Bourdain in Senegal

“A rebuke to those who’d paint a whole continent as a monolith of despair, or Islam as something to be feared.” This was Tony Bourdain in Senegal, in the fall of 2015.o be feared.” This was Tony Bourdain in Senegal, in the fall of 2015.

Senegal.

In Tony Bourdain’s words, “A rebuke to those who’d paint a whole continent as a monolith of despair, or Islam as something to be feared, Senegal turns simple-minded assumptions and prejudice on their heads at every turn.”

More than a few people who followed Bourdain on his travels over the years — including some of those in this group, quite possibly — may have been surprised by how taken Bourdain was with the West African country of Senegal, which he visited just once in his many years on the road, in the fall of 2015.

The essay he penned for the social media platform Medium, the day before Senegal premiered on CNN’s Parts Unknown in May 2016, left little doubt, however.

Bourdain had set foot in Africa before, a vast continent with more than 50 countries, in Congo for Parts Unknown’s debut season, followed in short order by Morocco, South Africa, and Tanzania in 2014, Madagascar in 2015, and Ethiopia a year later.

He would go on to visit Nigeria and—famously, in his final season of Parts Unknown, which aired posthumously in 2018—Kenya with Kamau Bell.

Years earlier, for Travel Channel’s No Reservations, Bourdain wound his way through Ghana, Namibia, and Liberia, ending with Mozambique in No Reservations’ last season, titled — somewhat portentously — The Final Tour.

Senegal, though, was different, as he made clear in his essay for Medium.

“So let this episode in Senegal, an African nation which is over 90% Muslim, serve as both rebuke and example. It is a country that proudly elected as their first president after independence a Christian — because they felt, in their best judgment, that regardless of his faith, he was the best person for the job.

“It is a country that defies stereotypes and expectations at every turn. Emerging from French colonial times as a functioning multi-cultural, multi-lingual, extraordinarily tolerant society, it has managed to avoid coups, tribal wars, dictatorships and most of the ills that afflicted so many of its neighbours. It remains an absolutely enchanting place to visit, with delicious food, absolutely extraordinarily beautiful music, and a relatively free and easy attitude towards intermarriage, mixed race, intertribal relationships and foreign visitors. It has a powerful and proud tradition of hospitality that endures to this day.”

This was in 2015.

Remarkably, the same is still true today, nearly 10 years later, despite everything that’s happened in the outside world in the years since.

And is still happening, as Bourdain himself would have been quick to point out.

The fascinating thing to me, as a frequent visitor of that vast continent, is that all 54 countries are different. That may seem like a trite thing to say, condescending even, but then you must understand that most — virtually all — Africans see themselves that way, as the residents and citizens of strikingly different countries, with separate cultures and separate languages. I have heard it said that while South Africa — possibly the most westernized of African countries, certainly in the big cities of Durban, Johannesburg and Cape Town, has 11 official languages, in fact, the country of 64 million people is thought by some to be home to 86 different native languages. To homogenize the entire continent in a single word — Africa — is the height of condescension, but that’s what colonial thinking does to one.

Tony Bourdain got that.

That’s why he was openly welcomed wherever he went on the continent — that, and his love for good music in all its forms. And African cultures have indelibly close ties to music in all its forms. The Sahara Desert and the Sahel hinterlands — possibly a vast, seemingly empty wasteland to you and me — are home to some of the most respected, well-attended music festivals on the planet. And here’s the fun part. Those music festivals are about 95% local and only 5%, if that, touristy.

Bourdain got that, too.

And so, in Senegal, he sits down and breaks bread with Senegal’s native-born Youssou N’Dour, not just sharing quality time with N’Dour but thanks to CNN’s Parts Unknown and Zero Point Zero Production’s cameras allowing us, the viewers, to share quality time not just with a remarkable singer and musician but a poet-philosopher, a political activist, an active humanist, who is Christian, secular and Muslim all rolled into one.

A truly remarkable person. Peter Gabriel is a frequent musical collaborator of N’Dour’s, and he’s not alone among Western musicians of note. Gabriel will tell you he’s the pupil and N’Dour the mentor, not the other way around.

It’s worth noting, too, that N’Dour performed his anthemic 7 Seconds, featured in all its gorgeous fullness in the Senegal episode, in 2005’s Live 8 concert in an extended duet with Dido, who was born in Kensington, London and hails from a background as different from N’Dour’s as is humanly possible.

Think on this: Live 8 — sobering and deeply moving to look back at today, given the fractious state of world affairs today— was performed live, and I’m not making this up, from London, Paris, Rome, Philadelphia, Barrie (Ontario, Canada, my home country), Chiba (Japan), Johannesburg, Moscow, Cornwall and Edinburgh. Think about that: good music brings the world together for a common cause.

Tony Bourdain got that, too.

“So what’s the future?” he asks N’Dour, about midway through what, with the benefit of 10 years’ hindsight, is one of my favourite Bourdain sets.

The two met in Dakar’s Bazoof restaurant over plates of mafe, a Senegalese stew of beef thickened with ground peanuts. To hear Bourdain tell it, “There are similar preparations throughout West Africa, but the Senegalese version is particularly great. Sear the beef; cook the onion, garlic, peppers, and carrots; deglaze with ground peanuts and broth, bringing up all that good stuff from the pan; then simmer until tender and awesome. Serve hot over rice.”

“The future?” N’Dour replies, perhaps surprised by the question.

Bourdain: “Yes, the future. Twenty years from now, where will Senegal be?”

N’Dour: “What I hope is, in 20 years, Senegal is going to be the place for great and big contributions of what we call Islam.”

Bourdain: “Do you think there's any danger of the kind of radical Islam that we see taking hold in many places in Africa?”

N’Dour: “All these people who are using the religion, the Muslim religion, to do bad things — I think Senegal sets (a good) example. This country I love, my country has many different models of the religion. This country, you know — you are here. I'm doing my local bissap “ — a drink made from a hibiscus flower known as the Roselle; the sepals of the hibiscus, when infused in hot water, leave a pink, red, magenta or dark shade of water — “and you are here, with your beer, in a country that is 95 percent Muslim.”

Bourdain: “Right.”

N’Dour: “And I think this example can help all the world.”

Bourdain: “I hope so. Inshallah.”

By the end, Bourdain is profoundly moved by this country of 18 million. Shaken to his core. What better way to close this, then, than with his own words,.

“Senegal is one of the best arguments for travel I can think of. Because the more we see of the world, actually meet who we are talking about — or think we are talking about — the more we take a walk, however briefly, in other people’s shoes, see how other people live, people who are supposedly so different than us, and find ourselves — as so often and so inevitably happens — recipients of random acts of hospitality and kindness from total strangers, then the better we shall be.

“And the happier. Knowledge — exposure — to ‘the other’ is not a contaminant.

“It enriches us. It makes — or should make us — more humble.

“Senegal. It’s someplace that everyone, given the chance, should go.”

Inshallah.

Supplementary reading:

https://explorepartsunknown.com/senegal/senegal-women-equality/

https://explorepartsunknown.com/senegal/senegal-episode-facts/

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

CNN

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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 Marseille (avec Eric Ripert)

Anthony Bourdain: “I should point out that every single Frenchman, when I say, ’I’m shooting in France,’ they go, ‘Oh really? Where?’ And I say, ‘Marseille.’ Their face drops immediately, like, ‘Oh.’”

CNN

No regrets. Non, je ne regrette rien. Alors, I don’t regret anything.

Tony Bourdain’s sojourn to Marseille, France, for the second episode of Parts Unknown’s sixth season was a marked departure from the news-driven outings that preceded it, the previous season’s season-ender in Beirut, Lebanon,  and the previous week’s season opener in Havana, Cuba.

The emphasis this time was back on food and having fun in an exotic destination — back to Bourdain’s roots, in other words — but it was more than that. It was a chance to renew his lifelong bromance with chef Eric Ripert.

The episode, co-produced and directed by Cuba’s Toby Oppenheimer, opens with the two of them regarding each other — un certain regard — looking strikingly alike, in neatly pressed long-sleeved white shirts, two full heads of white hair — si viril! — and near-identical shades for the bright Mediterranean sun — élégante, naturellement.

Then, after a pause, “I need a French coach,” Bourdain says — ironie! As if.

As if Bourdain needed coaching in anything, let alone how to blend in with the local colour and get along with the locals in an unfamiliar setting. Welcome to Marseille. Somehow I don’t think we’re in Kansas anymore.

Bourdain never really lost touch with his French roots, after all.

Bourdain is a French name; he first took an interest in food when, as a child during a family trip to France, he ate his first oyster. Qu’est-ce que c’est la? Whatever it was, it tasted good, and worth looking into further — though at that age Bourdain was too young to seriously consider his future life choices.

On one level, it’s easy to think of Ripert — a successful chef, optimistic, a practicing Buddhist, laid-back in that live-and-let-live Buddhist way, without a single bad word to say about anyone, a point Bourdain mentions frequently, with no small amount of wonderment, throughout the episode — the philosophical and emotional ying to Bourdain’s yang.

During Marseille’s early moments anyway, the pair are peas in a pod, petits pois dans une cosse, pun intended.

Peas have a special place in French culture, after all. They were one of the earliest food crops to be cultivated—Marseille, despite its coastal Mediterranean setting, is anchored in a rural region where agriculture plays an important role in the local economy—and Charlemagne, the 8th-century French emperor, not the American rapper and radio host, planted and nurtured peas in his royal garden.

And cheese. Must mention the cheese.

There’s a virtually moveable feast of cheese throughout the episode, and small wonder. Bourdain and Ripert both dote on cheese, in all its guises, and the Marseille region is famous around the world for its wide variety of quality cheeses, in ways France’s neighbours can only dream of. Legend has it that the famous English comedy troupe Monty Python took one look at Marseille and thought to themselves, ’ To hell with British politics, what we really need is a sketch about a cheese shop.’

Make it so, and let it be.

What makes Marseilles stand out, watching it today, knowing what we now know — it first aired on CNN in October 2015 — are the poignant moments toward the middle and again at the end of the hour when Ripert, arguably one of Bourdain’s closest friends and confidants, if not his closest, and Bourdain discuss the meaning of life, where things go from there, and the perfect exit.

“I could retire here,” Bourdain says.

“I could retire here, too,” Ripert replies, even though he’s admitted, moments earlier, that he’d never been to Marseille before his bromantic get-together with Bourdain — this was his first visit — despite growing up no more than 50 miles away.

(It’s hard to believe, that, the part about growing up just 50 miles from France’s second-largest city but never once actually going there, not even for a visit.)

“I could live here,” Bourdain says. “Just me and my watercolours. … That’s the measure of a place, for me; if you start thinking thoughts like that when you retire, are you going to just putter?”

Ripert: “What’s putter?”

Bourdain: “Dicking around. Doing nothing. Basically, you wake up, and maybe you paint a little.”

Ripert: “I could paint.”

Bourdain: “Do you know how to make a sweater?”

Ripert: “I would like to go fishing. You know, I’ve never caught anything in my life.”

“Do you actually fish? Do you know how to fish? Do you ever fish?”

“I don’t know how to fish.”

“I'll show you how. All you need is a car battery and a couple of cables. Trust me, you get all the fish you want.”

“That’s—”

“How do you say ‘dynamite’ in French?”

“Dynamite.”

“Dynamite. See, I do speak French! You can tell ..,.  you know what’s coming, right? You can sense it. Oh, no. Another fishing scene.”

Bourdain tells Ripert that, when filming Parts Unknown and No Reservations before that, he never once had a fishing scene that worked the way it was supposed to. (Fellow Bourdain watchers: Remember Sicily?)

“This must be my 12th fishing scene. No, I must have done 20 fishing scenes in my life. And I think I had one good day out of all of them. Other than that, it's been one humiliating goat rodeo after another.

“Ordinarily, our typical fishing scene actually would be … it would be rougher than this. So we're pitching back and forth, and I'll be hanging on to the contents of my stomach only by realizing that (the camera dudes) feel even sicker because they have to look through the viewfinder. … Basically, you're playing this sort of race-against-time kind of game.”

No matter. Peu importe. They go fishing anyway, just Bourdain and Ripert together, a scene from a buddy movie, with an expert handy with a long-line reel and a reputation for catching a fish no matter the conditions.

It ends badly.

“This is the worst,” Bourdain says.

“This is the worst,” Ripert agrees.

“Well, there it is,” Bourdain says, for the benefit of the cameras and you, gentle viewer.

“Another extraordinarily successful fishing scene in the can. Time to reap the rewards waiting for us back on dry land.”

It’s Marseille. There are always culinary rewards waiting on dry land.

That cheese, for one. And red wine.

“Oh, look at that,” Bourdain says, of the cheese. “Oh, man. I love. Cheese like this. It’s incredible. Oh, yes.”

“It is exceptional,” Ripert says, and he would know. “Life is good.”

“It’s very good in Marseille,” Bourdain says.

At least it was, if only for a moment.

Bittersweet. Poignant. A lovely episode. Spéciale. Vraiment.

Supplementary reading:

     http://theprovencepost.blogspot.com/2015/09/anthony-bourdain-in-marseille.html

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

CNN

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Bourdain in Cuba

Anthony Bourdain’s first impressions of Cuba, back in the day: “I’ve been to a lot of places, but I can’t think of another place that’s been less f**ked by time than Havana.” When Bourdain returned in 2015, it briefly looked as if that was about to change.

When Anthony Bourdain pulled back the curtain on the 2015 season of CNN’s Parts Unknown, the restless world traveller and homespun philosopher was nearing the midway point of what would prove to be his crowning moments in the TV spotlight.

Cuba was the 41st of, in the end, 95 hour-long TV episodes of Parts Unknown. In a departure of sorts for the often caustic, always irascible Bourdain, it also marked one of the few times he visited another country, cameras in tow, twice in such a short period of time. Parts Unknown’s Cuba episode followed just three years after his first visit for No Reservations’ 2011 season.

That was for Travel Channel;  the follow-up was for CNN, but that wasn’t the only difference.

In March 2016, then-US president Barack Obama announced he would be lifting travel restrictions to Cuba for American citizens. Bourdain, reasoning this was too good an opportunity to miss, made the short 90-mile hop from the Florida Keys in an uncharacteristically — for him — sunny mood, buoyed by optimism for a more hopeful future for a people snakebitten by history ever since Spanish colonization in the 15th century.

In 2015, Cuba — then as now — was a mystery wrapped inside an enigma, a historical oddity, disarmingly simple on the one hand and yet maddeningly complex on the other. Fidel Castro, still very much alive and kicking at age 89, was a bogeyman to descendants of the Cuban emigres who fled to South Florida in the wake of the Cuban Revolution in January 1959, but a hero to a significant portion of the roughly 7 million Cubans who stayed behind, not all of them by choice, for good or bad.

Today, Cuba’s population has ballooned to 11.21 million (2022), more people than live in the states of Michigan and Ohio, but many of the same old issues remain.

Dates in history can play funny tricks on one.

Castro’s death on Nov. 25th, 2016, came 51 years and three days after the assassination of President John F. Kennedy, on Nov. 22nd, 1963 — which, depending on how much faith you place in Oliver Stone conspiracy movies, Castro had a hand in … along with the CIA, the Russians, a cabal of disaffected Cuban emigres in South Florida, assorted Texas weirdoes, right-wing elements in the US military, and a lone nut with a gun hiding out in the Texas School Book Depository, now a museum no less, with a somewhat prosaic name, the Dallas County Administration Building.

Cuba features the work, too, of Parts Unknown director/producer Toby Oppenheimer and Bourdain’s longtime cameramen, Zach Zamboni and Todd Liebler, among too many others to name at production company Zero Point Zero.

Zamboni and Liebler must have done something right: They won the coveted Emmy Award for outstanding cinematography in a non-fiction program that year, to go with Emmys they won earlier in 2013, for Myanmar, and 2014, for Punjab.

As with so much of Bourdain’s best work — and Cuba is some of his best work if trapped in a weird political and socio-economic time warp thanks to unforeseen events, hello, President Trump! — Cuba very much has that signature Bourdain look and feel.

The rum no doubt helped. Cuba, lest we forget, is home to some all-world rum.

Bourdain repeatedly talks about how the island will drastically change, and for the better, in a matter of weeks — and, hey, What will all those people do with all those extra tourist dollars once the locals become cruise ship millionaires?

As we know now, to many’s regret, that never came to pass. Unless you’re Canadian, that is, as I am. Cuba has been something of a tourist mecca for Canadians — Europeans, too — since 1976 when then-Prime Minister Pierre Trudeau visited Cuba and kissed the Beard.

Richard Nixon, America’s president at the time, was singularly unimpressed. He even made a tape recording to that effect. (Nixon taped virtually everything he said, including things that were perhaps best kept to himself.)

Despite its misplaced optimism for Cuba’s short-term future, Cuba remains one of Bourdain’s more fondly recalled episodes among Bourdainophiles.

Just look at this comment, posted on Reddit a few years back:

“… watching Anthony Bourdain: Parts Unknown and for the umpteenth time marvelling at the images. Every goddam frame — well, 90% of them — is beautifully composed with perfect depth-of-field, rich contrast, colours and textures, and striking subjects.

“And the editing is really inventive, breaking up longer shots with tiny vignettes of apparently unrelated but complementary images. … (Even) if you don't like Bourdain, you can watch (the) episode with the sound off and just groove on the images and editing. … “

And that ending!

”(It) ends with one of the most amazing shots I've ever seen on TV. For a couple of minutes, they roll slowly along a blocks-long seawall where people are hanging out in the twilight, but they frame it so they only show the people from the chest down. Two minutes of slow side-scrolling past headless bodies, graceful, casual, random, almost abstract patterns of arms and legs in the twilight.”

But wait, there’s more.

Here’s unit photographer, Zero Point Zero regular and Peabody Award-winning filmmaker David Scott Holloway, who bird-dogged Bourdain throughout his travels for CNN:

“The restaurants in Havana’s Chinatown were delicious, and surprising. Also, going to see a show at midnight in a club was great. Things could be a lot different than when we were there, but I’d still check the episode and see if any of it speaks to you. Good luck!”

And that music!

Watching Cuba is a little like watching Buena Vista Social Club coupled with Babette’s Feast.

Many of the places Bourdain ate at, and according to the site Eat Like Bourdain, are still open today, at least as of this past December: in Havana, Cafeteria a la BBQ, along with El Aljube, Fábrica de Arte and Paladar “Los Amigos” among others,  and in the small fishing town of Jaimanitas, Casy Santy, aka ‘Santy Pescador’ according to Google, where two brothers fish every morning for seafood they serve on the plate later that same day. It adds whole new meaning to the term, locally sourced.

Cuba was the first episode CNN aired after the emotional grind of Beirut, and the two make an unlikely yet oddly fitting couple. As with Beirut, the city that is, it’s clear Havana captured Bourdain’s heart.

He intimated as much in an essay for the social media platform Medium, titled Cuba!!!, which Bourdain shared in CNN's Field Notes.

“Whatever your feelings on the Cuban government of the last half-century,” he wrote, ”Cuba itself is beautiful. The Cuban people are uniquely wonderful: proud, resourceful (you sort of HAVE to be in Cuba), educated — and funny as hell. Even crumbling from neglect, Havana is the most beautiful city in all of Latin America or the Caribbean. The rum is the finest in the world, bar none. The music … fantastic.”

Bourdain saves a comment, too, for that shot at the end.

“A long tracking shot of people, mostly young Cubans, hanging out by the Malecon in Havana. We have sort of a bet among ourselves — those of us who make the show — where we challenge each other to see how long we can hold a sequence without voiceover, or dialogue. Just allow the images to speak for themselves.

“I think we outdid ourselves this time. I’m very proud of it.”

And rightly so.

Con razón.

Supplementary reading:

     https://explorepartsunknown.com/directors-cut/when-something-was-good-he-would-tell-you/

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

CNN

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