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Anthony Bourdain's Lost Li.st's
I read through the years about Bourdain's content on the defunct li.st service, but was never able to find an archive of it. A more thorough perusing of archive.org and a pointer from an Internet stranger led me to create this site. Cheers
It seems like li.st was founded by https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/B._J._Novak#The_List_App — unlikely to show on HN but maybe someone knows him.
For those who haven't read it yet, the book "In the Weeds" does a pretty good job of showing the hidden side of Bourdain (if there was such a thing). He was as imperfect as you might imagine. I personally enjoyed learning how cruel he could be as I always had a tremendous amount of respect for him and it made him more human to me.
They even cover an incident where the crew played a practical joke on him with a clown (his fear is mentioned in a li.st).
One of the few people that has a voice (written and otherwise) so distinctive that even reading those lists, I read them in his voice. I miss that guy.
There used to be a mirror of the Wayback Machine [0][1] hosted at the new Library of Alexandria in Egypt [2]. Sometimes you could pull pages from them that otherwise errored out on the main archive.org site. Sadly, it seems the mirror has been offline [3] for some years now.
0: https://www.bibalex.org/en/News/Details?DocumentID=1550&Keyw...
1: https://www.bibalex.org/isis/frontend/projects/ProjectDetail...
2: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bibliotheca_Alexandrina
3: http://web.archive.bibalex.org
Bourdain had a way of writing that made even throwaway lines feel meaningful, but so much of that era of content is basically disappearing. It’s nice to see someone do the unglamorous work of gathering the fragments before they fade completely.
It's funny because his, and Chuck Palahniuk's (fight club, etc) way of seeing the world- that brand of anti corporate- pro human- enjoy the waste- cynicism seemed so permanent and authentic- and like nothing could take it away from you- it felt like a staple of the human experience that was a place you could go to in your mind.
It's amazing to see how quickly that all got shovelled away and replaced with productised, streamlined, sterile groupthink- and one in which authentic sexuality and sex jokes are shunned. I think in some part he knew which way this world was heading and made a decision based off of that.
As a young person who stakes a lot of my headspace in the former, it's definitely an interesting, ridiculously two faced and contradictory cultural moment we're in right now.
If you're lumping together Bourdain and Palahniuk I think you've completely failed to understand Bourdain.
And then diagnosing his suicide as a result of your apparent culture war grievances over sex jokes is just revolting behavior.
I’m a dyed in the wool GenX-er and I think the comment you’re responding to has insight.
For those of us that grew up in the punk-rock anti-corporate adbusters rage against the machine WTO protest era the current culture around commerce and wealth is a disorienting hellscape.
The boomers and their children, the millennials, were wrong in their belief that fashion choices and good vibe thinking by the affluent set would lead to a better culture.
Should have listened to the Nirvana generation a little more. Turns out the cynicism was justified.
If you've read Bourdain's books and gone beyond just skimming his TV shows you'll know they share deeply similar writing and irreverent humour- talking about every type of escape and prank- from summers tripping on acid rooting everyone he could find to working for the mafia as a chef to pay off his heroin addiction. And it's reductive to think that just because someone is talking about sex jokes they're interested in 'culture wars'. Is it revolting for him to have essentially predicted his own death in the same way?
I miss him a lot, his passing affected me far more than that of most public figures, but I won't sanitise my memory of him or pretend his humour, or his way of seeing the world was cookie cutter. That, to me, is far more revolting.
Palahniuk and Bourdain both talk about the fringes of 'punk' topics, but they have a totally different voice and objectives for doing so.
To me it sounds something like pairing up Brian Cox and Neil Degrasse Tyson, I mean they both talk about black holes..
For what it's worth, and i've read just about everything from both of those authors, Palahniuk is usually trying to illicit a feeling from the reader, be it disgust, ennui and nostalgia for a different time, or anger towards whatever 'the system' is at the momnent. He uses relatable anecdote to do so. His writing, in that vain, is very similar to Phillip Dick (who wrote 'a Scanner Darkly' from a lot of first-hand experiences)
Bourdain had similar prose mannerisms and favorite topics, but his objective was to instill wanderlust and an interest in the human spirit. Camaraderie, and hope for future opportunities to experience far away lands. A desire to seek more experiences regardless of what lesser prices and inconveniences must be paid in order to do so.
as a guy who grew up as a punk rocker in so-cal Palahniuk strikes me as the friend that couldn't make the show because ,even though he loves the band and the venue , there is homework due tomorrow -- whereas Bourdain always struck me as one of the folks i'd have woken up next to in someone elses' car the morning after the show and gone out to get breakfast with and talk about the night.
There is more difference between those two types of personality than I can write about, even if they gravitate around the same stuff.
I miss Bourdain.
From my vantage point, Anthony Bourdain is immensely popular with friends of all kinds of political and cultural flavors. I actually can’t think of a single person I know who dislikes Anthony Bourdain. If there’s some kind of cultural headwind against his style, it certainly isn’t manifest in mainstream consumer culture itself.
Have to love the content about how some sociopathic crazy guy is so “successful”.
It looks like the original URL for Anthony's profile on li.st was https://li.st/Bourdain/
https://web.archive.org/web/20181204232645/https://li.st/Bou...
Didn't know he was such a fan of rap, interesting point about brioche buns.
Also: "Karaoke should only be performed with people who have already seen your genitals." :D
I absolutely love brioche buns but I only eat veggie burgers, and they make a lot more sense for veggie burgers.
Maybe someone here knows the creators of li.st and we can get the missing lists back online?
Awesome. I refer to https://bourdain.greg.technology/#food-im-thinking-about about once a year. One of my favorite vacations was going to a different hawker stall on his list each night in Singapore. Unsurprisingly, his picks are all pretty good, and #1 is justified in crowning the list.
Oh! #1 ended up with a Bib Gourmand from Michelin later that year.
I've never ordered it, it always looks so incredibly bland, am I missing something here?
Chicken and rice is anything but bland. I haven't had Hainanese style but the Thai style khao man gai that Nong's serves in Portland is a flavor that I still remember more than a decade later.
If you would order it once, you could stop wondering if you are missing something.
Also for general bourdain tourism- eat like bourdain is a really passionate and fleshed out blog that tells you where and what he ate in each city/country. I use it pretty frequently.
https://eatlikebourdain.com/
Was there ever a cooler guy who could actually write? I don't think so.
Anyone who rates "Dr. Strangelove" as a great movie is OK by me.
Hands down the funniest thing I ever saw, live and in person, was Anthony Bourdain staring with naked, enraptured joy at the woman doing the American Sign Language translation of what he’d just said, then stopping just after she did to let us all know that “I just had to know what it looks like to sign ‘felching Mrs. Butterworth.’”
Thank you, Tony, wherever you are… if for nothing else, then for the Pho Chay I the Lunch Lady made just for my newly vegetarian self in Saigon.
I went to the 'Obama restaurant' in Hanoi for bun cha (not vegetarian) more so because Anthony Bourdain. Like a good American I smoked a Cuban cigar afterwards in a cigar bar under an image of Che Guevara I passed on the way back to the hotel which was out of the way likely guided by Tony's spirit if such things exist. Nonetheless, the Bun Cha up in the mountains of Sa Pa is better as are Dominican cigars.
It's honestly hard to think of a better title for the definitive Anthony Bourdain biography then "Felching Mrs. Butterworth"!
As someone who was mildly familiar with Bourdain ("some sort of American TV cook", some badly-dubbed shows in our private TV channels which didn't really catch on, because 'cooking show') until he decided to end it ...
... it is fascinating to me that one person, especially in a very niche profession, has had that kind of cultural impact that his random writing is being discussed seven years after his death.
In the SCARY SHIT!!! Things I find genuinely terrifying section:
> Switzerland: I think I must have experienced some awful childhood trauma in view of a mural of snow capped peaks and Lake Geneva. I live with a persistent dread of alpine vistas, chalet architecture, Tyrolean hats, even cheese with holes in it. You will notice I have never been there. That’s because Switzerland frightens me.
Huh. He was just over the border from there when he was finished.
thank you!!!
Gentle reminder that the /kitchenconfidential reddit is a fun place to occasionally visit.
As someone who's worked in plenty of kitchens, I can thoroughly recommend the book. Totally nails kitchen culture.
There's this one chapter where he just rolls through a day at work, it's so good. A phenomenal writer, much missed.
Thanks
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