, honoured and delighted” — again, his words — to draw the attention of an acclaimed filmmaker whose work he admired, but he had one proviso.

“My only request was that he shoot some footage—with whatever device he wanted to use. And that, at some point, he give us his version of at least a portion of the show for which we have already seen my version.

“So, in Act 6, you will get an example of what may or may not be missing from the shows we make. An ugly, uncomfortable reminder that it’s not just pretty pictures and neat, hopeful sum-ups. It does not, I’m pretty sure, portray me in the best light. Or any of us, for that matter. But there it is. I thought it was important.”

When Bourdain passed on 8 June 2018 — years ago now, though it still feels like yesterday — Aronofsky was among those CNN approached to pen a eulogy of sorts. The two would later travel together to the mountain kingdom of Bhutan for a Parts Unknown episode.

Aronofsky’s words, written just four days after Bourdain’s passing, resonate to this day.

“I was asked to share some thoughts on my time with Tony in Madagascar and Bhutan,” he began. “I’ve been staring at a blank page for days. His death is incomprehensible. I don’t know how to process him being gone.

“I do remember how easily words flowed from him. He made it seem so effortless. He was a poet of life. So I’ll let that inspire whatever flows now.”

And, at the end:

“You turned a light on what it means to be a human right now, right here on planet Earth.

“Thank you for letting me tag along and witness a master storyteller shape the unexpected into the relatable and unforgettable.

“I will never forget how passionate you were about life and this world. You loved love, cinema, food, artists, people, idiosyncrasies, pain, relief, martial arts, chefs, music, the Lower East Side. You loved the whole damn world (even the parts you despised). And the whole world loved you.”

Bourdain was seemingly incapable of producing an underwhelming hour of television, even with the passing of time, but Madagascar, for me, is on a whole other level. Now seems as good a time as any to revisit it.

Supplementary reading:

    https://explorepartsunknown.com/bhutan/anthony-bourdain-darren-aronofsky/

    https://www.foodrepublic.com/2015/05/18/what-its-like-to-film-anthony-bourdains-parts-unknown-in-madagascar/

CNN

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Bourdain in Budapest

“My Dinner with Vilmos:” The one in which Anthony Bourdain sups at the table of Vilmos Zsigmond, one of the greats of film cinematography, in a city Bourdain describes as one of the most beautiful on Earth, and the two share memories and anecdotes from the Hungarian Revolution.

Anthony Bourdain was captivated by the power of the image from a young age, and that’s possibly no more apparent in CNN’s Parts Unknown than it is in the fifth-season episode Budapest, which first aired in June 2015.

Spending much of the hour with Vilmos Zsigmond, the Hungarian-American cinematographer who informed Bourdain’s own cinematic eye from the time Bourdain first became interested in cinema. Zsigmond came of age in the late 1950s and early 1960s, and his camera helped shape the look of American movies in the 1970s. Zsigmond would go on to become one of the leading figures of the American New Wave movement in movies at the time.

He worked with Robert Altman, Brian DePalma, Woody Allen, Michael Cimino and Steven Spielberg. Yes, that Steven Spielberg. Zsigmond “lensed” Close Encounters of the Third Kind., as they say in behind-the-scenes movie parlance, and won the Academy Award for The Deer Hunter, which he made for Michael Cimino.

Zsigmond also shot Heaven’s Gate for Cimino, which, regardless of its merits or lack thereof — I quite liked it, despite its being savaged by critics at the time (Gene Siskel and Roger Ebert both rated it one of the worst films they saw that year) and a major fail at the box office, profoundly so — is gorgeous to look at, like turning the pages through an elegant coffee-table book, sumptuous and yet oddly moving.

Yes, you may be thinking, but if  Zsigmond was such a Hungarian patriot, how did he end up in America? Well, therein lies a tale.

And it’s that tale Bourdain chooses to tell in Budapest — to Bourdain’s eye, one of the most beautiful, if not the most beautiful, cities in the world.

Yes, Bourdain takes time to eat out — Parts Unknown was sold to CNN at least partly as a food show, if not exactly a cooking show: at the somewhat eccentrically named New York Café — which turns out to be a distinctly Hungarian-flavoured homage to New York City’s intellectual art scene, where saying what you think comes with the menu choices and free-speech rules — and at the working-class eaterie Pléhcsárda, where he samples venison stew, pancakes with chicken liver sauteed in marrow and paprika sauce (better than it sounds), and a pork schnitzel the size, Bourdain says only half-jokingly, of a small surfboard.

Budapest is, first and foremost, a show about revolutionary politics, though, not food per se.

In 1956, Hungary bore witness to one of Eastern Europe’s bloodiest revolts against Soviet oppression and occupation. It would not be the first.

Zsigmond, a film student at the time, used a 35-millimetre movie camera purloined (i.e., without permission) from the arts academy where he was studying to record the fighting — and Russian atrocities — in Budapest at the time.

You could be shot for simply carrying a camera, Bourdain says, and Zsigmond did a lot more than just carry his camera.

Zsigmond, together with his friend and fellow student László Kovács — who would go on to have an influential career as a respected cinematographer in his own right; Easy Rider and Paper Moon were among his list of credits — hid their movie camera in a shopping bag and filmed through a hole they cut in the bag’s side.

It’s a good thing they did.

Their footage survives to this day as virtually the only footage to have survived that time, and a testament to the human will to survive, even in the face of terrible odds.

Most photographers and cameramen, student and professional alike, were cowed into silence by the carnage. Many people died.

Hard as it may be to believe today — insert sarcasm emoji here — the Russian invaders were brutal.

Bourdain was always a rebel at heart, and there’s little question, based on his off-the-cuff remarks in Budapest, that had he been fighting in the Spanish Civil War, he would have sided with the left-leaning Popular Front of Spain’s Second Spanish Republic, basically artists, teachers and writers, you know, the bad guys, and not the military junta of patriots, monarchists, conservatives and “traditionalists” led by Gen. Francisco Franco — the eventual winner in what US ambassador Claude Bowers called at the time a dress rehearsal for the Second World War.

Just as Franco quashed dissent in Spain, Russia quashed dissent in Hungary, and Zsigmond and Kovács were among those who decided that perhaps it might be better to leave — for America — rather than end up being lined up against a wall and shot.

Bourdain, a Hungarian partisan in mind if not body, could relate.

The irony, of course, is that some of Zsigmond’s best work — and the work he remains best known for — is in the childlike wonder depicted in Close Encounters of the Third Kind, a film Bourdain felt a special affinity with. The images from Close Encounters shown in Budapest are a reminder of just how stunning visually — and emotionally uplifting — that film really was. Bourdain saw it at a time in his life when it left an indelible impression.

“Our style in photography was not realist; it's called poetic realist,” Zsigmond tells Bourdain toward the program’s end. “That's what we always thought about that certain photography. Emphasizing the beauty of things, basically. But, also, I make it more beautiful.”

“This is no kind of an answer to me,” Bourdain tells him. “You've made some of the most iconically beautiful images we've known in the modern world. And you keep telling me, ‘Well, I was smart in school, I was good at math—‘“

“So tell me,” Zsigmond interrupts. “What would you like to hear?”

“‘I don’t know,’” Bourdain replies. “‘I was touched by God.’ If you're regularly creating the sublime, I'm looking for a metaphysical answer, I don’t know.”

“You learn this,” Zsigmond says simply. “You learn to be an artist.”

What a great meal,  Bourdain tells his hosts at the end. “Thank you.”

And then, in his closing voiceover:

“Do we emerge fully formed with a God-given eye for pictures, images that can move people?

“Or, are we the end result of all the things we've seen, all the things we've done, the places we've been, the places, the people we've had to leave behind, all that's happened in your life. Is it those things that bring the light or the darkness to the blank screen?

“And what about the faces of those we capture in our magic lenses for a minute, or second, or hour? Afterwards, should we think about them, and where they might be now?”

Remembering Anthony Bourdain, 1956-2018.

And remembering Vilmos Zsigmond, for that matter. 1930-2016.

Supplementary reading:

     https://explorepartsunknown.com/budapest/remembering-vilmos-zsigmond-1930-2016/

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

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

CNN

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Bourdain in Scotland

“They say Glaswegians have more fun at a funeral than people in Edinburgh have at a wedding.” Awe’ n bile yer heid. This was Anthony Bourdain on a bonnie day in Scotland, in May 2015.

A vegetarian boarding school?

“That’s unthinkable to me,” Anthony Bourdain says, barely able to conceal his shock, just past the halfway mark of the 5th-season Parts Unknown episode Scotland.

Americans abroad. Scots have suffered their share of American incursions, from a characteristically gauche Trump golf course and country club on environmentally sensitive land, a development project that naturally raised the ire of many of the local clans — still does — to the steady parade of American visitors with surnames like McDonald, MacDonald and Macdonald eager to get to the bottom of their ancestral roots.

There’s no such danger there with Bourdain — his surname bears more of a French feel, you know, the other, l’autre, one of them, and the funny thing about the French is that, traditionally and historically, they found more succour in Scotland than in hostile England, from France’s Catholic connections to France’s support of the ill-fated Mary Stuart, aka Mary, Queen of Scots — eventually done in, wouldn’t you know, by the English Queen Elizabeth I, beheaded in fact, an act so egregious it provoked a long line of noisy protest films from Mel Gibson (Braveheart!), Sean Connery, and others.

And therein lies a tale that continues to this day — a Scottish yearning, in some quarters anyway, for independence from Westminster and an embrace of Scottish cuisine over the English kind, all for one and one for all, once and for all, and all that

Bourdain samples the brew at a Glasgow pub (EST 1510) before heading to a country estate in the Scottish Highlands to shoot a stag and experience first-hand where venison comes from, all the while ruminating about an independence vote that was turned down by 55% of Scottish voters. At the time.

Now, after decades of misrule from a Tory government in London — think Republicans, but better spoken and with a keener grasp of the English language, not to mention better manners — there’s talk of another vote, and this time it isn’t just the 16-year-olds who’ll bite (yes, the age of eligibility to vote was dropped in Scotland, in part to encourage more young people to be involved in politics, and in part because if you ask virtually any 16-year-old on the planet, ‘Do you want more freedom,’ you don’t need a poll by Angus Reid to tell you the result.

What has all this got to do with food, you might ask, and the answer is that this is CNN, the self-styled “most trusted name in news,” and not the Food Network, a difference that Bourdain embraced when he originally signed on to do a show that allowed him to trek across the globe on somebody else’s dime.

And while Scotland won't top too many foodies’ lists of their favourite Parts Unknown episodes, good eating is never too far away from Bourdain’s mind.

"Last night, in Glasgow, I had enough with the deeper issues," Bourdain says at the 19-minute mark.

“Now, I want to go no deeper than the bottom of a bubbling cauldron of hot grease. It's out there. It's calling to me. I want it now. A happy place from my past where once I frolicked young and carefree in the field of related arts. The University Cafe, where I learned at the foot of the masters the Tao of hot fat and crispy batter.

“Yes, they do a deep-fried Mars bar here and deep-fried pizza. Been there, done that. But Carlo here and his twin brother have been keeping the Verragio family tradition alive since 1918, and it ain't about no Mars bar.

"I order the fish and chips and some haggis. Haddock battered and floating, a drift in a sea of mysterious life-giving oil. The accumulated flavours of many magical things as it bobs like Noah's Ark, bringing life in all its infinite variety. Deep-fried haggis, my personal favourite. Sinister sheep parts in tube form, in this case. And if you don't like chopped-up liver and lungs and all that good stuff, believe me, the curry sauce sets you right. The combination of French fries, or “chips” in the local dialect, with curry sauce and cheese is perhaps a bro too far, Guy Fieri in a kilt, but, what the hey.

“I'm pretty sure God is against this.”

But back to the vegetarian boarding school.

“Heading north out of Glasgow, Scotland quickly becomes something else. A savagely beautiful, harsh, but absolutely mesmerizing landscape that seems to have changed not at all for thousands, even millions of years. And across Loch Maree, and only accessible by boat, one of the great isolated estates: Letterewe. It's the favourite retreat of my friend, Adrian Gill, more widely known as A.A. Gill. He's the much feared and widely followed restaurant critic for the London Sunday Times, a regular columnist for a spectrum of magazines, author, traveller, and one of the finest essayists of our time.”

Gill, it turns out, went to said boarding school, despite now living within a stone’s throw of a country estate where venison rules the roost.

“My parents sent me to a vegetarian boarding school, and for nine years, the year after I left, I was a vegetarian,” he tells Bourdain.

“Nine years,” Bourdain says ruefully. “That's unthinkable to me.”

“Then I decided not to be,” Gill responds. “I made the decision that if I was going to eat meat again. Then I had to be prepared to do the whole business.”

Bourdain: “Right. You’ve got to be accountable.”

Accountability. That was Bourdain’s stock-in-trade.

The last word, as seems only fitting, hails from the visiting American with the French name.

“I came to Scotland this time to shoot an animal in the heart, to take part, to be fully culpable in a practice nearly as old as these hills. You walk this country stalking an animal across the rocks and wet heather. You feel little has changed from how your distant ancestors must have searched for their food, with a rifle, with a spear, with a club. I drag my knuckles up a hill and, like my ape-like predecessors, return tired, happy, and covered in blood.

“Everything changes. Nothing changes at all.”

Strange as it seems, it makes perfect sense.

Supplementary reading:

     https://medium.com/writerontherun/retracing-anthony-bourdain-in-scotland-3b9031c978f0

     https://eatlikebourdain.com/anthony-bourdain-in-scotland/

CNN

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Bourdain in Korea

“Han, my favourite Korean word, has many implied and specific meanings, but generally speaking, it's a mixture of endurance, yearning, sorrow, regret, bitterness, spite, hatred, and a grim determination to bide your time until revenge can at last be enacted.” This was Anthony Bourdain in Korea, in a story told backwards, Memento-like, from end to beginning.

Not every idea turns out as planned, just as not every well-laid plan goes astray. Every so often, there’s something to be said for going in cold, for not planning at all, especially when coming off a ground-breaking season of Parts Unknown that won several Emmys and the prestigious Peabody Award — broadcasting’s equivalent of the Pulitzer Prize, established by the (US) National Association of Broadcasters in 1940 to recognize the best in broadcasting news, entertainment, documentaries, children’s programming, education, interactive programming, and public service.

Public service? Yes, that’s Bourdain.

The Peabody is judged by a select committee of academics and broadcasting historians modelled after the Nobel Prize Committee. It is the Nobel, Academy Award, and Pulitzer Prize all rolled into one, and it goes without saying that it is not given away like candy.

Ambition doesn’t always go before a fall, but it helps.

That must have been what was on Anthony Bourdain and Korea sidekick and segment co-producer Nari Kye’s minds when they broke ground on the opening episode for Parts Unknown’s 5th season, which made its debut on CNN  on April 26th, 2015, nearly 10 years ago.

The idea was inspired by — paid homage to, motivated by, stolen from, take your pick — Oppenheimer filmmaker Christopher Nolan’s neo-noir psychological thriller Memento, made in the year 2000. Memento tells its story in reverse chronological order about a man with short-term memory loss who tracks down his wife’s killer. A story told from end to beginning, in other words. “I” before “E” except after “C,” except when it isn’t.

What if, Bourdain posited, he returned to Korea for another go-round?

Bourdain visited Korea some 10 years earlier for No Reservations, TV cameras in tow, accompanied by Korean-American filmmaker Nari Kye, by then a graduate of New York University’s Tisch School of the Arts and one of the first hires by Parts Unknown production company Zero Point Zero.

Kye, a self-styled “fun-raiser” on a mission to get everyone to fall in love with Korean culture, accompanied Bourdain again, a little older this time, more travelled and less open to suggestion. Kye herself is still active on social media, thanks to Instagram (where she posts as @narzattack) and in YouTube videos like the get-to-know-you introduction video posted by the Council of Korean Americans (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LzCFFxp224c).

What if, this time, they started at the end, with Bourdain blotto from a week of carousing in his happy place, and ended at the beginning, with Bourdain in the contemplative and reflective mood we’ve all come to know and respect?

Bourdain was smart enough to realize that not every viewer might get jiggy about his telling his story backwards.

In a Q&A after the show aired, Bourdain confessed that he wanted to open the show with the end credits, but CNN wasn’t too keen on the idea, guessing — again, probably with good reason — that fans would think they missed the show and turn to something else to watch.

Even now, years later, Parts Unknown’s Korea gets, um, decidedly mixed notices on chat forums like Reddit, in which one reader chalks it up to Bourdain’s being burned out from one too many frequent flyer miles and someone else remarks, again not without reason, that it’s no fun seeing Bourdain hopped up on hooch, veering from one hallucinatory vision to another, only to end up playing violent video games that don’t look so much like good clean fun as, well, creepy.

So … is Korea worth seeing again, or even a first time, after all these years?

The short answer is yes, and for a simple reason: It’s still Bourdain.

The caustic wit is still there, and so is that life-affirming humanity and insight into the human condition — at least, when he’s sober enough to tell the difference between han, the Korean concept of resentment and feeling the need for revenge, best served cold — or hot, Bourdain doesn’t mind — and jeong, the Korean cultural tradition of loyalty and feeling a strong emotional connection to people and places.   

The hour improves as it goes along — well, sure, the story is being told backwards! — and even for those not in on the joke, it always helps when the show-ending summation — the part of the process Bourdain arguably liked the least and wasn’t afraid to say so — sums up the show and does it with the grace, style, and raw emotion we’ve come to accept.

“The past, the present, the future,” Bourdain says toward the program’s end or, rather, make that beginning, “in Korea, they all bleed together. If you’re there for the whole ride, one explains the other. Drop in the middle; it makes no sense at all.”

Not to mention the food.

Korea, Nari Kye will be quick to tell you, is known for unique — some might say eccentric — cuisine, unmistakably Asian but quite unlike anything else in Southeast Asia — or northern Asia, for that matter.

Bourdain noshed on spicy rice cakes and japchae (glass noodles served alongside veggies and beef) at the Gwang Jang Market in Seoul; still-wriggling sea worms, soju, and a bubbling pot of meh oon tang (spicy seafood stew) at the Garak Market at 298 Garak-Dong, Songpa-gu; and, with Nari Kye, Korean fried chicken and beer at Ggu Da Dak on Dhowa-dong, Mapo-gu (yes, these are all real places, and the food is real too).

Yes, much of the program is borderline incoherent — no pun intended regarding borders and conflating the North Korea border and DMZ with fast food and noodles.

That said, there’s much to recommend it, including a seriously weird sequence toward the end — or is it the beginning? — of Bourdain sampling DIY what-the-hell-is-this, surrounded by what looks to outside eyes like a cross between a makeshift TV studio and an underground military bunker.

Bourdain is determined not to allow the ever-present threat of Emperor Flat-Top across the way harsh his buzz, however. Or his wit.

Bourdain on silkworm soup, for example:

“Eating bugs? That is so last network.”

Don’t get him started on the past.

“Last time I was here, I was working for some other channel. The Bacon Channel? The Competitive-Eating Channel? What was that old show called? It was so long ago.”

For some of us, though, not that long ago at all. Some things don’t change. Not really. Korea was cool then, and it’s kind of cool now.

Korea is just cool, period. The southern part, anyway.

Supplementary reading:

    https://explorepartsunknown.com/korea/han-jeong/

    https://explorepartsunknown.com/destination/korea/

CNN

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