Processing Pain: The Legacy of Anthony Bourdain
Anthony Bourdain’s Death | Parts Unknown | Eric Ripert | Apollo Fields Photojournalism
Watching Anthony Bourdain’s Parts Unknown with Eric Ripert offers insight into the turmoil behind Bourdain’s infamous irreverence. Around every corner of conversation Bourdain’s slinging some cryptic or grotesque piece of humor, landing upon Ripert’s matter-of-fact ears like juvenile jabs from a close friend. It is entertaining albeit haunting, to hear the words “death” and “I want to die” come from Bourdain’s mouth. Perhaps the saddest part though, is that the callous, cynical persona that we all fell in love with was slowly consuming the host of Parts Unknown right in front of our laughing eyes.
Hindsight is 20-20 of course, and now watching the show is an exercise of recognizing his blunt, unforgiving humor as the red flags of a man publicly processing his inner demons. Bourdain’s trip to Buenos Aires in one episode is particularly poignant as it cuts in and out of a therapy session where he explores and laments his character. Bourdain says that he wanted nothing more than to look out the window and think, “life is good,” but couldn’t see past what he considered an unfixable, untreatable “character trait.” The reality is that he was processing his pain the way he was accustomed to—using lewd jokes as bridges for cross-cultural conversations—it’s just a shame that we didn’t see these devices as explorations of his mental “parts unknown,” rather than hilarious quips.
Yet that’s exactly what our mental machinations are to each other: “parts unknown.” Bourdain knew he would find no sympathizers with his woes because, let’s face it, he had a job we all could only dream of. But I’m beginning to believe that our feelings, the things us millennial are infamous for, are perhaps the only knowable truths in our lives. Yes they are subjective, but no set of objective circumstances can make them invalid. Bourdain felt suicidal despite the objective reality of a world full of open doors. He told us his truth in his way and we loved him for it. His opinion on life is valid. If his unfortunate demise is to teach us anything it is to further explore and explain our own mental “parts unknown.”
I see a problem today is that avoiding our introspection is easier than ever. We dive into any form of social media and relate to each other or fictional characters with similar problems but never really engage with our “parts unknown.” We recognize social media as a problem in the same breath that we launch an hour long conversation about Stranger Things or Black Mirror. I do believe that we all want to be stronger, but few us of have the will power to shut down our apps and sit in uncomfortable silence. Just the other day, when I was asking a friend what he thought about a current painful event in my life he recommended watching The Good Place and American Vandal on Hulu and Netflix respectively. I called him out and couldn’t help but think that we are treating our “parts unknown” with a healthy dose of social media. But I don’t want to distract the pain away, I want to engage it.
And I think that’s exactly what Bourdain was doing. Let me be clear, the irony of me opining about social media consumption while learning a life lesson from social media is not lost on me—it is a reflection on a particularly honest man. Bourdain’s death is a representation of what can happen when we conflate our mental machinations, our feelings, our “parts unknown” with consumable pieces of entertainment. If we don’t learn to resist the urge to hide our feelings in our favorite characters and friend’s Instagram stories, I fear that we all increase our likelihood of realizing the same fate. In a nod to Mr. Bourdain and to all of the pain in the world, be strong and speak on it. Not just on social media, but to your friends and family, and more importantly, to yourself.
Photo credit: The Hollywood Reporter
Nihilism: The Teenager's Escape from Reality
3.27.18 - 5004 Cody Street ~ 9:10 AM MT
I’m starting to write at 9 today, which is a step in the right direction. Once I spend a few minutes or hours sucking at the teat of mindless information it’s difficult for my mind to focus and get back on track. When I first wake up my mind may be groggy but it’s the most clear that it will be all day.
Yesterday I helped a friend, let’s call him Mark, paint a room and we talked about everything from nostalgic video games (Link’s Awakening for Gameboy) to what animal we’d want to be reincarnated as (some type of bird). He talked about that he doesn’t have much time to do anything and the time that he does have he enjoys being by himself and gaming, proclaiming that he has “no responsibilities to anyone but himself.” At the time it seemed very appealing, carrying an air of total freedom, but I can’t help but think that it’s ironically one of the reasons he’s depressed. He often uses it as a rationalization for sleeping in until noon and he never applies himself.
I remember when I used to sleep in that late and I’d feel crummy. It was tough to feel good about myself when I wasn’t leaving the stamp of my uniqueness on anything on any given day. Floating through life is fine and all, but at some point I thought, “this is how you wake up middle aged never really doing anything.” Pleasure and leisure can only get you so far but fulfillment lies in a putting in a concerted effort at something that you don’t mind doing over and over again, improving upon it every time. When you sleep through the morning and coast through the afternoon, the only thing you get in exchange is whatever you’re dreaming about.
Heather helps me by pulling my productivity towards her end of the spectrum because that’s her default. It’s also why we’re good together: because we bring each other towards a happy equilibrium. Too much of anything is detrimental, just take either Mark or Heather by themselves—unhappy and caught in a cyclical pattern of what they know and what they feel comfortable doing. I could definitely use some work getting pulled to the side of productivity but I tend to think I hover more around the center than either of them.
Mark also lets his cynicism paralyze his action in the form of anti-capitalistic nihilism. He’s not wrong—it’s just too much for a human mind to carry with it, especially if you’re going to exist within the capitalistic structure and enjoy some of the luxuries it provides. Perhaps I’m too cut and dry or I’ve bought into the system as well, but when you hold beliefs as strong as him I think that you have to either separate entirely, removing yourself from participation in the system as much as possible; or you come to grips with the futility of overthrowing it, accept the benefits it awards you, and you try to combat it in the most productive way that you can as an unique individual. I don’t think he believes in some widespread Marxist revolution to overthrow the owners of the means of production (I used to) but I don’t see any value in nihilism. It’s like a teenagers way out of the existential crisis of capitalism.
My argument against nihilism is also the same one why I don’t harbor negative feelings towards people most of the time—because they don’t provide anything useful to me. When you do things in life that have no positive purpose you are essentially keeping your needle close to neutral, perhaps even tilting towards the negative side of things, and I believe life is more than that. You don’t have to achieve greatness, you don’t have to get a PHD or discover something new; all you have to do is try to leave the unique imprint of yourself somewhere everyday (with exception to intentionally hurting others), and try to err on the side of positivity.
"We Are What We Repeatedly Do"
2.25.18 - Brittany’s House off Independence ~ 9:46 AM MT
Coming back from an Internet black hole, 30 minutes later, I’m finally putting some work in. Its really hard for me to focus when there is so much content to consume, making it really easy to divert my attention to passive activities. I’m grateful to have Brittany and Mike’s house to take refuge, although I wish their fireplace worked.
The thought that’s been bumping around my head is to unify all that I’ve been thinking about since studying philosophy in a non-fiction work about living a meaningful life in the 21st century. My immediate response to my own thought is: who are you to say how to live a meaningful life? To which I respond, I studied philosophy, Aristotle intensively, and have meaningful interactions day-in-and-day-out. If you are what you consistently do, then what does that make the average American? A consumer: products, food, entertainment--that is what our culture is known for.
I used to think about dismantling the ideology of businesses, how ethics should be enforced onto ad agencies and mega-corporations because it’s not “right” to manipulate the psyches of the masses to make a quick buck. A realization on that idea is that the inertia behind the consumerist exploitation of the American population is so great and monolithic that it’d be like an ant standing in front of a tank rather than a person in Tiannamen square. A disruption of the system through bureaucratic means not only sounds like an unconquerable uphill battle, but an exercise in futility.
Instead, focusing on the tenet of Aristotle, you are what you constantly do, in order to have a meaningful life you need to make meaningful decisions. You need to exercise discipline in your consummatory choices, recognizing the need for pain, for silence, for the higher cost of quality products to live a more meaningful life. Unless you’re willing to live a meaningless, surface-level life, in which case that’s fine for you to Snapchat your days away, Facebooking until the screen on your phone burns your retinas.
Aristotle’s tenet, then, is a phrase meaning that life is a pattern of decision-making. It doesn’t need to be framed in good or bad decisions, but rather healthy or unhealthy ones. We do not need to invoke a 21st century code of morality to live better lives, all we need is some science.
Unplugged Times
When I opened up my eyes in the fort (yes, it’s still up) this morning, the sun scorched my retinas like a prolonged flash from a disposable camera. It made me think of how far I’ve come from my hatred for the stream of sunlight that would find its way through the drawn curtains of my teenage years. In those days, the only things that were worthwhile before noon were McDonalds’s breakfast and The Price is Right with Bob Barker (remember to spay and neuter your pets).
After some reading in bed I took a stroll through the melting snow with Rumor, our Doberman pinscher who we rescued from a sandwich shop. It always amuses me how other dog walkers switch to the other side of the road to pass because of her breed’s reputation—little do they know that Rumor is scared of cardboard boxes, paper towels, washing machines and anything that’s loud; not to mention that she lets our paraplegic Jack Russell, Riddle, maintain the alpha role in our house (I must admit that I do enjoy this misplaced, stereotype-induced appearance of intimidation because my tendency to smile at strangers doesn’t exactly strike fear into people’s hearts). Taking walks like these, unplugged from the constant chatter of the Internet allows me to hone in on the trickle of the stream of mountain runoff, the honks of the distant geese, and the massive puddles that turn every sidewalk’s corner into mini ballets of pedestrian pirouettes.
Yet it’s still a struggle for me to leave the comfort of my couch, where I could be scrolling through the sea of infinite information and entertainment that lives in my phone, waiting, beckoning me to fall into yet another black hole of YouTube where after starting with one silly video I suddenly find myself, hours later, watching a clip of a cat putting on a bunny hat, leaving me wondering, “how the fuck did I get here?” It’s nuts how easy it is to be captured by these cheap, goldfish-attention-span videos that sate our lazy, passive curiosities, but that’s a real 21st century, first-world problem—anything I want, including all day McDonalds breakfast and all of the old episodes of The Price is Right are just a couple of convenient clicks away.
It’s unplugged times like walking through the snow with my dopey, intimidating Dobie that make me grateful for remembering the sound of a dialup modem coming through the receiver of our rotary phone as I try to hang up immediately, hoping not to inconvenience one of my older brothers by kicking them off one of their “super important” sessions on AIM in the basement. Perhaps it’s just my version of “back in my day,” but I can’t help but think that this evolution of technology invading our psyches is a bit more intrusive and worrisome than watching Elvis thrust his hips on a television set or the 60’s movement being reduced to a brand of countercultural consumerism. Perhaps we all want to be strong and intimidating but beneath it all we’re all just scared of paper towels and cardboard boxes like Rumor—either way, I’m just happy and grateful I can still muster the strength to shirk the comforts of convenience and enjoy the trickle of a creek once in awhile.
Apollo Fields Wedding Photographers
3.12.18 - Bean Fosters – Golden, CO ~ 11:06 AM MT
It’s weird how a letter on a typewriter feels more real than a note typed into a word processor. Something about the tangible ink slapped onto the page one neat character at a time that delivers finality to your words. Typing on a typewriter forces you to arrange your thoughts in real time, creating a sense of emergency that nudges your mind to move forward rather than laterally.
Once you organize the first few words of a sentence and you like them enough you put them down and you figure the rest out as you go. Before you know it your fingers are splashing all over the keyboard and little tiny metallic pangs are echoing throughout the room until a delicate chime rings to delay the creative symphony for a few seconds.
There is definitely something more present about typing on a typewriter. On a computer with WiFi your mind is being torn to the sides, “come hang out in the periphery of the Internet where you won’t have to work so hard,” it calls to us. But being lucid enough to arrange your thoughts with a focus where you can’t believe your fingers are actually moving with purposeful conviction feels like a submission to the magical creative element that eludes the amateur artist. It’s funny that returning to a more primitive, real technology can trigger the magic that lives inside of us.
As I type this in Word Processor, I am constantly fumbling my thoughts, going back into my sentences and reworking them, never allowing my mind to uninhibitedly flow forward. Real time editing grants me the godlike power to alter the creative process and assure that I don’t make any silly or clunky mistakes. The problem with that is that it interferes with the free flowing creativity that is necessary to any worthy piece of work. It would seem unnatural to see a painter go back over their work and erase a stroke of the brush. When a painter dips their brush into a palate and splash it onto a canvas they mean it; when I write on a typewriter, plucking at the keys, I mean it.
A real element is lost in the creative process when it lives in the electrons of a screen, separating our hands from our creation. It is a similar transition in social media where we immerse ourselves in a world of appearances, a world that feels real, but isn’t. It gives us this sense of partial familiarity because the importance of the real is lost in the robotic 1’s and 0’s of binary code.
There’s nothing wrong with waiting for creativity to circle back around, sitting in discomfort as it orbits your mental grasp, just like there’s nothing wrong with admitting to something painful that’s happened in your life on social media. But the electronic cursor that prods your mind, blinking in your face like a cruel mockery of your stagnant creativity is akin to the way that the world of positive appearances mocks your negative experiences. A refusal to accept the real thrusts your existence into a world of appearances that seeks only to satisfy surface level gratification, ignoring the deeper concepts of our lives that wind up plaguing our minds into a cycle of consumptive passivity.
Allow pain to enter your mind and let seeds of creativity take on some water before you abandon their growth. Simpler times seem nostalgic because our minds were more engaged, more responsible when we didn’t have crutches to carry us along in our lives. It’s hard to argue for the welcoming of pain into one’s life, so think of it as an invitation to the real; a return to experience rather than appearance, because experience is where we derive meaning from and in the end we all want to lead meaningful lives. Don’t let the electrons mock you into a passive life. Move forward, not laterally.
Happiness: A Focused Effort on Self-Improvement
It took me awhile to get in front of a keyboard today. I'm still putting up the same obstacles between me and my writing. A blank page forces me to come face-to-face with my potential and I sit and stare, like I'm waiting for a divine strike of inspiration. The thought of perfection paralyzes my hands and mind. The reality is that I just have to endure the pain if I want to be a professional writer.
I watched an interview with David Foster Wallace in an attempt to lure inspiration from the depths of my consciousness. It still saddens me that a man with so much intellect and insight into the human condition took his life. It saddens me to think about what else he could've contributed to the progress of humanity.
In the interview they spoke about the allure of drugs and entertainment and how they both provided a certain escape. DFW linked these concepts to the ideology of self-gratification that pervades U.S. culture, where this hedonistic pleasure-center is constantly fed. He touched on class as part of the problem as it is the privileged graduates holding Masters and Bachelors degrees that have the ability and affinity to engage in higher culture, while the uneducated are trapped in a cyclical poverty. Let's face it - the endurance and focus necessary to read stuff like Infinite Jest is going to lose 9 times out of 10, even in educated circles. The trick seems to be to expedite the transmission of self-developmental content in an engaging, inexpensive, and for lack of a better word, subversive manner.
A fulfilling life requires effort, discipline and thoughtful action, which are all products of self-development. The problem is that mainstream media undermines all of these. The passive satisfaction of our thoughts and desires renders the active life a laborious endeavor, devaluing the fulfilling process of work in favor of comfortable stupefaction. Work has been an adversary to humans for millennia, but its stigma has grown exponentially since the dawn of the industrial age.
What would the argument for a life of fulfillment rather than comfort look like? The Aristotelean aim was towards a happiness made possible by virtues like temperance, courage, friendship, honesty, etc. The world we live in now subverts these virtues in the name of capitalistic enterprise; which means that our current system of values stands in opposition to our actualization of happiness and fulfillment. We are given instruments enabling passive unhappiness and we are told that we are lazy, ungrateful leeches on the society. MAYBE if we were given empowering tools rather than those determined by economic and capitalistic ends, we would be a more effective generation!
This mostly sounds like entitled wishful thinking, but it's important for me to hash out these concepts. Self-development is critical for lasting happiness and we live in a culture that undermines it around every corner. Happiness and fulfillment require effort, discipline, and thoughtful action, which means that if want better lives, we need to make a concerted, focused effort on improving ourselves.