Bourdain in Manila

You can’t go home again. Or can you? In this one, Anthony Bourdain examined the cultural impact of ‘OFW’s,’ “Overseas Filipino Workers,” and left at least one viewer in tears by the end.

If any longtime Bourdainophile had any doubts that Anthony Bourdain was no longer doing a strictly “food travel show” with Parts Unknown, those doubts were dispelled once and for all by the seventh-season opener, which kicked off on CNN with an eccentric, hard-to-read look at Manila, Philippines on April 24, 2016.

When Bourdain and his by-then close-knit team — Zach Zamboni, Todd Liebler, Tom Vitale and others at Zero Point Zero, a team that had been together thick and thin through countless excursions around the world for more than a decade — made the jump to CNN from the Travel Channel, the clue was in the name: The focus would be more on culture, politics, history, philosophy and, yes, the news, as opposed to the primarily food-focused lean of A Cook’s Tour, No Reservations and The Layover. It’s hard to look at A Cook’s Tour today and not see it for what it was — Anthony Bourdain Unplugged, the acoustic Bourdain, the brash, outspoken born-and-bred New Yorker, food enthusiast and frontline chef behind Kitchen Confidential, his tell-all “Hide the Kids, This Is Going to Get Ugly” look at how a busy, top-of-the-line restaurant kitchen really works. If A Cook’s Tour was Bourdain’s Piper at the Gates of Dawn, Parts Unknown was his Dark Side of the Moon: sophisticated, serious, meditative, studious, solemn, profound, handsomely mounted, mature, all grown up, and a global, worldwide smash. This was Bourdain in his pomp, no longer playing to a tiny audience of hardcore devotees on some obscure, out-of-the-way cable channel but rather playing to a global audience of everyone from hard-working, decent, everyday blue-collar folks to world leaders and global celebrities — basically, anyone and everyone with a working Internet connection. If the world was truly a global village, Bourdain was its town crier, librarian, historian and father confessor, a man of the people, for the people, and by the people.

And so, Manila.

Not everyone was a fan. Manila, with its curious shifts in tone — it’s Christmas in April! Here’s a biker cover band! Mom’s cooking is always the best, and don’t you forget it! Filipinos are some of the hardest-working people on the planet! The Philippines and Filipinos have endured an awful history of colonialism, invasion, exploitation, oppression, climate chaos, and some of the most rapacious, murderous and incompetent leaders who ever lived, and yet they're some of the nicest, neatest people you’ll ever meet!

It was never going to be for all tastes. Looking at viewers’ posts on Reddit today, a couple of points jump out.

1. Can it really have been nine years ago? It seems like only yesterday.

And 2, the world has changed so much in just nine short years.

Not just Bourdain’s world, but our world. Gaza. Lebanon. Ukraine. October 7th. The ongoing environmental destruction of the Amazon rainforest. The collapse of ecosystems around the world. Climate chaos. MAGA. The UN on the verge of total collapse. If there’s one comment — you couldn’t really call it a criticism — about Bourdain’s work in Parts Unknown today, it’s that much of it doesn’t seem too relevant to today’s world.

And yet … the more things change, the more much of Bourdain’s truthtelling seems prescient today. Eerily so.

In his essay for Medium at the time — see the link below — Bourdain explains that production of the Manila episode was hampered by an oncoming, full-blown typhoon, which restricted their movements around one of the largest, most populous and poverty-stricken cities on the planet.

And so, rather than visit every culinary nook and cranny in a city renowned for its wide variety of food experiences — familiar and unfamiliar eateries like Van Gogh is Bipolar in Quezon City, Neil’s Kitchen in Manila’s Westgate Center, Sebastian’s Ice Cream (“the Premiere Artisinal Ice Cream in Manila!”), and so on — Bourdain and his creative colleagues chose to focus on families cooking at home, biker cover bands, balikbayan boxes (corrugated boxes containing Christmas packages sent home by overseas Filipinos), the Filipino diaspora and the undeniable cultural, economic and social influence of “OFWs,” overseas Filipino workers who have scattered around the world, doing the menial jobs no one else will do and sending the money back home.

Manila was special, as one Reddit reader commented, because, for all the talk about despots like Ferdinand and Imelda Marcos, the tribulations endured under Japanese occupation during World War II, and the flattening of Manila by US carpet bombing during that same war, “he always throws us a bone with a food-centric show here or there anyways.”

And another:

“The show isn’t necessarily about food tourism like No Reservations was … Bourdain wanted to tell his personal story along with one of his directors, who was raised by the Filipina nanny in the episode. That Filipinos give and care for strangers’ kids, even when they had to sacrifice decades of getting to know their own children. He wanted to show the love that all those balikbayan boxes represented. That even our fast food is literally ‘Jolly Bee, and we export it around the world. He wanted to show the joy and happiness that people exude in the face of adversity, at home and abroad. I think he did a wonderful job. My mom was in tears at the end of the episode.”

Think about that.

When was the last time you watched an hour of TV that left anyone in tears at the end? Let alone a so-called ‘food tourism’ show.

That’s what CNN inherited when they somehow convinced Bourdain to leave the Travel Channel for the bigger world and a global audience, and it’s what we inherited when Bourdain emerged to become the cultural lightning rod and philosophical guidepost he still is today.

Supplementary reading:

     https://medium.com/parts-unknown/unfinished-business-8b9021ed432d

     https://explorepartsunknown.com/manila/domestic-worker/

     https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2016/04/11/the-sacrifices-of-an-immigrant-caregiver

     https://richardrguzman.com/ofws-anthony-bourdains-manila/

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Bourdain in Borneo

“Travel isn’t always pretty … the journey changes you. It should change you.” This was Anthony Bourdain going up the Skrang River in the heart of the Borneo jungle in November 2015.

Borneo was the first episode of Parts Unknown I ever watched. Truthfully, it was the first hour of Bourdain I ever watched.

I was stuck in cattle class on a 12-hour flight to Africa; I had some TV programs loaded on my iPad, and I’d heard good things about this guy, Anthony Bourdain. I wanted to see one of his programs set in the developing world, as opposed to one of his stateside shows — because, let’s face it, while “well done” (pun intended), Bourdain’s stateside settings are familiar to those of us who live in North America. I happened on Borneo quite by accident. It was random selection, as opposed to natural selection.

By then, Bourdain had knocked about the TV world for about 15 years. His first foray into food TV, A Cook’s Tour, debuted on the Food Network in 2000; Borneo aired 15 years later, on CNN’s Parts Unknown.

A Cook’s Tour was the brainchild of then-NYU film graduate Lydia Tenaglia, who was working at New York Times Television at the time.

Tenaglia had read Bourdain’s book sensation Kitchen Confidential. She learned that Bourdain was pitching a Mark Twain-esque Innocents Abroad-type travel journal as a follow-up project.

Much had changed by the time Tenaglia and her production company Zero Point Zero, co-founded with Chris Collins, settled on Parts Unknown for CNN. Those nascent episodes of A Cook’s Tour were filmed on the fly — and a budget — with a pair of Sony PD100 DV camcorders. Not exactly the Sony CineAlta cameras in wide use in the film industry today, but fit for purpose at the time.

For me, Bourdain was somewhat of an unknown when I first watched Borneo.

As a longtime viewer of CNN, going back to the Ted Turner years and before Warner/Discovery messed things up, I assumed Bourdain was some yutz CNN had parachuted in to fill a hole in their primetime schedule.

Obviously, a Bourdain TV show for CNN wasn’t going to be a life-changing, seminal moment in television history — more like a viewing alternative to Dirty Jobs with Mike Rowe. But I was trapped in cattle class on a 12-hour flight to Africa; what else was I going to do? I knew enough at the time to always have an iPad and a decent pair of headphones with me on long flights; the so-called in-flight entertainment on some of those African airlines makes CNN look like Citizen Kane.

So I turned to Borneo, somewhat reluctantly, and within five minutes — literally, that’s all it took — I knew. I was wrong. Bourdain was something special. A creative talent of the first order. Hell, I’m going to stick my neck out here and just say it: Bourdain struck me as the 21st-century equivalent of Mark Twain. Think  Innocents Abroad, re-imagined for the Apocalypse Now generation.

The analogy is apt.

The Parts Unknown Borneo, directed and produced by longtime Bourdain director/producer, creative companion and favourite whipping boy Tom Vitale, is structured a lot like the Coppola film, right down to the part where Vitale, as with Coppola on Apocalypse Now, had a near nervous breakdown during filming. More on that in a moment.

The story, and there is one, is simple. A lifelong wanderer and world traveller journeys up a largely unexplored jungle river in search of his destiny and a larger meaning, whatever that might be. Coppola and his fellow screenwriters John Milius and the Vietnam War journalist Michael Herr based their similarly themed screenplay for Apocalypse Now on the Joseph Conrad novella Heart of Darkness, first published in serial form in 1899.

As Vitale explains in his autobiographic book In the Weeds — highly recommended, by the way — “Tony’s first visit to Borneo in 2005 was a trip that had marked a turning point in his life and career, as well as mine. … That trip during the first season of No Reservations had been an emotional one for Tony. His marriage of twenty years was breaking up, and he’d fallen in love again and was feeling unusually poetic around the camera.”

The episode’s theme was inspired by the bejalai, an Iban philosophy about taking a journey of self-discovery. An Indigenous group native to the vast jungles of Borneo, the Iban consider the bejalai central to their culture; the bejalai is a voyage of discovery that every Iban must take. The idea, Vitale writes in In the Weeds, is to go on an adventure, and learn something about the world.

Vitale: “When all is said and done, hopefully, you’re better for what you’ve seen, and you share the knowledge you’ve acquired with your home village. The Iban then commemorate the experience with a hand-tapped tattoo, à la ‘travel leaves marks.’”

It was the perfect metaphor for an hour of TV about travel.

Bourdain had navigated similar emotional terrain in the Parts Unknown episode Congo, from that show’s first season — which, as fortune would have it, was another nightmare-inducing experience for Vitale, though in that one, at least, Bourdain didn’t try to strangle Vitale on the spot. More on that in a moment.

Ten years later, he wanted his own ceremonial tattoo to mark his emotional journey, becoming a new man — older, wiser, more worldly, more sophisticated, and more mature. A remote village of repentant headhunters, hidden in a faraway corner of Borneo’s sweltering jungle of steep, slippery, thorny, leech-infested bush seemed the perfect tonic — pun intended.

This time, though, as recounted in Tom Vitale’s autobiography In the Weeds (seriously, if you’ve not read it, the book is a must), Borneo had changed dramatically, not unlike Bourdain himself.

“Much had changed in the decade since Tony’s last visit,” Vitale wrote. “The old longhouse where the whole Iban village lived together under one roof in apartments off a communal hallway had been torn down and replaced by a newer one. The tribe had converted to Christianity and been convinced to bury their bouquet of skulls.

Much of the jungle had been clear-cut by loggers, and Itam [Bourdain’s guide from the No Reservations expedition ten years earlier] was dead.”

The shoot was arduous from the very beginning, nothing like the experience from a decade earlier.

Vitale: “We had decided to devote half the shoot to [the Iban festival] Gawai, but nothing was happening aside from repetitive drinking. At Gawai, everyone drinks. Kids, adults, the village elders, and especially honoured guests like us. Every five feet, you’re obliged to accept another shot of lankau, a homemade rice whiskey only marginally lower octane than jet fuel and known to induce mildly hallucinogenic effects. It’s considered an insult to refuse, which is probably why our travel doctor here in case of emergency was lying passed out drunk on the floor.

“In addition to that, I’d discovered that the translator-sidekick I’d brought along to the drinking festival was a recovering alcoholic and didn’t drink. Which didn’t really matter because, as it turned out, he also didn’t speak Iban. And none of the Iban spoke English.

“As if that weren’t enough, I didn’t have much to visually connect this visit to Itam—the narrative backbone of the episode.

“Worst of all, Tony had decided he didn’t want to go through with the Bejalai tattoo scene (after all). I was counting on that damn tattoo.”

Matters went from bad to worse.

Vitale stumbled over Itam’s widow, now 95, in the middle of the night, and realized he had an opportune moment to finally string things together — only he couldn’t find a cameraman. Or a camera.

“Ninety-five years old, she was knocking back shots from a handle of Johnnie Walker Blue with her preschool-age great-grandson. Now, that might have been a useful shot to bring back to New York, but, of course, there were no cameras to be found.”

Vitale confesses he had a few shots of his own by then, and not being a drinker by nature or habit, this was a very, very bad idea — especially in that heat and humidity.

Vitale came across the crew drinking with Bourdain in a ceremonial tent for that purpose, and to put it as delicately as possible, he lost it.

“Without question, I shouldn’t have had so much to drink, and I was totally out of line to speak that way to the crew. But my biggest mistake was doing it in front of Tony. I’d been pushing him for content all day, which always got under his skin. But drunken behaviour and being ‘uncool’ was even worse. Quite drunk himself, Tony got to his feet and yelled, ‘That is f**king it! You’re done, demoted! … if I see you one more time tonight, you’re off the show! For good.  Now get upstairs to your room and sleep it off.””

There was just one problem: Vitale did allow himself to be seen by Bourdain again that night, no more than twenty minutes later, and that’s when Bourdain launched himself on top of him and tried to throttle him on the spot.

“I wanted to believe we’d been on a Bejalai, but deep down, I was terrified the last decade had just been aimless wandering while making a TV show,” Vitate recalled. “On some level, I’d convinced myself the tattoo would be proof there was meaning in the chaos.”

Being strangled alive in the middle of a jungle night halfway around the world was not exactly the meaning he was after, though, and at that point it looked as if Parts Unknown was going to cause ZPZ and CNN a very big headache indeed.

Here’s the genius part, though.

Much as with Coppola during the making of Apocalypse Now — and, before that, Conrad in writing Heart of Darkness, the remote jungle setting coupled with the dark night, heat, humidity, biting flies, leeches, copious quantities of alcohol and emotional turmoil inspired revelatory soul-searching, and some of the best voiceover Bourdain would ever compose.

On that first visit to Borneo a decade earlier for No Reservations, Bourdain ruminated about the nature of travel in a moment of reflection, soul-searching, and lucidness.

It was, Vitale recalled, the single best quote about travel he had ever witnessed … from anyone, anywhere.

The footage was unusable, though, thanks to “the unrelenting barking of a dog in the background!” and it never made it into the final cut.

Vitale had the presence of mind to transcribe what Bourdain said, however, and it’s just as well he did. At the end of the Parts Unknown episode, a now-sober Vitale persuaded a now-sober Bourdain — post-murder attempt — to voice those words again for the episode-closing voiceover.

It’s his favourite quote about travel, Vitale wrote in In the Weeds, worthy of anything in Paul Theroux’s 2011 travel-quote anthology, The Tao of Travel.

Bourdain:

“Travel isn’t always pretty. It isn’t always comfortable. Sometimes it hurts; it even breaks your heart. But that’s okay. The journey changes you; it should change you. It leaves marks on your memory, on your consciousness, on your heart, and on your body. You take something with you. Hopefully, you leave something good behind.”

Hail and amen.

Supplementary reading:

     https://medium.com/parts-unknown/happy-gawai-5d54df41338c

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

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

CNN/David Scott Holloway

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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 Brazil

Candomblé, capoeira, and caipirinhas. This was Anthony Bourdain’s pilgrimage to Salvador da Bahia, Brazil, 10 years ago next month. After the end of a long, arduous season of Parts Unknown, Bourdain just wanted to kick back and give viewers a taste of fun and relaxation. It worked.

It’s worth noting that when Anthony Bourdain’s Brazil closed Parts Unknowns’s breakout third season 10 years ago, in June 2014, on CNN, it capped a season that included sobering visits to drug cartel Mexico and Vladimir Putin’s Russia, which, while gripping, didn’t exactly make for comfortable viewing.

The season also featured some of yeoman director/producer Tom Vitale’s then-best work to date, as Parts Unknown took on a more widescreen cinematic vision with each passing hour, beginning with the Punjab in India through Lyon, France, through the Mississippi Delta and finally into the green-limned rice paddies of northern Thailand.

It’s worth noting, too, that Brazil is vast, not so much a country as a subcontinent in its own right, not unlike India. The South is not like the North, and the Atlantic Coast is not like the Amazon.

Bourdain focused on Salvador da Bahia, a city of 3 million people, the original capital of Brazil, in the state of Bahia, situated in the Zona da Mata in Brazil’s sprawling northeast. Though Salvador and the more familiar — to outsiders, anyway — Rio de Janeiro share the same Atlantic coast, Salvador is not Rio, and by this point, Bourdain simply wanted to kick back and enjoy the moment.

“The wellspring for everything African and spicy,” Bourdain said in his opening voiceover, where things seem to sway and move constantly.
”It’s a place where everybody is sexy, where even the ugly people are hot. … This is where artists come from. African spiritualism, occult magic, Candomblé, capoeira. And caipirinhas. Did I mention caipirinhas?”

Oh yes, the caipirinha. “This indispensable icon of Brazilian beach culture is known to start with fresh lime. Muddle and mash with more lime juice, sugar, ice, (and) the magic ingredient, cahaça — that’s basically the distilled liquor of sugarcane — shaken, not stirred, and you’ve got yourself one of the world’s truly great cocktails.”

But wait, there’s more.

“I love nature and caipirinhas. Oh!”— startled by a hand pouring a glass in front of him— “What’s going on here? Caipirinha. Please. Sweet! This alone is an argument for the greatness of this country.”

Sweet indeed.

Bourdain journeyed to the northeast coast of Brazil mere days ahead of the 2014 World Cup, when the tourist hoards had yet to descend, supplemented by planeloads of lager louts from Germany who, as luck would have it, would have themselves a merry old time.

Bourdain found a Brazil cautiously optimistic about hosting a World Cup for the ages, and a chance to make history.

Soccer is to the national soul what samba is, after all, and Edson Arantes do Nascimento, Pelé to you and me, had long ago elevated the Beautiful Game to a worldwide religion, followed everywhere from Azerbaijan to Zimbabwe.

As luck — and some shocking defending — would have it, though, Germany would thump seven goals against the host nation in the semi-final, and dreams of a record World Cup win for Brazil dissipated in the tropical heat like so much sea spray.

The good citizens of Salvador da Bahia did what any sensible, happy-go-luck people with access to a warm ocean would do: they hit the beach.

This, people, is the meaning of life.

Today, ten years later, Germany is miserable — “We need to accept the situation,“ Germany manager Julian Nagelsmann murmured just this past November, hours after Germany lost back-to-back home games against Turkey and their smaller next-door neighbour Austria, “but we can’t fall into the role of being victims” — and Brazil still has the beach.

That 7-1 appointment with Ignominy seems a long time ago now.

For his part, Brazil caught Bourdain in a sunny mood.

Uncharacteristically sunny, you might say, given the rigours of the previous 11 months of making Parts Unknown.  His working relationship with Tom Vitale was always complicated — just read Virtale’s book — but this time everything clicked.

“I try to go to Brazil whenever I can find an excuse,” Bourdain said in his program notes.

“The fact that I haven’t made a show in the city of Salvador since A Cook’s Tour, over 12 years ago, seemed like reason enough for another visit. Salvador is all the best things about the country boiled down into a thick, spicy African stew. It’s mystical, magical, incredibly colourful, and has its own choreography that we worked hard to capture.”

That meant shooting at hip level as much as possible, moving the camera “to convey the sense that, unique to Salvador, everybody is beautiful. Young, old, fat, thin, every hue and shade on an extraordinarily diverse colour spectrum—absolutely everyone in Salvador is beautiful.

“Even ugly people are beautiful. Everybody seems likely to start dancing at any moment, and they often do. There are drums and music everywhere. Large, cold beers and powerful beverages of crushed limes and sugarcane liquor, along with spicy fried things, seem to appear from all directions. It seems, from a visitor’s point of view, utopian.”

It’s not, of course, utopia at all. Brazil in general — and Salvador in particular— face enormous problems.

“I stopped trying to figure out Brazil years ago and after many visits just decided to go with the flow,” Bourdain reasoned. “The show we came back with, I hope, reflects that attitude.

“After nearly a year on the road and a solid block of shooting on five continents, this was the last new episode of the season. Given the rigours of all those miles and all those airports, I felt a “low-impact” episode was appropriate.” That meant somewhere warm where the music is good and the water is fine.

“Someplace that definitely doesn’t suck.”

It doesn’t.

And neither does the show Bourdain, Vitale and their crew produced. The music is alluring, seductive even, the ambiance terrific. “Sweet,” to use Bourdain’s word. Brazil was a fine way to close what was, by all accounts, a tough season to film.

Bourdain again: “I don't know if it's the booze or the music or the tropical heat, but after a while bouncing from place to place, wandering down old cobblestone streets, different music issuing from everywhere, a different party, people flowing out of buildings, one gathering, commingling with another, the music mixing, it really does seem that everybody is moving to some mysterious unknowable pulse, some unheard throb that moves people to constantly touch each other, stroke hips, necks, limbs…

“If you, say, found yourself in Brazil and have a chance to hire a boat, head for the beach with a bunch of new friends, and bring along a skilled mixologist, expertly trained in the fine arts of caipirinha making — why wouldn't you?

“Charge across the water, head for a nice, quiet island, order up some sun to come out from behind dark clouds right about now.

“Sometimes clichés are clichés for a reason. Because they're good ideas to start with, which is why people keep … using them over and over.”

In a perfect world, upon reaching said enchanted island, there’s not much to do but jump into the warm, inviting Atlantic waters, with a classic soundtrack playing in the background. Samba, say.

“Splash around for a while, maybe enjoy a nice cold beer or two,” Bourdain said in his voiceover.

“You truly have not taken a beach until a man has set up the caipirinha station. Then you know the LZ is secure.”
The LZ is indeed secure. Time to land the eagle.

CNN

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Bourdain in Russia

“With the [sic] possible Russian invasion of Ukraine all over the news,” locations photographer David Scott Holloway posted on Reddit two years ago, “I’ve found myself thinking a lot about when we travelled there for Parts Unknown.” Today, ten years after that episode first aired, Anthony Bourdain’s ‘Russia’ is as trenchant — and poignant — as if it had aired yesterday.

Where to begin?

As with so many things to do with Anthony Bourdain’s restless, eyes-open wanderings and soulful ruminations in his Parts Unknown verite docuseries for CNN, you can’t go too far wrong by beginning with Bourdain himself. In truth, Bourdain sowed the creative, philosophical and geographical ground for Russia years earlier, in 2002, during his nascent A Cook’s Tour program for the Food Network. That is when Bourdain first broke bread — or rather downed a vodka or two (or three or four) — with his soon-to-be friend, sidekick and semi-frequent travel companion Iazamir “Zamir” Gotta.

As an older, more self-reflective Bill and Ted of the travel-TV set, Bourdain and the Moscow-born Gotta, just a year apart in age at the time (Bourdain was born in 1956, Zamir in 1957), were philosophical peas in a pod, so to speak. Where Bourdain was caustic and observant and not a little cynical — ideal attributes for a life as a chef in a restaurant kitchen — Gotta was, and remains, somewhat of an innocent abroad, cheerful, ebullient and soulful by turns.

It was their shared sense of humour, one acerbic and always looking to burst the proverbial balloon with a sharp, well-timed verbal barb and the other making it up as he goes, zany and full of life, coupled with their shared humanity and deep-rooted respect for the hopes and dreams of decent, ordinary, everyday working people — that made Bourdain and Gotta such an agreeable pair in Parts Unknown.

Zamir first appeared in a pair of A Cook’s Tour episodes, aptly titled The Cook Who Came in from the Cold and So Much Vodka, So Little Time, but it was in No Reservations, years later on Travel Channel, that they truly made their mark with the TV-viewing audience, with seven episodes over an eight-year period, in visits to Uzbekistan, Russia (specifically, St. Petersburg, aka Petrograd, or to Soviet enthusiasts, Leningrad), Romania — arguably one of the zaniest, most outrageous hours of TV that Bourdain and his long-suffering cameraman/producer/director Tom Vitale ever made together — Ukraine (yes, that Ukraine) and, interestingly, the U.S. heartland: the Rust Belt, Kansas City and Brooklyn, NY, unofficially the heart of Bourdain’s native NYC.

Russia, for Parts Unknown, would prove to be fortuitously timed, happening as it did just weeks before the Sochi Olympics and not long before Russia’s invasion of Crimea, Vladimir Putin’s bid to rewrite the history of the Crimean War — 1853-1856, updated for the 21st century.

Russia opens in a field of snow amid a stand of birch trees — “Beautiful, right?” Zamir says off-camera, “We can already indulge ourselves into something special. Such a beautiful day! … Ah, what a place.”

He’s being both literal and ironic, of course, irony being one of the hallmarks of Russian literature — and as a writer myself, I can honestly say that Russian literature is just about at the very top of the field, up there with Aeschylus, Sophocles, Euripides and Shakespeare.

Bourdain famously hated the cold, and the making of Russia coincided with one of the most bitter winters in Russian memory at the time. Bourdain famously said that an ill-advised shoot in Lapland in mid-winter just about killed him; it’s not hard to imagine that, years later, sunning himself in Goldeneye, Ian Fleming’s retreat in Jamaica, Bourdain took one long look at the beach and thought to himself, I could get used to this.

It isn’t long before Bourdain tells viewers what he really thinks of Russia’s fearless leader — still is today, ten years later — “All hail the Maximum Leader. Now, let’s dance!” — but it doesn’t bear repeating here. Bourdain had an inimitable way of describing his irritation at certain people in the public eye, and he is unsparing in his assessment of Maximum Leader. It’s the kind of descriptive way with words that made Bourdain famous, and really should be seen for oneself (Parts Unknown episodes are available for streaming on the (HBO) MAX streaming site, co-owned by CNN owners Warner Bros. Discovery, and are available for purchase on Apple’s Apple TV (formerly iTunes) site).

“It's February 2014, and the Sochi Olympics are just coming up when I arrive in Moscow,” Bourdain says in the opening. “It's a different Moscow every time I come here. The '80s style, go-go capitalist conspicuous consumption see-who-can-spend-the-most-money disco-techno thing that I encountered when I first came here back in 2001 — it's still going strong.

“In fact, these days, Moscow has one of the highest concentrations of billionaires in the world. But as never before, it's imperial Russia now, a one-man rule.

All power emanates, every decision must consider, this guy.”

Russia is full of characters with murky pasts and shadowy connections, Bourdain continues. “But one of them I've called a friend for more than a decade.”

“Tony, wow,” Gotta replies, humbled and awed. And genuine.

And that’s what really works throughout Parts Unknown, not just in Russia but in all the episodes. This is genuine.

“I guess I’m switching to vodka, Zamir.” Bourdain tells him. Switching? When travelling in Russia in the dead of winter, when was he ever off vodka?

“Listen, as a born Muscovite, I'm trying to be a good patron,” Gotta tells him. “So I really want you to tell me, frankly, a week from now, ‘Zamir, now I understand why stereotypes sometimes send a bad message about Russia.’

Bourdain: “I have an open mind. Everything's great. Russians have everything they want.”

Zamir: “Listen, why don't we just taste the vodka.”

Discussions of Mikhail Khodorkovsky, Alexander Litvinenko, Viktor Yushchenko and a sit-down dinner over pelmeni,   a modern riff on borscht, at Moscow’s Yornik restaurant (now closed), with former deputy prime minister (under Boris Yeltsin) Boris Nemstov, a prominent dissident and vocal critic of the Maximum Leader, who would not be long of this world after that dinner with Bourdain. A coincidence? Probably just that — Maximum Leader’s issues with Nemstov ran much deeper than one chance meeting for the TV cameras for US TV. CNN is not a thing in Russia, after all — there, it’s all about Rossiya 1, Channel One, NTV and Russia Today.

A quick scan of Reddit shows that Russia remains one of the five favourite programs for many of Bourdain’s followers

One of the more remarkable things about Bourdain’s body of work in Parts Unknown is just how many episodes count as “five favourite episodes” for someone. There truly was something special in every hour Bourdain, Vitale and Zero Point Zero Production made for CNN, something to appeal to at someone somewhere on a deep, fundamental level. And not just in the US, either. Parts Unknown’s appeal was worldwide.

How to end?

Not with Bourdain this time, though Bourdain does end Russia on a particularly powerful and trenchant note — how could he not?

On the Parts Unknown companion website ExplorePartsUnknown.com, taken offline for several weeks until just the past few days, possibly because it was hacked — that’s what the AI-generated browser blockers said at the time, anyway — there’s a telling, warm reminiscence of behind-the-scenes filming with Russian photographer and film-maker Darya Tarasova. (Also worth a look is the work of veteran set- and locations photographer David Scott Holloway, who has shared links to his Bourdain work, some featured here, on Reddit, and through his website at https://davidscottholloway.com).

The Q&A, conducted and written by Nathan Thornburgh (https://explorepartsunknown.com/russia/behind-the-camera-darya-tarasova/), sheds light on some charming moments that explain, as well as anything in the actual episode, Bourdain's unique relationship with Zamir.

“There was a funny moment in Moscow,” Tarasova recalled. “Tony and Zamir had a kind of skiing competition, because we were filming the episode ahead of the Olympic Games in Sochi. They decided to have fun with the Olympic theme. Anthony was wearing a big jacket that had ‘USA’ on it, and Zamir had his own jacket that said ‘Russia.’ So we had Russia versus the USA. Zamir kept shouting, ‘I will break you!’ He was there to win.

“Zamir knows how to ski, but he wasn’t very proficient when he was trying to go down this hill. And Tony wasn’t in great shape either, but he won the race.

“Zamir just fell down in the middle of the hill and then rolled to Tony’s feet.”

Then there’s the moment with the 122-mm D-30 Howitzer cannon, fired to commemorate the occasion of the October 1917 revolution that ushered in decades of rule — or misrule, depending on your point of view — of Soviet Communism.

Bourdain is invited to load a shell into the Howitzer, and — stand back, everybody… — Bang! It goes off.

Bourdain is happily handed the empty shell, all 21kg of it, once it’s ejected from the Howitzer.

“Enemy is destructed!” Zamir tells him. “Congratulations, you are the hero of Russia now.”

Bourdain: “Sweet.”

Zamir: “You can't take it on the plane, though. They won't understand.”

Bourdain: ”Not even carry on?”

CNN

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