After Bourdain: Essays on food, drink and life

The passing of Anthony Bourdain left a jagged hole in the middle of my chest. It was a like a brother from a different mother departed this earth. 

As an “essayist”, the title he gave himself, he was peerless. Superficially a food writer or a travel host he was much more than either. He gave us a window into the greater world, with food as the catalyst for knowing our brethren better. His efforts prompted countless people to get passports and to become world citizens. He recently said, “I wish more people would get passports.” I'm pretty sure he meant that folks would benefit, would grow, if they visited other places and discovered that people are more alike than different, everywhere. As our country turns inward, that revelation is essential.

Bourdain started travelling in earnest at 43 though he had spent some summers in France as a boy. It was there that he slurped his first oyster, marveled at its briny sweetness and was changed forever. We, also, travelled to Europe for the first time in our early forties. We inhaled it deeply and became citizens of that greater world, empowered but with a twinge of regret that we hadn’t done it much earlier

On that adventure, one that happened during a three-year sabbatical, we travelled first cabin, stayed at four-star hotels and reveled in memorable meals such as the unforgettable dining experience at the Priory in Bath, England. From the swank Royal Crescent in Bath we drove to a manor house in the midst of manicured gardens. We sipped champagne while waiting to be seated, selected a magnificent 1966 La Fort de la Tour Bordeaux, Chateau La Tour’s second label, had a sumptuous meal with dishes I don’t remember, and repaired to the library for brandy and cigars. The event, the only appropriate word for it, was so historic that it stands as “our best meal ever” after 34 years perhaps because it was our first such extravagance. A 2011 lunch at Alain Ducasse's Bastide de Moustiers does challenge for the title, I grant you.

Yet other meals in that exploratory voyage of 1984 are also etched in our minds, meals not riven with pomp and pretense. They were of simpler sensibilities and, as such, more warmly remembered. Bourdain spoke to this contrast in a recent interview. His words were, in effect, that as he got older the less interest he had in the self-congratulatory fine dining performance and craved unprepossessing restaurants and food carts where he could eat with the people in their places.

Breaking bread with a stranger or, for that matter, toasting them with good Irish whiskey brings you closer to them. Connecting with another human being is what makes us tick. As Bill Maher says, “I don’t know it for a fact. I just know that it’s true.”

No one makes friends with the front waiter or sommelier at The French Laundry or Le Bernardin, but you might if you met them as equals in the taqueria of their choice. Barriers of position and class disappear and you’re just a couple of swells enjoying fish tacos and icy Negra Modelo.

Anthony Bourdain was doing what a lot of us dream of doing, travelling the world, immersing ourselves in exotic cultures, digging beneath the surface and striding brashly across the television screen while reporting in bold, expressive prose what we saw and what we believed it meant in human terms. It’s certainly my dream job. Which is like wishing I’d written a best-seller about the dark profane crazed underbelly of the restaurant business but without the descent into addiction.  I’d call it “Kitchen Confidential” but I think that title has already been used.

Food is thread with which my life has been woven. Every milestone moment in my long life is punctuated by a dining experience or a “food epiphany”, a magical taste of something so different it’s life altering.

This is the first in a series of essays about food, places and people.

Yippee Ki Yay

As I drove back from my Sunday run (I use the term loosely) I saw a sign advertising El Rodeo de Taos that will be held June 22 and 23 this year. It’s a dusty affair that brings out the cowboy and cowgirl in all of us. It takes me back to my first rodeo in Salinas, California about 1946. Yes, that’s more than seventy years. The Salinas spectacular began in 1911 at Sausal Park Race Track and was loftily called The California Rodeo from the get-go. The grandstand was expanded to seat a robust 14,000 in 1935 and is the venue I would have visited at the ripe age of five. The California Rodeo is still the biggest and most popular in the Golden State.

Rodeo started in the days of the Spanish rancheros. Its name come from the Spanish word for round up or “rodear” a factoid I didn’t know till this very day, proving that I’m never too old to learn something of no importance.

Suffice it to say, I look forward to cowboying up in two weeks. Yippee ki yay.

These teasers are from last year’s Rodeo de Taos and the National Day of the Cowboy at the Mortenson Ranch Arena in Santa Fe.

Tubular, man.

The cylinder is elegantly strong and simple. Here a towering Saguaro near Tucson, one of the three stacks at the shuttered Dynergy natural gas power plant in Morro Bay, California and grain silos in sleepy Sudan, Texas vie for airspace.

It's a marvelous form, the way its shape gathers volume from the shadows that caress its roundness. Soft porn descriptions aside, the camera does love the cylinder.

Morada Libre

There’s not a whole lot to say about these two images. The first is a rather traditional (hackneyed) shot of a ladder against an faux adobe wall the other is a (hackneyed) window and real adobe vignette at La Morada de Nuestra Señor de Guadalupe. So, the connection is either adobe or hackneyed.

Come to think of it, there is a story lurking beneath the surface of image two and is that of access or lack thereof to the aforementioned morada. My understanding has been that the rights of the public and, specifically, of artists and photographers to visit and depict the morada was guaranteed in the agreement that conveyed the morada from the Taos Historic Museums to the archdiocese of Santa Fe about ten years ago. Rebutting that belief is a conspicuously placed sign on the entry gate to the morada which says that painting and photography are not allowed. I have conspicuously ignored said sign, the evidence of which is flaunted above.

The last time Peggy and an artist friend attempted to paint there they were told to cease and desist by an officious member of the Penitente Brotherhood who said that the morada is a sacred place which would be defiled if memorialized by camera toting barbarians. I paraphrase liberally.

After a short interchange which culminated by Peggy saying. “I don’t want to debate it with you anymore.” she and her friend departed the scene. I, on the other hand, will photograph the morada this very day as a matter of principal.

Form follows Function

Of late, especially on Instagram, I’ve been posting photographs of ordinary mechanical things; wires, conduit, pipes and the like. I've referred to this series as "The backside of the frontside." To my surprise, the images of things that are not in the least artful have been among the best received. Go figure.

I will surmise that the appeal stems from the geometric designs that are a product the efforts of engineers, electricians and plumbers who, generally speaking, try to install these functional things in a trim, straight and plumb fashion (except for the wires which are a nightmare of tangled webs) and that order creates tempting patterns like these.

We don't need no stinking camera

Of late I’ve been ducking into alleys and behind the monotonous blur of postcard scenes that abound in Taos. If you who follow me on Instagram you've seen plenty of these since our visit to Pueblo, Colorado back in March. All of those Instagram pics were shot with my iphone 7 which is always at hand and which boosts I mighty fine onboard camera. As my friend John Farnsworth jokes, “It’s a camera that’s also a phone.” 

The backstreet images here were made with an honest to gosh camera, my Canon 5D Mk lll. The mighty unit is the third most used camera among the professional class behind a couple of Nikons. Truth be told, the iphone performs some kind of alchemy and has left me wondering whether a big megapixel camera is even necessary. I say that barely in jest.

Señor Farnsworth has already reached that conclusion. At this very moment the boy is wending his way back to Taos after some four months in his beloved Antigua.

Bien venidos, Juanito.                   

Simple and intricate

I was wandering around Taos Plaza looking for obscure mechanical elements to photograph. That dictated ducking into alleys as I am wont to do. Then there was the appealing Orthodox Jewish family that I tracked for several blocks, hoping to capture their black attire, yarmulkes and payot (sidelocks) that seemed more at home on Manhattan's Lower East Side than Taos. Coming up empty I placed myself smack dab in the middle of the plaza in order to capture the budding trees and sky above me.

The intricacy of trees never ceases to amaze.