Tag: Passages

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“All spiders are named ‘Phil'”: On Matthew Perry

This is one of my favorite little scenes from Friends. I’ve always loved this little exchange, and in tribute to it, I have ever since referred to all spiders as “Phil”. (In this case I now assume that Phil can be a genderless name: Philip, Philomena, Philopina, you get the drift.)

Actor Matthew Perry died yesterday–that’s him in the clip–after apparently having drowned in his own hot tub.

I expect that there will eventually be more sordid details about his passing, considering his long struggles with addiction and other medical issues. But that doesn’t matter now. Perry did a lot of good work, primarily comedic, most notably on Friends. That particular show was a favorite of mine during its run, and I still love a great deal of it, even if much of it hasn’t aged very well; right now, Friends is kind-of in that middle area where it hasn’t aged enough for its problematic aspects to be seen as being “of its time”, but I do think that it earned its claims to be a classic sitcom. Friends did manage to capture something of the 90s zeitgeist for young people in that era. The people who were on it were my age group, or slightly above it (I’m 52; Perry was 54). But Friends wasn’t just that; it was usually written with wit and crisp attention to character and structure. Friends has never quite gotten its due for its writing, in my opinion. The show really excelled at things like setting up a big episode-ending punchline in the first minutes, and also at having big moments come as complete surprises while still being entirely consistent with the characters. Yes, Friends probably endured a season or two longer than it should have, but its drop-off toward its end wasn’t that bad.

Perry played Chandler Bing on Friends. Chandler was the neurotic jokester of the group who always seemed to have a quip ready at hand. The Friends producers made a lot of hay out of this, but they were also aware enough to know that sometimes that guy (there’s one in every group!) will make jokes that don’t quite land, that fall awkwardly, and that ultimately mask a certain level of weird insecurity. A low-level subplot that unfolded over the series’s run was Chandler’s growth and maturity, as he progressed from the smart-mouthed and insecure jokester to being one of the first members of the group to settle into a stable, long-term relationship (with Monica, another of the show’s regulars). As Friends ended, the group was transitioning as Chandler and Monica started a family and decided it was time to move to the suburbs.

Perry anchored Chandler Bing nearly perfectly, giving him a voice that was so distinctive that to this day people remember certain of Chandler’s phrasings and verbal tics. However, when I saw Perry in other projects, I realized that he had a good deal more range even than Chandler Bing afforded him.

Perry turned up on The West Wing as Friends ended. His character there, a lawyer newly hired for the White House Counsel’s office who happens to be a Republican, was an interesting addition…but sadly he came along right when Aaron Sorkin was exiting the show, which meant that Perry didn’t get to do much with Sorkin’s signature style, and he showed up a few times on a recurring basis. I’ve always found it perplexing that Aaron Sorkin left The West Wing after he added talent like Lily Tomlin and Matthew Perry to his roster. It was all a money thing, from what I remember, but sheesh–I’m not a rich writer, but if I was one, I think I might find my way to taking a pay cut to write for Tomlin and Perry.

Sorkin got another shot later on, though, at least with Perry: he was one of the leads on Sorkin’s backstage-at-a-teevee-show show, Studio 60 on the Sunset Strip. I watched every episode of Studio 60 with anticipation at first for a good show, and then with the anticipation one feels as one approaches the scene of a car wreck on the thruway. Studio 60 had…issues. Gigantic issues. The show was one of the most highly hyped new shows of its season, and then it winded up getting axed after that singular first year, for many reasons. But none of those reasons was Matthew Perry, who again anchored the show as the head-writer for a late-night live comedy show, Matt Albie. Studio 60 provided yet another data point in my long belief that Aaron Sorkin may be a good writer on individual projects (though not so great as many believe), but he’s simply not a very good show-runner for long-term television. The focus on Studio 60 was all wrong, and the best material came not when he focused on the struggles and the love lives of the Big Main Characters, but when he instead looked at the lower-level workers in television, the underappreciated people, the ones who aren’t household names: the writers.

As Studio 60 begins, Matt Albie (Perry) and Danny Tripp (Bradley Whitford) are hired to take over and restore to prominence a long-suffering SNL-esque live comedy show. One big issue is that the writers’ room for this show is a big collection of hacks, overseen by two guys who hate Matt and Danny with a passion. These conflicts simmer in the background of Studio 60‘s one season, and at one point Matt hires two new writers, who have collectively about eight minutes of comedy writing experience, for the room. Shortly thereafter, the two guys who hate Matt and Danny quit, and they take all the other writers with them–leaving only the two deeply green newbies as the only writers Matt has left. In desperation, Matt brings in another comedy writer just to mentor these two into a level of competence. This, as it unfolds, is one of my favorite things that happened in the entire run of Studio 60. This video stitches together the entire storyline–it’s less than five minutes during one episode, and excuse the quality, this is where someone aimed their phone at their teevee–and while Perry doesn’t play a huge role in it, he still anchors it as the straight-man to the comedy that is unfolding two floors below his big office.

I’ve seen Matthew Perry in other things over the years–not a lot, but enough–and I think he always was somehow the “grounding” force in his projects, the guy who seemed like a real guy in the middle of whatever other weirdness was going on around him. Going back to Friends, someone had to be there to react to the weirdness of Phoebe, the goofball shit that always surrounded Joey, and the straight-up embodiment of “What are you doing?!” that was Ross.

I don’t want to speculate much about the facts of Perry’s death or the degree to which his personal demons may have played a role. I just want to point out the quality of his work over the years, and that he’ll be missed.

 

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Wake

The Pittsburgh Pirates entered the 1992 season as two-time defending National League East champions. Back then, both the AL and NL had just two divisions, East and West, and the playoffs consisted of a single Championship Series pitting the division winners of each league; the winners of the LCSs would then face off in the World Series. No wild-card teams, no play-in games, no divisional series, just two teams in each league facing each other for the pennant and then the World Series. The Pirates had lost the NLCS in 1990 to the Reds, and then they lost the NLCS again in 1991 to the Atlanta Braves. They lost some talent after 1991–most notably, Bobby Bonilla–and not many people penciled them in for another division crown in 1992.

But somehow, the Pirates managed to surge early to a lead in the division, which they somehow maintained throughout the season, though in the middle of the season, through July and the All-Star break, it looked like their lead was in trouble. The Montreal Expos were breathing down their necks (partly because of the play of Moises Alou, a former top Pirates prospect that the Pirates dealt to the Expos two years earlier for pitching help), the bullpen wasn’t doing terribly well because for all their talent the Pirates never managed to find or develop a true closer, and the rotation was two really good guys (Doug Drabek, Zane Smith) and a few other OK guys.

Meanwhile, down in the minors, there was a first baseman who occupied his downtime by practicing throwing a knuckleball, one of the strangest of all baseball pitches. When this guy was told straight-out that he would, at best, plateau as a position player no higher than AA ball, he decided to try reinventing himself as a pitcher, with the knuckleball as his main pitch. He didn’t have much other than the knuckleball, to be honest; his fastball speed was never above 80mph, so he was never going to overpower hitters at the plate. No, it was knuckleball-to-the-majors or bust. He made the conversion to pitcher and started toiling away in the minors as a full-time pitcher in 1990.

Knuckleball-to-the-majors or bust, indeed.

It worked.

He made it to the majors on July 31, 1992, when the Pirates decided that they needed some help in the rotation. Up came this weird knuckleballer, who proceeded to go 8-1 down the stretch for the Pirates, with a 2.15 ERA; his presence helped fortify the rotation and provided an exciting boost. The Pirates ended up winning the NL East handily, and went on to face the Braves again in the NLCS.

Honestly, it felt like the run was over very quickly; the Braves took a three-games-to-one series lead–but the one game was a complete game thrown by this rookie knuckleballer who managed to out-duel Tom Glavine, one of the game’s best pitchers and a future Hall-of-Famer. Suddenly everybody knew who this kid was.

His name was Tim Wakefield.

The knuckleball, if you’re unfamiliar, is a very strange pitch. Every other pitch–fastball, slider, curveball, you name it–relies on spin to control the ball’s trajectory. The knuckleball, so named because of the weird grip used to throw it, negates all of that. The idea is the throw the ball with no spin, so that the ball might do anything on its trajectory to the plate. If it’s thrown right, it might start off looking like this big fat old baseball moving slowly into the hitter’s zone…and then drop suddenly, one way or the other, as the hitter swings. Or it might look like it’s going to drop and then not drop, so the hitter either doesn’t correct or doesn’t swing at all. Or…you get the idea. The knuckleball is an unpredictable beast, and since most athletes at that level rely on predictable results from muscle memory, nobody wants to work with a pitch that relies on total randomness. In Wakefield’s first game in that NLCS, Braves hitters–a potent lineup including David Justice entering his prime–were made to look like inept Little Leaguers.

The Pirates won Game Five, behind a complete game by pitcher Bob Walk, setting up Tim Wakefield to go again in Game Six, on three days’ rest (the knuckleball’s other main grace is that it puts very little strain on a pitcher’s arm), again facing Tom Glavine. The series was back in Atlanta for the last two games, all Atlanta had to do was win one to return to the World Series. Surely there was no way this rookie knuckleballer was going to beat the future HOFer again.

Tim Wakefield beat Glavine again. He threw another complete game, his second of the NLCS. The Pirates, who had trailed the NLCS 3-1, now tied it up, 3-3, with Game Seven to come.

It didn’t escape anyone’s notice that the Pirates’ three wins had all been complete games. Everyone knew that the bullpen was not great and that all bets were off if the starter got knocked out. Doug Drabek, the staff ace who had won the Cy Young Award two years earlier, went out and shut the Braves down for eight innings.

And then, the ninth inning happened.

I’m not going to relate the specifics of that inning; suffice it to say that the Braves managed to get Drabek out of the game, the Pirates’ lack of a closer reared its ugly head in exactly the worst way at exactly the worst time, some backup “whodat” catcher came up with the pinch-hit of his life, Gold-Glover and Best Ever Barry Bonds couldn’t manage to throw out at home a guy who couldn’t outrun a rock…well, that’s a lot of specifics after I said I wasn’t going to relate any, but the bottom of the 9th of Game Seven of the 1992 World Series might well be the most galling memory of my sports-fan life. That one may actually hurt more than “Wide right”. (Google it, if you don’t get the reference.)

After 1992, the Pirates entered a salary purge. Bonds and others were gone, and when 1993 dawned, there were a bunch of rookies up with the club and Wakefield–who had finished third in Rookie-of-the-Year voting just the year before–found himself anointed as Opening Day starter, staff ace, and all of that. It was probably too much for him, and he spent most of the next two years bouncing back down to the minors before the Pirates gave up after the 1994 season. Wakefield ended up with the Boston Red Sox, where he successfully worked his way back into an MLB rotation–and he was a damned good one. He had a couple of really good years, and a whole bunch of solid years, riding that knuckleball all the way to a career that spanned 19 seasons and saw him make crucial contributions to two World Series winning teams.

Tim Wakefield retired after the 2011 season. He’s a fond memory for Pirates fans, but he’s beloved by Red Sox fans, and with good reason. Yes, I wish the Pirates hadn’t screwed up the team when he was there, but getting out of Pittsburgh was the best thing for him as the 1993 Pirates were starting a run of losing baseball that would last more than two decades. Consider: Wakefield came up as a rookie in 1992 during the Pirates’ playoff run that year…and then he played out his entire 19-year career and retired before the Pirates finally made the playoffs again, two years later.

Tim Wakefield died yesterday, aged 57.

Make sure you read Sheila’s post; she comes at it from a Red Sox fan’s vantage point. No doubt more satisfying than a Pirates’ fan’s remembrance, but that’s how baseball goes. Many players start one place and then blossom in another. It happens, a lot. It certainly happened for Tim Wakefield.

It turned out that he had been suffering a very aggressive form of brain cancer. The public wasn’t even supposed to know about this, but his former teammate, Curt Schilling, decided to take it on himself to ignore Wakefield’s and his family’s wishes and reveal Wakefield’s condition on his podcast last week. (Schilling may well have Ty Cobb to thank for keeping him out of first place for Worst Person To Ever Play Major League Baseball.)

Tim Wakefield is not in the Baseball Hall of Fame, and looking at things from a strictly statistical standpoint, I suppose that’s the right decision…but then, I remember what I wrote last year when quarterback Ryan Fitzpatrick retired from the NFL:

But I submit that it’s the Hall of Fame, not the Hall of Stats. The Hall of Fame does not exist merely to honor numerical excellence. I’m a storyteller, and stories are why I love the Hall of Fame–in fact, stories are what I love most about sports in general. Who doesn’t love sitting with friends around a beer or two, swapping stories about great games and great players or even players who weren’t so great but had some great moments?

We don’t love sports because of stats. Stats help and they’re fun in themselves, but stats aren’t what connect us to sports at the most basic level. Stories are why we connect with sports: stories that we can share, stories that we recall collectively, stories that bind us together in fandom either in love for this team or, yes, hatred for that team or player, the one that always drives in the knife.

I stand by that. Yes, baseball is about numbers, probably moreso than any other sport; when you play that many games in a season and when there have been that many seasons–more than a hundred of them!–then numbers become part of the way we talk about the game more than for any other games. But still, numbers aren’t everything. Numbers offer a shorthand to talking about the game, a way of quantifying greatness…but they don’t capture the game. As I wrote in another post:

You can’t look at a box score and tell how blue the sky was that day, or what it smelled like in the park because maybe the breeze was coming from the lake or the industrial park the other way (in Buffalo, with the cereal plants downtown, it often smells of Cheerios). A box score won’t tell you how scuffed up the first baseman’s jersey is after several close plays, or how the catcher is still trying to work off the gimpy ankle from that play at the plate last Tuesday night. The box score won’t tell you the crowd’s mood: Are they giddy and jubilant, or are they kind of grumblingly negative because the team’s having a rough season and they’re sarcastically cheering the guy hitting .197 who just managed to leg out a weak grounder safely to first?

The box score won’t tell you if the players are attacking an early season game with vigor, or if they are visibly just playing out the last few weeks of the schedule, mired in fifth place and just wanting nothing more than to go home and rest for about a month. The box score will tell you that a particular player homered in the sixth, but it won’t tell you that he was on a hot streak and he came up against a tiring pitcher who probably should have already been pulled and who had of late been surrendering homers to right-handed hitters at a surprising rate for a guy who, up to a few weeks before, had been almost unhittable.

Numbers are great and important and useful…but they are also a flattening force, a force that tends to flatten out story. A baseball player who collects more than 3000 career hits is almost guaranteed a spot in the Hall of Fame…but is that all that player does? All I really know about Robin Yount is that he hat 3000 hits in his career. That’s numbers: for me they reduce a Hall of Fame player to a guy who had roughly 150 hits a year over his 20-year career.

But, what if I ask a person who has been a Milwaukee Brewers fan their whole life, “Hey! Tell me about Robin Yount?” Then, I’m not going to hear about 3000 hits. Then, I’m going to hear stories.

Sport isn’t just numbers, it’s also stories. I think that’s why we follow sport so adamantly as a species–well, partly, anyway. I don’t want to discount numbers, after all. But numbers aren’t the whole story.

Yes, I stand by all of that, as well. One common thing that I hear often in Hall of Fame discussions when players come up whose statistical accomplishments seem to make them a borderline candidates is, “Can you tell the story of the sport without mentioning this person?” And I suppose, depending on how deep you want to go, maybe you can tell the story of Major League Baseball, or the last thirty years of it, without mentioning the Tim Wakefields of the game…but it’s the Tim Wakefields of the game who flesh out the stories, who make them live. Every sports fan talks about their team’s Hall-of-Famers…but I wonder if it’s the not-quite-HOF guys that sports fans actually prefer to talk about. I wonder if they’re the ones whose stories summon up those knowing smiles and the twinkles in the eyes of the people who know.

I’ll always be a stories-over-stats person. It’s in my nature. And though he may not be in the Hall of Fame, but Tim Wakefield is in mine.

 

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Sinead

What a voice she had. What a musician she was. Too hard was her life.

On the musical collaboration above:

And back through the glen I rode again
And my heart with grief was sore
For I parted then with valiant men
Whom I never shall see more
But to and fro
In my dreams I go
And I kneel and pray for you
For slavery fled
Oh, glorious dead
When you fell in the foggy dew

Sheila O’Malley:

It’s hard to describe what it was like when Sinéad O’Connor arrived on the world stage. She came from seemingly nowhere. Her voice was eerie and transcendent. She was drop-dead gorgeous. Her head was shaved. She covered a Prince song. She arrived fully formed into a world that had no place for her. She created her own place. The second she arrived, you couldn’t imagine what it was like before she got there. That’s what it was like when Sinéad O’Connor arrived.

It seems a particularly cruel curse of this world that often great art seems to require great pain to give it voice.

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Tony

Thank you for the music, sir. What a life.

I’m not one to appoint “golden ages” of this or that, but…there really is something awfully and uniquely special about the first half of the 20th century in American popular song-writing, isn’t there?

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Tone Poem Tuesday: Farewell, Andre Watts

Pianist Andre Watts has died.

Watts was 77 years old when he died of prostate cancer last week. Born in 1946, Watts was best known for his expressive performances of piano music from the Romantic and early modern eras, which constitute the bulk of his recorded work. His music-making was always fiery and emotional, which I always appreciate; emotional distance and cool temperatures are never what I look for in music. Here is a selection of remembrances of Watts.

In this selection, Watts performs the Piano Concerto No. 2 in G minor, by Camille Saint-Saens. The performance is taken from a live broadcast of the New York Philharmonic, so you actually get to hear Watts discuss the music for a bit prior to the performance itself. Saint-Saens himself was a long-lived French master who was as much a child prodigy as Mozart, but whose work hasn’t quite endured as Mozart’s did; Saint-Saens is represented in the standard repertoire by a number of works, but others sit in relative obscurity due to his occasional lack of attentiveness and depth. The best of Saint-Saens is almost always pleasing music, if not particularly profound; the standard quip about this concerto is that “it starts with Bach but ends with Offenbach”. This concerto’s moods shift from solemnity to playful dance and then to pure minor-key speed, all of this steeped in late-19th century urbane Parisian sophistication. Of particular pleasure is the ending of the second movement, just before the storm of the last erupts; and I challenge anyone to claim to be unexcited by the blaze with which the entire concerto closes.

Here is Andre Watts performing the Second Piano Concerto by Camille Saint-Saens.

 

 

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“I feel compromised, a part of an evil empire, when I eat a McNugget.” On Bourdain Day

Born this date, 1956: Anthony Bourdain.

There are few voices I miss today more than that of Anthony Bourdain. His warm-hearted embrace of the entire world, his endless curiosity, his willingness to bridge gaps and accept differences–these are qualities our world is deeply lacking today. I, myself, fall short of his example…but I do try. Obviously I’m not able to travel as much as Bourdain did, but I do what I can. His oft-cited bits of travel advice, starting with eating where the locals eat, are always well taken.

By pure good luck, I read a book of Bourdain’s wisdom this very morning, after I checked it out of the library yesterday. I didn’t even know that today was Bourdain Day, as we’re all calling it now, honoring the life of a man who modeled a way of looking at the world to which we should all aspire. The book, Anthony Bourdain: The Last Interview, is actually a short collection of several interviews, ranging from one he gave in the early 2000s to several he gave in the last few months of his life. I realize that the temptation may be there to read those last few and try to find any hint of the demons that were lurking in the dark places of his mind, but I strongly advise against it. Bourdain’s life should stand for more than just the fact of its ending.

Here are a few excerpts from the interviews in this book:

NEIL DEGRASSE TYSON: How do you distinguish between tricks–and I don’t mean it in a circus sense, but just secrets–versus ten years of doing it? You serve a food to someone and they say, “what’s your secret?” as though they can just tell that to them and then tomorrow they can do exactly what you made. At what point do you say, “Look, I’ve been at this my whole life?”

BOURDAIN: There are no secrets. The secret of the restaurant business and professional cooking is there are no secrets. It is a mentoring business. Chefs spend their whole lives learning stuff, and then, because of the nature of the business, every few months teach everything they know, invest time they don’t have, in teaching somebody everything they know so that they can maybe have a Sunday off, and that they can count on a crew. It is a military hierarchy, and it is import–there are no secrets. There are no secret recipes. There are no secret techniques. Everything that you learn in a kitchen you are either told, open-source, by your immediate supervisor and that’s been shared with everybody in the kitchen, or you have learned it over time, painfully. You know, the ability to tell when a steak is cooked by listening to it in the pan or on the grill. Or determining that a piece of fish is probably ready to come out of the pan just from the sound of it–these are things you learn through repetition. And that is the great secret. It’s that this is how professionals learn, this is how home cooks should learn. People shouldn’t be intimidated by recipes. They should understand that professionals learn through getting it wrong, getting it wrong, getting it wrong, getting it wrong, starting to get it right, eventually getting it right, until it became second nature. It’s repetition, repetition, repetition. You learn all of these things, even if you don’t understand the technical, the science behind why your stew is transforming, why it’s becoming thick as it cooks longer, why your egg scrambles, why the steak gets dark on the outside when you expose it to heat. You may have no understanding of the science behind that, but you instinctively–of course through repetition–understand it, you learn to use it, and you count on it.

Bourdain on writing (this interview is from a writing conference in Sydney; the interviewer is author Jill Dupleix, whose name is apparently misspelled in the book):

BOURDAIN: I don’t work for a living. I mean…

DUPLIEX: You’re making it sound good.

BOURDAIN: I mean, writing–I have no sympathy for anyone fortunate enough to get paid any kind of money to write whining about writer’s block or how hard it is, or some sort of internal torture. You’re doing it in a sitting position, so right away, you know? I spent my whole adult life on my feet. I feel very, very lucky that anybody even gives a shit what I think. It’s not something I’m used to, and it is a privilege to be able to write and have even eight people care what you’re saying.

[A bit later in the same interview]

BOURDAIN: I’m gonna tell you something that aspiring writers or writers here will really hate me for: I’ve never written anything in my life that hasn’t been published.

DUPLIEX: Yeah, we hate you.

BOURDAIN: I have never toiled away in a garret for years writing unsuccessful or unpublished manuscripts. I wrote the article that Kitchen Confidential was based on for a free paper in New York. I figured they were lame enough to buy my piece. It ended up in The New Yorker. I got lucky. I’m always talking, telling stories. Being a little provocateur with a way with words was something that was true of me when I was a little kid. I’ve always used that skill to get the things I want, to manipulate events to my liking, to get myself into trouble, to get myself out of trouble, to hurt my enemies, to seduce people, or make people do things I would like them to do. So I was always a little…you know, my parents very early on said “You should really be a lawyer, you’ve got such a way with words.”

Bourdain on differences and contradictions within people:

BOURDAIN: I used to think that basically, the whole world, that all humanity were basically bastards. I’ve since found that most people seem to be pretty nice–basically good people doing the best they can. There is rarely, however, a neat takeaway. You have to learn to exercise a certain moral relativity, to be a good guest first–as a guiding principle. Otherwise you’d spend the rest of the world lecturing people, pissing people off, confusing them and learning nothing. Do I pipe up every time my Chinese host serves me some cute animal I may not approve of? Should I inquire of my Masai buddies if they still practice female genital mutilation? Express revulsion in Liberia over tribal practices?

Fact is, the guy who’s been patting my knee all night, telling jokes, sharing favorite Seinfeld anecdotes, making sure I get the best part of the lamb, being my new bestest buddy in Saudi Arabia will very likely later, on the drive back to the hotel, guilelessly express regret over what “the Jews and the CIA” did to my city on 9/11. What do you say to that?

Bourdain wasn’t one to hold an opinion for life, if he learned otherwise. He was very open to changing his views as his perspective evolved. I remember that he was rather disgusted by the degree to which Emeril Lagasse became a big “brand” in the 90s and early 2000s, but later on he would write an article in which he acknowledged Lagasse’s skill, knowledge, and the fact that he had paid his dues. Bourdain also famously sprang to the defense of a small-town newspaper food critic in the Midwest who praised her town’s new Olive Garden restaurant, even though he has made clear his general distaste for corporate food (see the quote in the title of this post). Here’s an example of Bourdain’s shift in perspective altering a previous strong opinion:

PETER ARMSTRONG: You said in an interview I read a couple days ago that you’ve changed your take on brunch as a result of having a kid.

BOURDAIN: Well, I hated brunch because for many years of my life, for many low points of my professional career, when I was fort of unemployable by any reputable restaurant for various reasons, I could always get a brunch gig. Because restaurants are always desperate to find somebody to cook three hundred omelettes for drunks on Sunday morning, and that was me. And so the smell of eggs cooking and French toast was always the smell of shame and defeat and humiliation until I became a dad. And now, if I want the fast track to looking cool in front of my daughter’s friends, it’s make a pancake bar for them, you know, “Your choice: chocolate chip, blueberry, or banana?”

I think what I appreciate most about Bourdain is that he rarely talks about food the way a “foodie” talks about food. He talks about the people who make it, why they make it the way they do, maybe a bit about the method of how they make it, and what it means to them in a cultural way. You almost never hear Bourdain talking about the acidity of a dish or the way it “elevates” certain ingredients or any of that Master Chef bullshit. Even when he visited a high-end restaurant on his shows, he always focused on the human connections involved with the food.

My God, I miss Anthony Bourdain. He was to food and food exploration what Carl Sagan was to science and space.

 

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Tina

Damn.

I never knew that Tina Turner was just a few months younger than my father. She had a life full of triumphs and enormous difficulties, and she leaves an enormous legacy of music. I salute her.

(image: via)

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