Anthony Bourdain dead

denverpilot said:
Yeah they did. Not sure either one was all that and a bag of chips, but whatever. I’m usually more interested in what Alton Brown has to say about cooking’s finer points.

As it stands, Brown said he liked “Tony” as he called him, and said he was an “interesting guy”. Being that Alton is a careful man in his words, it’s notable he said nothing about Anthony’s cooking skill.

One of the most interesting Brown interviews is a session he did at Google HQ a number of years ago where that quote comes from and also a fairly long description of the difference between early Food Network and modern Food Network and how it has changed from cooking enthusiasts to a generalized audience that mostly doesn’t cook but wants to be entertained by cooking.

Plus Alton’s a pilot. So there’s that. He owned a 206 for a while.

In that interview at Google he lamented that he can’t get any TV execs interested in an airport restaurant (or nearby) travel / food show, even with the demographic changes in food TV over to an entertainment bent.

And of course, Alton is restarting Good Eats this year too. Yay!
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Huge Alton Brown fan here as well. And cannot wait for Return of the Eats this year. But even Alton experienced suicide (or murder) in that his father was found with a bag over his head.

Anthony Bourdain was controversial, no doubt. But I did enjoy his shows. I am sad that he chose a permanent exit to those demons that haunted him and left behind an 11 year old daughter. I hope he has found the peace he was seeking.
 
BrianNC said:
He actually had his 206 in at least one episode where I think he was flying some seafood from maybe New Orleans. He lives here in Atlanta. I Googled to see if he still had the plane and the only thing I could come up with was, "he has owned two planes: a Cessna 206 and a Cessna 414." Maybe he upgraded to the 414.
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Yeah after initially sharing quite a bit about his aviation activities he clammed up and got cagey about it.

Probably pandering to the crowd that says pilots are just rich jerks and his publicists. But maybe he just wanted more privacy.

Would be interesting to ask him why he got so quiet about it.
 
iflyvfr said:
That's not the way I read it Brian. I interpret her message as affirming her love for her daughter and urged her to confirm this fact with her father: "Bea — I have always loved you. This is not your fault. Ask Daddy!" Sad for all involved regardless of fame and wealth.
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That’s assuming that was the actual message....

The media f’s so much up. Why should we expect this to be any more accurate?
 
Everskyward said:
Guessing that they know without anyone telling them.
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I did say that earlier above. This was simply in response to Bill lamenting that society doesn’t see it as a disease. I think we treat it like most other diseases here. Poorly. With pills and ten minute diagnoses.

I think most of our society also knows when someone is broken mentally. Not always when they try to hide it, but those closest to them usually aren’t too surprised when they have an episode of crazy or even suicide.

We were shocked and saddened by Karen’s brother but none of us were surprised when we thought about it a little bit. What he hid from everyone was his surrounding circumstances. I think we all knew he wouldn’t be able to handle those, if any of us knew ALL that was going on around him. Each of us knew little pieces of the bad stuff. Put together, it was a total train wreck.

I suspect many suicides are like that. Nobody has the whole picture but we would all know the person well enough to know they wouldn’t do well if we were handed a list of the crap happening to them, either externally or self-induced.

Cram all the bad stuff together in their life and they won’t make it. And the people truly close enough around them to know then know it, too.
 
Personally, I doubt Bourdain or any of those chefs can cook worth a damn. Most of them smoke, which destroys the taste buds. So all they really know how to do is drown everything in salt and fat. When I go out that’s mostly what I taste, which is why I don’t go out often. And believe me, none of them know the first thing about cooking vegetarian, which happens to be my forte. Vegetarian food is far more difficult to do well, and very few chefs have the knack.
 
denverpilot said:
I think most of our society also knows when someone is broken mentally. Not always when they try to hide it, but those closest to them usually aren’t too surprised when they have an episode of crazy or even suicide.
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A couple people I have known seemed as normal as anyone can seem normal, at least to me. But they were only casual acquaintances.

There is still a stigma, though. Many times the family doesn't want to reveal it. I've gotten so that when someone dies and no one mentions a cause; accident, illness, old age, I start to wonder.

On another note, I recognize the names Anthony Bourdain and Kate Spade, but before a few days ago, I only had a vague idea of what they did.
 
Everskyward said:
There is still a stigma, though. Many times the family doesn't want to reveal it. I've gotten so that when someone dies and no one mentions a cause; accident, illness, old age, I start to wonder.
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We partially participated in that silliness by censoring it for a while. Mostly because we didn’t think it nice for people to learn about it on Facebook and other social media.

But later we all agreed when the family was talking that there is a stigma, almost everyone has been affected by it that you meet, and there was no reason not to just call it what it was.

Personally I also won’t pull any punches and say that alcohol was deadly to him too. There was easily a half bottle of vodka downed on the day of the event and who knows how much prior, but the credit card statements didn’t lie. Nearly every day there was a liquor store purchase. Signs of alcoholic dementia existed too, which only a couple of people really realized. We weren’t insiders to that part, we just knew he never showed up at a family event without a bottle of wine.

If medical privacy didn’t exist for convicts, I think you’d see a rather direct correlation between alcohol and an awful lot of our society’s problems. Nobody calls alcohol a “gateway drug” and there’s sure no “war on alcohol” spending billions tossing flash bang grenades into baby cribs in no knock raids of the wrong house.
 
wsuffa said:
It is a disease. It consumes people. It may be hard to understand, but people with depression lose the ability to care about others. A friend of mine who's ex- recently killed herself relayed a post about depression... comparing it to a snow storm. The gist was that most days it's clear or just a few flakes that can be ignored, other times it becomes like being snowed in until that builds a snowbank so high that there is no way out.
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Pretty much this. The cases that have touched on my life were both parents to young kids. Both in economically stable situations, both with a history of bipolar disease and at the time of their death involved in marriage problems (chicken-egg situation for sure, if you are bipolar its not that easy to be a good husband/wife). Once the brain of a suicidal person is on that track, nothing around them seems to matter.

One thing to keep in mind with suicidality is that it is not the same thing as depression. While most people who commit suicide are also depressed, there is often no direct correlation between how good or bad they do with their depression and their likelihood to kill themselves. 'Oh he was doing so much better lately' is one of the more common phrases you hear after it happens.

Bourdain never made a secret out of the fact that he had been through problems with substance abuse. At one point or another he had been through pretty much every category of legal and illegal intoxicants. I don't know where he was with this in recent years. Between his age, his race and his history of substance abuse, he checked off many boxes on the 'increased risk for suicide' checklist. Not sure there is really anything anyone could have done about it.
 
Fearless Tower said:
That’s assuming that was the actual message....

The media f’s so much up. Why should we expect this to be any more accurate?
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True, I was going off something that was also reported by the media, but that doesn't invalidate my interpretation any more than his.
 
All I know is I can't imagine the state a person's mind has to be in to actually commit suicide. In my present state of mind I can't imagine how anyone could actually do it. So that lets me know how far a mind must deteriorate and what a horrible state of anguish, etc, it must be in to make someone actually kill themselves to alleviate the 'pain'.
 
BrianNC said:
All I know is I can't imagine the state a person's mind has to be in to actually commit suicide. In my present state of mind I can't imagine how anyone could actually do it. So that lets me know how far a mind must deteriorate and what a horrible state of anguish, etc, it must be in to make someone actually kill themselves to alleviate the 'pain'.
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Many people leave out fear as a motivator and only focus on the pain of the moment when they try to figure it out.

The person doing it is often terrified of tomorrow.
 
Every time suicide is in the news I think of two friends of mine that took that route. One guy, dunno, he was going through a tough time and this was not only a way out, it seemed like he thought it was a way to make a statement of some sort. I still miss him, he was about the best friend I ever had.

The second guy had real clinical severe depression. If you've never seen it, it's really scary, dark stuff. He was on meds and seeing a doc of some sort, but it didn't prevent his final decision.

I've seen bipolar, paranoia, and severe depression. When someone's brain doesn't work (wiring/chemistry/whatever) it's almost a waste of time trying to figure out the "why" when it comes to suicide. When someone is broken like that, there is no why, there just is.
 
Part of the mental health stigma is the same reason I avoid the doctor for physical ailments unless I have to...they can rarely treat the condition...or know what is causing the condition...so they just pump you up with meds to treat the symptoms but you will still likely have the underlying problems.
 
Shawn said:
Part of the mental health stigma is the same reason I avoid the doctor for physical ailments unless I have to...they can rarely treat the condition...or know what is causing the condition...so they just pump you up with meds to treat the symptoms but you will still likely have the underlying problems.
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That very much depends on the physical ailment.

But the diagnoses get poor on more esoteric things. Especially from the wrong type of Doc. They tend to see only what their specialty is.
 
BrianNC said:
Well, it's always tragic when someone commits suicide. But your memes bring up one reason I didn't like him. He was a real snob about food and would criticize those like Guy Fieri and Rachel Ray and other Food Network chefs and others like them. Basically he became famous for writing a 'tell all' book about being a chef and never really was that well known although he was an executive chef at a known restaurant. He just became known for the books and other things. He and Fieri had an ongoing feud because he criticized Fieri all the time. Just that kind of guy because he had to berate other chefs to lift himself up. That's why I didn't like him.
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And I liked him for exactly that.
An antidote to the then all too common fawning food journalist, currying favour with celebrity chefs while the snorffled free food. He helped bring about a much needed change, and increased credibility to food journalism.
 
wsuffa said:
Twp high-profile celebrities. Folks that people pay attention to. Most suicide victims cause a lot of pain to people that know them or are close to them. A very few reach the global consciousness. Those very few create power to start to be a force for change. Robin Williams, RIP, was another.

No, we don't know what demons Tony faced. We are starting to learn about Kate Spade. Until people - both in the US and abroad - recognize mental illness for what it is, bad things will keep happening. We can recognize cancer, heart disease, and dementia as being illnesses.... but at the same time we shame and hide from depression and mental illness. Unless it's high profile, it gets little attention.
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Folks people pay attention to. Interesting. I pay attention to the folks in my life. Family. Friends. Coworkers. Neighbors. They and their issues deserve my attention. Those of celebs don’t.

While I watch certain tv shows and movies, I pay no attention to the people involved in that entertainment outside of it. People outside my sphere of influence have little to no interest or influence on me. Those inside that sphere do. If everyone helps to take care of those inside their sphere, the world would be a better place. Relying on outsiders, whether it be government, religions, charities, so called support organizations (AA, Alanon, etc), will never get the job done.
 
An articulate and interesting guy, and I pull up his shows "on demand" - his politics weren't mine, but he had a "live and let live" attitude you don't often see in the very intolerant modern liberals. Sorry to hear this, but it's not uncommon (or new) in humans. . .
 
steingar said:
Personally, I doubt Bourdain or any of those chefs can cook worth a damn. Most of them smoke, which destroys the taste buds. So all they really know how to do is drown everything in salt and fat. When I go out that’s mostly what I taste, which is why I don’t go out often. And believe me, none of them know the first thing about cooking vegetarian, which happens to be my forte. Vegetarian food is far more difficult to do well, and very few chefs have the knack.
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Who in the culinary world doesn't smoke?

Also you lost your argument when you brought up vegetarian food, most high end chefs don't speclize in cooking for hippies ;)
 
I have a son who has schizophrenia so I am always alert for stories of suicide as I have read that 10% of schizophrenics die from it. Would like to say it wouldn't happen to him but then people would have said that about Anthony wouldn't they?

Medical care in our country is abysmal, we spend one sixth of our GDP on it yet have the health stats of a middling second world country. Maternal mortality is actually increasing in Texas which beggars the imagination. But an exception is the medicine ( we do not call it drugs or pills in our house) that treats his symptoms. Those literally brought him back from complete insanity.
The drug racket is quite rigged. One month we were between providers we paid $3600 for 100 pills of Abilify from the pharmacy. Next month we couldn't afford it so we found the same medicine from India for $146. I enjoy my physician's company as a person but I actually believe my wife has more medical knowledge than he does. He can prescribe pills and provide referrals but that is about it.
 
Sundancer said:
An articulate and interesting guy, and I pull up his shows "on demand" - his politics weren't mine, but he had a "live and let live" attitude you don't often see in the very intolerant modern liberals. Sorry to hear this, but it's not uncommon (or new) in humans. . .
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He actually attacked the Hollywood left during the Weinstein thing and confirmed the stories of it had been around for a long time. He went directly after Hilary during that tirade, too.

Don’t think he was much of a “status quo” kind of guy. Makes one wonder if he was starting to get backlash in the TV industry from what he said and knew his shows were about to be cancelled. But nobody’s talking on that one. Any sort of food guy on CNN would always an “on the bubble” kind of job, anyway.
 
denverpilot said:
He actually attacked the Hollywood left during the Weinstein thing and confirmed the stories of it had been around for a long time. He went directly after Hilary during that tirade, too.

Don’t think he was much of a “status quo” kind of guy. Makes one wonder if he was starting to get backlash in the TV industry from what he said and knew his shows were about to be cancelled. But nobody’s talking on that one. Any sort of food guy on CNN would always an “on the bubble” kind of job, anyway.
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I dunno, maybe so. . .it's awful strident on the left now, and in the current media stew, my unscientific estimate is the rad libs outnumber the rad rights about 4 to 1.
 
Sundancer said:
I dunno, maybe so. . .it's awful strident on the left now, and in the current media stew, my unscientific estimate is the rad libs outnumber the rad rights about 4 to 1.
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Dunno. I call anything radical what it truly is. A cult.
 
denverpilot said:
He actually attacked the Hollywood left during the Weinstein thing and confirmed the stories of it had been around for a long time. He went directly after Hilary during that tirade, too.

Don’t think he was much of a “status quo” kind of guy. Makes one wonder if he was starting to get backlash in the TV industry from what he said and knew his shows were about to be cancelled. But nobody’s talking on that one. Any sort of food guy on CNN would always an “on the bubble” kind of job, anyway.
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Well, yes. His girlfriend stated that she was raped by Weinstein. That certainly was cause for response. Note that if hasn't been proven in a court.

He had depression. He talked about it in one episode. There's a Mike Rowe post this weekend noting that one of the first episodes Rowe watched as entitled "Hello Darkness, My Old Frined". No that is not proof. But there was a separate episode that discussed his depression. Then there was the stuff posted on TMZ.

Frankly, I don't think he cared much another the TV establishment. He made the show a success by challenging the establishment. I suspect that he would have accepted cancellation without changing his values.

He long championed those that were marginalized and he did things his way. I am saddened that he felt a need to do this, but upon reflection it would not be out of character. In choosing this, he called attention to those that have depression (and are marginalized), and he chose his own way to go. That seems to be in keeping with how he portrayed himself.

Yes, it's more complicated than that. And yes, he could have done more if he were still alive.
 
James331 said:
Amen

There is such a thing as a good death and a bad death, and there is something to be said for making that decision yourself if god forbid you find yourself there.
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I'm sorry, but I don't consider strangling with your bathrobe belt in a hotel bathroom to be "a good death." Deadfalls and large knots to break the neck were developed for a reason. He had neither . . . . All he did was choose the time and place, but it's not a manner he probably would have chosen in retrospect.
 
Hank S said:
I'm sorry, but I don't consider strangling with your bathrobe belt in a hotel bathroom to be "a good death." Deadfalls and large knots to break the neck were developed for a reason. He had neither . . . . All he did was choose the time and place, but it's not a manner he probably would have chosen in retrospect.
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I'll agree there
 
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