Bourdain Redux

I met Anthony Bourdain at a Smithsonian lecture here in DC a couple of weeks ago. Got him to sign a copy of my Doublethink interview with him. Good stuff.

The highlight of the evening -- by far -- was his putdown of Rachael Ray's $40 a Day Food Network show: "Try tipping, bitch." (Bourdain may hate Ray less than these folks.)

In related news, Ivan (sometimes pronounced "ee-VAHN") Osorio's post on the Doublethink piece over at CEI's Open Markets garnered two responses. Osorio colleague Iain "There's no 'I' in team but two in 'Ian'" Murray replies, smartly, that Bourdain may be a recovering socialist, to which CEI's Pete Suderman responds.

Bourdain Audio Up

Doublethink has posted the audio from my interview with Anthony Bourdain. It runs about 40-45 minutes. Luckily, Bourdain talks a lot more than I do.

Jerry Brito -- to whom I owe several beers and many thanks for pushing me to write the article -- guest-blogging today at DCFUD (sorry "U", but my umlaut key is broken. Wait. Hold on. OK. Fixed it. DCFÜD.), talks about the germ of the Bourdain article.

Anthony Bourdain: Libertarian

My piece on Anthony Bourdain is up here at Doublethink. Here's a sample:

Before delving into Bourdain's comments, I should note my predilection for turning people into libertarians.

Or, rather, my tendency to lend maximum weight to the libertarian qualities of people I admire.

This penchant to turn those I like into one of my own is hardly unique. It's best likened to the way millions of gay men, during the late 1980s, decided that they'd like nothing better than for Tom Cruise to be one of them. At some point a forward-thinking gay man decided to just declare Cruise gay and welcome him to the club. And, several wives and the bronzed contents of Suri's diaper notwithstanding, Tom Cruise went from being a gay icon to actually gay just like that.

Audio from my interview with him should be up at the Doublethink website next week. The magazine will be out in print form next month. It's not too late to subscribe to Doublethink, you know.

What You'll Find in the Series of Tubes

In no particular order...

Screech still might lose his house, but at least he's going out in style with a sex tape. And it's a threesome, no less. [Defamer]

Cartoon bunnies act out classic movies in 30 seconds. [The Age's Last Laugh]

Skip Oliva coins and defines Okiefascists, then he sacks them. While we're at it, his take on the jailed San Francisco Chronicle reporters is spot-on. [Mises]

Ricky Gervais: one-time member of the Human League? [1500 Videos (Scroll to "R")]

Anthony Bourdain on Singapore [NYT]. Get the goods on how to get his new book. For free. [Jerry Brito]

Philip Dawdy on Seattle's city-funded strip club, and news on the city's smoking ban. [Seattle Weekly]

Bill Simmons and the Longest. Chat. Ever. [ESPN]

Good (Weeds) and Great (Bourdain) TV This Monday Night

I'm not really a fan of Weeds, the Showtime pot dramedy -- though I should mention that Mary Louise Parker is looking pretty damn hot these days -- but I think it's pretty cool that the Marijuana Policy Project's LA VIP elbow-rubber is set to appear on Monday night's episode of the show. According to MPP's eNewsletter,

The episode will air at 10:00 p.m. EDT, and will be replayed at 10:30 p.m. and midnight the same evening, as well as on August 23 at 10:00 p.m. and August 25 at 9:00 p.m.

Unfortunately for the Weeds folks and MPP, I a) don't have Showtime anymore and b) will be watching Anthony Bourdain's Travel Channel special on his harrowing time in Beirut last month, filmed before and during the Hezbolebsraeli fighting that devastated the recovering paradise. From Bourdain's Travel Channel pages:

Don't miss Travel Advisory: Trapped Behind the Lines. In this one-hour special we'll recount the stories of the harrowing, life-threatening and sometimes deadly occurrences that have befallen travelers; through footage of recent events in Lebanon and Israel, to past incidents in Bali and Nepal, as well as the devastation following the London and 9/11 terror attacks.

Watch Travel Advisory: Trapped Behind the Lines on Monday, Aug. 21, at 9 p.m. ET/PT

Video, air times, and more photos like this one can be found here at the Travel Advisory page.

Anthony Bourdain: Libertarian?

Earlier this week I had the pleasure of interviewing Anthony Bourdain by phone for a piece I'm writing for Doublethink, the magazine of the America's Future Foundation (AFF).

I set out to ask Bourdain a bunch of questions he'd never been asked to respond to in print (so far as I can tell) about his time in Beirut and his views on things like the nanny state, genetically modified crops, drug legalization, vegans and vegetarians, regulation of the fast-food industry, and globalization. The goal of this line of questioning is perhaps best summed up by this one I lobbed his way toward the end of our 40-minute talk:

In my pitch for this piece, I wrote that “I think you are probably the best popular example of a person living and promoting a libertarian lifestyle in America today.”

I’m wondering if this might be true, or if it’s something like gay men’s fascination with Tom Cruise – that sort of we’d love to have him be one of us, so let’s just fantasize that he’s one of us mentality. Any thoughts on this?

What'd he say? Wouldn't you like to know? Well, I'm not telling. You'll have to buy the magazine -- with his surprising answer to this and other questions -- when it comes out this fall. (The article and audio from the interview will also be made available at Doublethink's website.)

In the meantime, you can find a bunch of new Bourdain up on the web to sate your appetite. There's last week's WashingtonPost.com chat, in which he answered the question I submitted about his best meal in Beirut. There's his great Salon piece on Beirut, also from last week. And there are three podcasts for you to listen to at Raincoast Books.

Bourdain, In Lebanon, On Lebanon

My favorite badass just got even badder.

The best-selling author of "Kitchen Confidential" flew to Beirut on Sunday with a camera crew from his Travel Channel series, "No Reservations," to do a show on the local cuisine. But after the thunderous assault on the city in response to Islamic extremist group Hezbollah's capture of two Israeli soldiers, Bourdain and his crew holed up at the Moevenpick Hotel while they waited for evacuation instructions from the State Department.

"Our network, our friends and our families just want us out of here as soon as possible," Bourdain told Page Six yesterday afternoon, as Israeli shells exploded in the distance. "We're not getting a show out of this . . . I just wanna hang out and drink at the bar. The mojitos here are great."

More here.

My Hero

Salon's posted a great interview with Anthony Bourdain. Here's an exerpt from his rant against Rachael Ray:

If I ever saw her getting trashed on Old Crow, pistol-whipping a vegan after a bar crawl, I would think, "That's an interesting woman. I would like to know her."

More here.

[Via Nobody's Business.]

Stuff People Are Reading

Anthony Bourdain tells us what really pisses him off. [Bookslut]

A judge has (correctly) ruled in favor of our most downtrodden class: White male college professors. [Chronicle of Higher Education]

Fox has decided not to pick up what would likely have been the only reason for me to watch primetime network television. [ESPN]

Charlie Gibson staged a tough battle to make sure ABC's World News Tonight anchor desk had only one anchor chair, and that he was in it. [New York Magazine]

[Via Dave, Minerva, Pete and me, sequentially and respectively.]

Bourdain on Immigration

I'm about fifty pages into Anthony Bourdain's so-far magical new collection The Nasty Bits -- it's just out this week -- and just happened upon the timeliest little chapter on immigrants and immigration, titled "Viva Mexico! Viva Ecuador!" An excerpt (especially prescient in light of the remarks of Fox News yammering head John Gibson):

The idea of America is a mutt-culture, isn't it? Who the hell is America if not everybody else? We are -- and should be -- a big, messy, anarchistic polyglot of dialects and accents and different skin tones. Like our kitchens. We need more Latinos to come here. And they should, whenever possible, impregnate our women. [Ed.: Take that, Gibson!]

[...]

Solution? Simple. I suggest immediately opening up our borders to unrestricted immigration for all Central and South American countries. If the [Culinary Institute of America] grads don't want to squat in a cellar prep kitchen for the first couple of years of their career, or are too delicate or high-strung or too locked into a self-image that precludes the real work of kitchens and restaurants, then they should just stand back and watch their competition from south of the border take those jobs for good. Everyone will end up getting what they deserve.

He's right, of course. It's not that hard-working immigrants are somehow not as good as the rest of us. It's not even that they are our equals. No, it is that they are better than us. Much better. They have proven something none of us have -- that they would choose this country over their birthplace, and would risk life and limb to get here, and would continue to do so by starting at the very bottom, toiling long hours for little money in jobs so difficult we cannot even imagine.

It's high time many pro-immigration advocates in this country change their tactics to suit this reality: Stop apologizing for immigrants and immigration, and start hammering home the point that immigrants are at least as much a part of the true fabric of this country as those who are American simply by birthright.

I Subscribe (The New Yorker)

Interesting stuff from this week's The New Yorker...

The Lonely Planet Guide to My Apartment is some funny stuff.

WOMEN TRAVELLERS

Solo female travellers are often subjected to excessive unwanted male attention. Normally, these men only want to talk to you, but their entreaties can quickly become tiresome. Don’t be afraid to be rude. Even a mild polite response can be perceived as an expression of interest. The best approach is to avoid eye contact, always wear a bra, and talk incessantly about your “fiancé, Neil.”

It may actually be the best fake guidebook piece -- yes, this is a genre -- since The Onion dished out Zagat Editor A 'Nice Guy' But 'Kind Of Boring' in 2002. I make that claim having read a good deal of Molvania but none of Phaic Tan, the first two offerings from the Jetlag Travel Guide series, which is doing its best to quickly exhaust the genre.

Another notable from this issue of the magazine is the odd collection of celebrities endorsing a variety of products, including

Gisele Bundchen, for Louis Vuitton

Nascar's Jeff Gordon, for Tag Heuer

Jerry Hall, for the Mandarin Oriental Hotel Group

Charlie Rose, for Lexus

Anthony Bourdain, for Anthony Bourdain: No Reservations

A poorly drawn, cycloptic representation of Anthony Bourdain (3x), for Anthony Bourdain: No Reservations

Helen Mirren and Jeremy Irons, for HBO's Elizabeth I (which Minerva forced me to sit through Part II of on Monday night; blech)

An actress I always mistake for Charlotte Rampling, for Eileen Fisher, and

Emeril Lagasse, for the Louisiana Dept. of Culture, Recreation and Tourism

That crew would make one hell of a reality show.

Bourdain Takes on the Great White North

Two words: seal hunt. More: raw seal eyeball and brain. Firearms and foie gras aplenty. Best show on television. Full schedule here.

Bourdain Does Peru Right

On last night's amazing episode of No Reservations on the Travel Channel, Anthony Bourdain did which of the following while traveling through Peru?

A) Chewed coca leaves.
B) Drank ayahuasca tea.
C) Drank chi cha and a similar drink that's fermented with help from human spit.
D) Promoted wake-and-bake as a hangover cure.
E) Talked about his decade-long heavy cocaine use.
F) Ate fire-roasted guinea pig.
G) Attacked "smug" leftists who live quite nicely while urging those in the developing world who live in abject poverty to simply forge on with their backbreaking, difficult lives.
H) All of the above.

The answer is H. (H is also, coincidentally, the answer to the question, "What is another drug of which Bourdain was once quite fond?")

A Few Notes on Stars of Filmed Entertainment

Stuff you know you want to know, you know?

Last night's two-hour season premiere of Anthony Bourdain's great No Reservations on the Travel Channel featured (among other things) Bourdain paying a reverential visit to a famous Osaka, Japan restaurant known as a post-war meeting place for intellectuals opposed to the power of the state. The second half of the premiere showed Bourdain as he travelled through China, eating all sorts of absurdly hot and weird foods. More on the show here.

Wilmer Valderrama has an 8-inch penis.

FHM gets it where Esquire did not.

I used to think that nothing could have made Baz Luhrmann's odious musical Moulin Rouge! worth watching. Now I'm certain there's one thing. And that thing is this.

[Thanks to my friend Dude for the latter link.]

Bourdain Ate What?

Chef Anthony Bourdain says he's finally eclipsed his most extreme eating moment. He ate raw seal brain, which he claims to be more extreme than the time he ate the still-beating heart of a cobra (which, thankfully for him, was no longer attached to the cobra). I have a hard time trying to distinguish which is more daring, so I'll just take his word for it.

The new season of Bourdain's great Travel Channel show No Reservations debuts March 26.

My previous TtP homage to Bourdain here. Me talking up Bourdain elsewhere here.

For more on Bourdain -- and video of him eating the cobra heart -- go to his official site.

Newley Purnell's 2005 Bloggers' Favorite Books Survey

This is the third year running that fellow DC blogger Newley Purnell has run the world's only Bloggers' Favorite Books Survey.

This year, along with some extremely well-known and accomplished folks -- Instapundit's Glenn Reynolds, Tipping Point author Malcolm Gladwell, author and blogger Laila Lalami, Boing Boing co-founder Mark Frauenfelder, Purnell and others -- is yours truly. (I'm filling the coveted not-well-known/not-well-read slot.) I give props to Bill Bryson and Anthony Bourdain. Read all about it.

A big thank you to Newley for the invite. Now go read his blog.

Good Eats II

Chef Anthony Bourdain is a fucking badass. As I wrote in To the People's first-ever blog post earlier this month:

Bourdain cooks and eats greasy, fatty and even repugnant foods, all while swearing, drinking and smoking like a condemned prisoner with nothing to lose. He’s a hero.

Besides his status as executive chef at New York City's Les Halles brasserie (I've had their great steak frite at both the Miami and DC locations), Bourdain is also a superb author -- of a fantastic cookbook, an "urban historical", and at least one turgid and -- sadly -- unreadable work of fiction. (Clarification: I've only read one of his three.)

More notably -- to me, at least -- Bourdain also has written two of the finest books I've ever read. In the first, Kitchen Confidential, Bourdain tells of his own fascinating, funny and eminently readable rise from the bottom of the kitchen to success through hard work, good luck, bad luck, and copious amounts of drugs and alcohol.

In A Cook's Tour, Bourdain takes readers with him as he travels the world in search of numerous cultures' best and riskiest eating experiences. As a reader, I practically felt the knife in my hand as Bourdain slaughtered a pig on an Iberian farm, drooled as he described the succulent sheep testicles cooked by his Bedouin hosts in North Africa, and shared his urge to retch while eating iguana in Mexico.

Not risky enough for you? Try not to fear for your own life as Bourdain describes his time eating and drinking in the Wild-West atmosphere of a Cambodian automatic-weapons firing range.

But Bourdain is not just a successful chef and writer (and Ramones fan). A Cooks' Tour the book was paralleled by Bourdain's sadly downplayed Food Network show of the same name. If you have not seen the show, you need only know it is undeniably the best television show ever made. And I blame its relegation to off-hours programming on the Food Network's self-loving simp and everywhere-man Emeril Largeass -- whom Bourdain has derided as an "Ewok."

All this leads me to implore you -- the now-interested reader -- to park your ass in front of your television for Bourdain's new show, No Reservations, which debuts on the Travel Channel this Monday at 10 p.m.

"Basically, everything that makes this place good would be illegal in the United States," say Bourdain in a promo for No Reservations. Bourdain's contempt for the nanny state, and his love of straight, plain language makes his return to original programming sure to be the highlight of my summer.

Update: Fox is making Kitchen Confidential into a show.

Welcome To the People

“What the fuck?” someone asked me. “Does the world really need another libertarian blog?”

Maybe not. But I expect you'll find this one to be a bit different. Our goal is to knock down the normal level of discourse found at most libertarian blogs by at least a few notches. Lowbrow, if you will. Yes, you’ll find an intellectual argument made here from time to time. (Bone to the nerds: as I type this, one of our writers is working on a sexy gold-standard piece.) But we hope that’s not all you look for here, lest you find crushing disappointment. Sure, I’m very happy to share important ideological and philosophical beliefs with many really brilliant people doing wonderful things. But that’s not me; that’s not To the People. While I like libertarianism because it’s the only path to a society of meaningful freedoms, I like it even more because it defends my right to drink a lot of booze, smoke some weed, eat still-living animals, kill myself, prolong my life indefinitely, masturbate in the HOV lane, etc. etc.

So where does the name come from? Well, most of you might recognize the blog’s name as being the final three words of the Tenth Amendment and, thus, the Bill of Rights. Not only are they that, they’re also the most important words – in our opinion – in the whole Constitution. We’ll make that case later on. In the meantime, here is a partial list of intellectuals whose thoughts and actions we absolutely like and believe in:

The late Peter McWilliams laid out an engaging, well-researched and humorous defense of individual liberty. Then the government effectively killed him.

Randy Barnett argues that the Ninth and Tenth Amendments are the most important for guaranteeing individual liberty – to the extent that we might be entirely more secure in our persons and property without the rest of the damn document.

Reason’s Nick Gillespie sees progress in all the stuff we can do now that we couldn’t at one point legally do. (Gay men can check into a hotel together, for example. Others are free to wear the same leather jacket every day.) His colleague Jacob Sullum has made a convincing case that moderate (and sometimes-heavy) drug use is perfectly acceptable, and we dig him for that.

Larry Flynt? Same thing… different vice.

No one defender of liberty is at once as esteemed and reviled as eminent psychiatrist Thomas Szasz. What he endures for being smarter and braver than the rest of the world is shameful.

New York City chef, author and traveling gourmand Anthony Bourdain cooks and eats greasy, fatty and even repugnant foods, all while swearing, drinking and smoking like a condemned prisoner with nothing to lose. He’s a hero.

Peruvian economist Hernando de Soto cuts through the crap spread by those who say that markets and freedom harm the poor in the developing world, and describes how and why specific restrictions on economic freedoms brake progress.

Who else do we like? Cathy Young, Ron Bailey, Evel Kneivel, Pete Guither, Ward Connerly, Ron Paul, David Boaz, Jeffrey Schaler, John Stossel, Penn & Teller. Clint Eastwood. Eugene Volokh, Jim Leitzel, Virginia Postrel, Johann Norberg, Tyler Cowen, Dave Barry and James Bovard. Thomas Sowell, the late David Brudnoy and any other person or organization that believes that what the Constitution says goes.