Bowie

Posted on March 13, 2021March 13, 2021 by Emma Alvarez Gibson

DAVID BOWIE

Whenever I think about people who embody my definition of “cool,” David Bowie is always high at the top of that list. Take just one look at him at any age of his career and the man oozes cool from every pore of his body. It’s the way he talked, walked, the way he sang, the way he lived…every single thing about him screamed “COOL!” So of course when I got the opportunity to write about someone I think of as cool, he immediately jumped out in my mind.

So what exactly is my definition of cool? Frankly, it’s hard for me to really define cool because it isn’t just a set of standards that you can measure every person against. Cool for one person might be downright dreadful for another and the two seemingly opposing concepts or expressions could still be pretty cool. For me, cool is being your own person no matter what the status quo tells you. Cool is standing up for what is right even when everyone else around you seems to be siding with everything that’s wrong. Cool is acknowledging that there is beauty in differences and celebrating that beauty with unabashed joy, love, and passion. Cool, similarly to the cliché about beauty, is in the eye of the beholder. You define cool, cool doesn’t define you. In a lot of ways, my thinking about cool and what makes someone cool are perfectly demonstrated by my obsession with David Bowie. Bowie lived out loud, meaning that he was authentically himself and that, in my opinion, made him unequivocally cool.

I still remember the first time Bowie entered my consciousness. It was in the early 90s and I, like many kids of that era, was obsessed with MTV and VH1, which at the time didn’t have multiple channels and for the most part, aired music videos and news related to music and popular culture throughout the day. Despite not having even the slightest idea what most of the singers, rappers, and bands were talking about in their music, I would sit glued to the screen watching video after video of popular songs of the day and the early trendsetters of yesteryear. It was through those seemingly endless hours of watching music videos that I got to know the likes of Chaka Khan, John Cougar Mellencamp, Luther Vandross, Michael Jackson, Nirvana, Notorious B.I.G., Queen, Sting, The Police, The Rolling Stones, Whitney Houston, and countless others.

Between videos of “In Bloom” and “I Wanna Dance With Somebody,” there it was. From the rise of its “Ahhh” line to the drop of that first “Let’s dance,” I was hooked. If you’ve never heard “Let’s Dance,” you’re missing out. It starts out with this very 80’s rhythmic beat that gets you ready to start moving your body and then you’re met with Bowie’s unmistakably breathy voice that seems to beckon you to get up no matter where you are and do exactly what the song is telling you to do.

As the camera moves forward to focus on Bowie, you see his recognizable slender figure in this oh-so sleek light-colored ensemble. I can still remember feeling entranced by his leggy form draped in billowy, pressed white pants, a light colored button-down shirt with its sleeves rolled up to reveal his forearms, his hands in white gloves as they strummed his electric guitar, and his white loafers casually tapping to the beat. Then there’s his face, which I can only describe as the definition of androgynous beauty. He had these high cheek bones that were the envy of all women hoping to land the covers of Vogue and Harper’s Bazaar and these piercing light blue eyes that were so unique and enchanting. For many years, I just assumed he had two different colored eyes until I learned that they were actually the result of anisocoria, which is when one pupil is larger than the other and does not change even in the presence of light. Of course, learning this just added to his cool factor in my book.

And finally, there was that hair. Whenever I see a video or image of Bowie through the years, I immediately hear this line from the titular song in Hair the musical, “Oh give me a head with hair/Long, beautiful hair/Shining, gleaming/Streaming, flaxen, waxen.” If there is one thing about Bowie that no one can deny, it’s his knack for one-of-a-kind hairstyles. His slightly messy blonde hair in the “Let’s Dance” video is no exception. Short on the sides and long on the top, his hair is perfectly tossed in varying directions with this section at the front that just hangs forward in this sort of way that you can’t quite tell if it was done on purpose or that’s just how cool people’s hair falls when they are that cool. Either way, I was in love.

Still featuring Bowie in the “Let’s Dance” music video

After that initial introduction to Bowie, every single thing I learned about him going forward just added to his cool persona. Take for instance his marriage to the endlessly gorgeous model, Iman. Even in the 90s, the image of a successful and world famous White man married to a chocolate-skinned Black woman was just not something you saw everyday in popular culture. As a kid, I understood all too well the tensions between racial lines, and seeing Bowie so comfortable in his skin and married to this beautiful Black woman just added to his allure as a cultural rebel and icon to me.

Then there were his other musical collaborations and film work. I’m sure by now almost everyone has gotten to hear Under Pressure, which was his duet with Freddy Mercury of Queen fame. Another song that, while it’s not a duet, still gives me such joy when I listen to it is Young Americans. Fun fact: it features the likes of Luther Vandross as backup vocals. That’s another thing about Bowie that I loved—his ability to push the envelope in both his life and his art. At a time when Black backup singers were no longer getting jobs on top records like they had been in the 60s and 70s, Bowie was still creating opportunities for Black backup singers to practice their art form and grow as musicians. (While I’m on the topic of Black backup singers, I highly recommend watching the documentary film, Twenty Feet from Stardom (2013). It goes into detail about Black backup singers and the struggles many of them had while trying to pursue their musical careers outside of the shadow of famous White singers or bands and groups that were created more for their good looks than their vocal abilities. But I digress.)

As I noted earlier in my appreciation for Bowie’s portfolio of work, his acting performances were also noteworthy. Bowie was one of those rare talents that could cross over from music to film perfectly and he accomplished that with one of my favorite 80s flicks that also featured one of my all-time favorites of Bowie’s looks: Labyrinth. In this dreamy, fantasy film featuring a young Jennifer Connelly and the puppet handiwork of Jim Henson (see The Muppets and Sesame Street), Bowie shines as the goblin king who holds Connelly’s little brother hostage after she angrily and thoughtlessly wishes for him to be taken away. When I tell you Bowie “did” that character, I am telling you he did that character. Everything about his portrayal of the goblin king was Bowie coolness—from his hair and makeup to his rockstar-like wardrobe, it was pure perfection. If you haven’t yet, you must see it or at least look up clips on YouTube. You’ll thank me later.

Outside of his musical genius, fashion prowess, and just plain awesomeness in general, Bowie was a true renegade. While I was living briefly in Rochester, NY and attending graduate school there, I learned of an interesting connection Bowie had to the city. On March 21, 1976 and after playing a performance at the Community War Memorial, Bowie and three others—one of whom was punk legend, Iggy Pop—were arrested by Rochester police for marijuana possession. Now, to be clear, I am not glorifying marijuana use or getting arrested, but seeing how much of the United States has finally started to change its stance on marijuana, with many states even legalizing it for recreational use, I find it pretty funny that Bowie was part of setting the trend for normalizing its use. I also found it funny that because of that egregious arrest that resulted in dropped charges against Bowie and his crew, Bowie never played in Rochester again.

David Bowie’s (hot AF) mugshot after his arrest in Rochester, NY. Credit: Rochester Democrat and Chronicle

Now, some people might call that “cancelling” but I like to think of it as a protest against the criminalization of drugs. In my mind, Bowie made the decision to avoid playing in a city that wouldn’t allow him to live out loud and for someone as cool as Bowie was, that meant never getting to see him live on that city’s soil.

In addition to being cool, when I think of Bowie, I think of a man who was extremely principled; someone who wasn’t willing to just ignore beliefs or ideas that were unreasonable or lacked sense. And while this short little tale about Bowie’s arrest is not an attempt at demonstrating why the war on drugs is so terrible (because it is), I do like to think of it as a simple anecdote highlighting the harm criminalization of drugs causes people who weren’t so fortunate as Bowie was to be a successful, White male celebrity with the ability to overcome the damage a drug possession arrest can have on one’s life and livelihood. I know I can’t prove any of this, but I love the idea that it could be a legitimate explanation for his decision to avoid Rochester.

Whatever the case may be, Bowie is a hero for many rebels, misfits, weirdos, musicians, artists, and creators. Whether it was his out-of-this-world stage act of Ziggy Stardust and the album that was based on it, The Rise and Fall of Ziggy Stardust and the Spiders From Mars (1972), or his portfolio of game-changing music and on-screen roles, Bowie was an innovator who, once you set your eyes upon him, you couldn’t turn away. He always left you wanting more. And if that is not the essence of what it means to be cool, then I have no idea what is.

~ Ngozika “Go Zee” Egbuonu

Sclavunos

Posted on December 31, 2020February 26, 2021 by Emma Alvarez Gibson

PARADOX

A Conversation with Jim Sclavunos

Multi-instrumentalist, producer and writer Jim Sclavunos has been a member of Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds since 1994. Alongside Lydia Lunch, he was an integral part of the No Wave scene in the late 1970s, playing in bands Teenage Jesus & The Jerks, Beirut Slump and 8 Eyed Spy, before joining Sonic Youth to record their first album, Confusion Is Sex. Since then he has recorded with a diverse host of artists including Grinderman, The Cramps, Marianne Faithfull and Iggy Pop, along with solo albums as The Vanity Set. Sclavunos’ work as a producer encompasses The Horrors, Gogol Bordello, Beth Orton, The Jim Jones Revue, Beth Jeans Houghton and The Wytches; under the moniker Silver Alert he has done remixes for Philip Glass, Depeche Mode, and Boss Hog, and in 2012 presented “Faustian Pact”, a live adaptation of Murnau’s Faust at The Perth International Arts Festival.

EAG: I’m writing on the topic of cool, and what’s cool, and who’s cool, and what are the criteria.

JS: I hope you’re not coming to me for answers.

EAG: Well, it’s funny, that’s what everybody keeps saying.

JS: But I wonder if that’s because there’s almost a stigma to attaching yourself to the idea of being cool, because it’s not cool to think you’re cool.

EAG: It’s not cool to think you’re cool, and I think too the topic makes a lot of people nervous—

JS: It doesn’t make me nervous, but it’s hard to…maybe it’s just a habit of a lifetime, but I’m not used to thinking of myself as cool. It’s usually something that I think of as something that’s assigned by other people to people other than me. And when people tell me I’m cool, not in like, “That’s cool, Jim,” or something like that, but cool in terms of a trend or a zeitgeist or a legacy, it amuses me more than flatters me.

EAG: Why’s that?

JS: I suppose there’s some flattery anytime anybody kind of implicitly compliments you. But it amuses me more, because it seems so removed from the process whereby I go about doing things, which is usually quite heated. So the temperatures seem misaligned.

EAG: Tell me about the first time in your life that you remember thinking something was really cool. Even if you didn’t know the word yet.

JS: I think Audrey Hepburn. In Breakfast at Tiffany’s. I can’t remember clearly enough to know how she came on my radar as a child, but I became aware of her as an image, as a icon. And she seemed to embody a lot of things that later on Twiggy seemed to embody. There was a sort of lightheartedness but also a reserve, a distance. There was a sort of elegance mixed with a kind of goofiness. And yeah, there was that hint of an accent that made her most ordinary gestures and comments somehow more exotic. And Twiggy kind of did the same thing later on. And, you know, I grew up in the ’60s so these…skinny ladies… [laughs] were sort of the burgeoning of my sense of female otherness.

Now since then I’ve learned that Raquel Welch is pretty cool, too. [Laughs] She was pretty much the opposite. But she didn’t have that same kind of alien quality, almost. She seemed like a product of Hollywood, whereas Audrey Hepburn seemed very much like something apart from that. And then later on, I started identifying that same sort of quality with Marlene Dietrich. And, you know, in the ’60s they had all this kind of late, late shows. I don’t know if they were still around when you were—

EAG: Yeah.

JS: —but, you know, in the pre-cable days if you managed somehow to stay up late, particularly if you had an indulgent babysitter, you could watch all these interesting movies that weren’t on in the daytime. And they were often from Hollywood’s golden age, but sometimes they were also foreign movies. And like I said, I don’t know when all these exotic European-type women started coming onto my radar; I can’t remember. But it was something that seemed very different from the women I was encountering in Brooklyn. And the way they spoke was completely and utterly unlike the way my peers spoke or the way my schoolmates spoke or the teachers. So there was something quite enchanting about it, and that’s where I first kind of started looking or projecting this idea that that’s cool or these women are cool. Because they had reserve, they were understated yet at the same time flamboyant. There seemed to be this real paradox to their demeanors that I couldn’t quite reconcile. And that was what was intriguing about them. And alluring.

“They had reserve, they were understated yet at the same time flamboyant. There seemed to be this real paradox to their demeanors that I couldn’t quite reconcile.”

EAG: Is that tension still part of your criteria?

JS: I think I use cool in a pretty ironic way these days. I’ll use it in conversation like, Oh, that’s cool, meaning, if you say so. I’ll accept your point of view reluctantly, but I’m not prepared to do battle over something that I consider potentially pretty trivial.

EAG: So removing the language aspect from it, what lights you up now?

JS: Well, loads of things. But I have difficulty thinking about them in terms of cool as applied to maybe taste or a signifier of a lifestyle that I’m attracted to. Not to pester the semantics aspect too much, but the other way in which I use “cool” is as a directive to musicians when I’m producing or arranging or bandleading. But it’s often to the drummer, and I say, “Play it cool.” And that’s like meaning don’t make it sound like you’re trying too hard. Hold back a bit. Show some reserve. And so in that way it’s kind of connected with that idea of what I identified in those female actresses when I was very young.

And all that’s before I actually became sort of clued in to music that I might consider cool. I think it really did start with film and film icons. And then I kind of became aware that Marlon Brando was allegedly cool. And that was a little trickier for me, first of all because he was male so he wasn’t quite as attractive to me; and also I had a toy monkey that was called Marlon. My parents told me his name was Marlon and it was probably some kind of in-joke on their part, you know, because Marlon Brando was like the hot actor at the time. So I couldn’t really look at Brando and really feel he was quite as cool as he was alleged to be, or even as cool as my monkey. I still have trouble with that. I mean, it’s hard for me to watch Apocalypse Now and not think of Marlon. The monkey, I mean.

EAG: Really, that works on so many levels.

JS: But I’ll tell you who I did really come to identify with the utmost in cool, and it’s kind of obvious, I suppose, to a certain generation and certain types of musicians of a certain generation. That was Lou Reed.

EAG: Oh, sure.

JS: Yeah. That was indisputable, you know. And everything he did up until he took up Tai Chi was for me the epitome of cool.

EAG: And talk about understated, right?

JS: Well, it was more that he was disdainful. And I started becoming aware of him in my puberty leading to my teenagehood, and that was the sort of posture that I found most attractive about him was his disdain. His withering disdain for almost everything under the sun. And his very elegant way of expressing it, both in terms of his look and his gift for lyrics and his stunning interviews, which were always the embodiment of complete and utter lack of respect for journalists, most journalists, and most of his fellow musicians. His own band included. And it wasn’t so much that I found that disrespect so attractive; I actually didn’t think it was a very attractive trait, you know, dissing musicians, dissing journalists. But the fact that he was so unapologetic about it and so consistent about it made him sort of a marvel to behold. He really seemed fearless. And maybe it was all coming from a deep lack of confidence or very troubled soul, but on the surface it came across as absolutely fearless, his not cottoning or seeming to want to even care or care what the consequences of what he said were. And of course that sort of behavior was a gateway for me through glam rock into punk. And ultimately No Wave, and all the sort of cartoonish behavior all that entailed. But I suppose, you know, I’m as guilty as the next punk rocker of, you know, on some level emulating Lou Reed. I admit it. And that’s probably not very cool, but if I am cool I guess I was in a spiritual journey for finding my own form of coolness. And that’s where I set out, the path I set out on, till I came to that strange fork in the road where I didn’t need to consciously or unconsciously emulate people I admired.

“Photographs are by their very nature the coolest medium, I think. Because they seize this one moment in time, this one perfect moment in time, and make a monument of it, a permanent index of this one monumental moment, where everything was perfect.”

EAG: When was that?

JS: I don’t know. I don’t know. I think I was too busy being alive to notice. But you know, you grow out of it, like you grow out of most things of your youth. Or you hope you grow out of it. And it’s probably in there still somewhere. I can still look at a picture of Lou Reed and my first thought is, Hey, that’s cool. And then I remember the other stuff I know about him, and I think, Yeah, he was cool. Or maybe just his picture was cool.

Photographs are by their very nature the coolest medium, I think. Because they seize this one moment in time, this one perfect moment in time, and make a monument of it, a permanent index of this one monumental moment, where everything was perfect. The lighting was perfect, the person’s expression and body shape. And the photographer either lucked out or had the keen eye to capture it. And it’s preserved forever. And all the imperfections that might otherwise have existed in this person’s life are irrelevant because this image is forever. And the camera is by its nature also a sort of a clinical device. It reflects what it sees; it captures what it sees. It’s not, apart from any darkroom trickery or other special effects. Joel Peter Witkin style. You know, apart from any of that kind of thing, the camera usually just captures what’s in front of it. And if you capture that one moment, the camera is sort of a passive observer; even though it’s being directed by a photographer it’s a passive observer. It doesn’t overtly manipulate reality; it just captures it. And so it’s cool in the sense, again, of being held back, of being reserved, of being almost a sort of passive engagement rather than a proactive engagement. Does that make any sense?

EAG: That makes perfect sense. Are there other concepts or things that fall into that category for you?

JS: Not as much, no. Because film, you know, you would think film is a very closely related; it’s basically the same technology, right? But because it deals in time rather than a single frozen moment in time, it’s more…I can’t think of the word I’m looking for. Things get manipulated more and so there’s more of a subjective sort of activity going on. It’s not as phlegmatic. It’s more fiery. To use a sort of alchemical sort of analogy. But also the way…I guess painting comes the closest, at least from a observational point of view, because you have to sit there and look at it and kind of digest it. And you have to be still; you can’t be like jumping back and forth. It has to happen in that moment and it only can happen in that moment. So everything about something that’s sort of stationary and in a frame demands a sort of passive regard, more so than films or books or watching theater or dance or any of the other arts. It sort of almost demands a meditative eye. And there’s usually one single ideal position to look at any of these things. And it’s almost like time has to stand still the same way you have to stand still, whereas the other arts unfold in time. You’re reading a book, it takes time to read a book. You have to turn pages. Sometimes you have to reread a passage, you know. It’s something that involves a sort of an intellectual motion. Likewise film, likewise theater. Photography more than any other is preserved in amber. There’s a moment preserved in amber. Painting comes close, but the process is not as refined as the photographic moment. Does it make sense, what I’m saying?

EAG: Yeah, totally. I see that.

JS: I’d love to have read the Susan Sontag book on photography before I said any of that stuff, because she’s got a good way of analyzing things and sometimes in a way that might undercut some of my thoughts or enhance my thoughts. But I haven’t read it. Sarah [his wife, publicist Sarah Lowe] just acquired it, and neither of us have read it. And she’s a pretty cool lady.

I guess I’ve been equally drawn to individuals of both genders that I thought were cool. I never thought of Susan Sontag as a hottie, but the idea of an intellectualized woman, a woman that was unsparingly intellectual, had a sort of allure beyond the scope of her thoughts. And I never could say that I felt sexually attracted to Lou Reed, but I could see that there was something about him that was sexually alluring, in some weird way…something in a sort of panther-like, cool sexual vibe that I just thought, Yes, there’s a sexual component here. It’s not something that makes me horny, but it’s something I think in some way is a sublimation of a sexual impulse. Yeah. It somehow is sublimated, not in the sense of the sublime. That’s a different set of ideas altogether, but sort of sublimated in a Freudian way, almost like fetishistic kind of appeal of an image.

EAG: Transference, almost.

JS: Yeah. Transference. That’s a good way to put it.

EAG: On a different note, I was amused to see that an old photo of you appeared in the final episode of Parts Unknown.

JS: Did it?

EAG: Yeah. Because Lydia Lunch was in that episode.

JS: [Talking in the background] Oh, yes. Okay. Sorry, I didn’t…that’s how cool I am. I don’t watch TV. I didn’t actually know what Parts Unknown was.

EAG: Yeah, the last Anthony Bourdain series.

JS: I don’t really know anything about him. Marty, the bass player in the Bad Seeds—who I also think is very, very cool, I’ll have you know—he has been an avid reader of Anthony Bourdain’s books. But I’ve never picked one up myself.

EAG: I wondered if you guys had crossed paths at any point, because you were kind of in the same time and the same place in the ’70s.

JS: Not knowingly. What was the context in which this picture showed up? Was it just sort of showing what Lydia looked like back in the day?

EAG: Yeah. It was just like a real quick overview of her career. And then they had lunch.

JS: Did she give him a hard time?

EAG: Oh my God, yes.

JS: Well, I’m certainly acquainted with Lydia’s style of speaking.

“Can people who are provocateurs be cool? Not in my traditional sort of understanding of what cool is.”

EAG: Good God. I was not ready for some of the things she said.

JS: Well, she’s always tried to be a provocateur. And that poses an interesting thing: can people who are provocateurs be cool? Not in my traditional sort of understanding of what cool is. And when I say traditional, I mean that kind of reaches back to the model of the beatniks and their bohemian predecessors and then the various forms that coolness took in the swinging ’60s. And then the coolness of punk rock, as most iconically embodied by, say, the Ramones or Willy DeVille or something. Lydia always has been an outspoken person that has a sort of a…it’s a high-energy demeanor usually. And this is no slight against Lydia or what she does as an artist or a personality, but she doesn’t, for me, evoke the idea of cool. She evokes the idea of Lydia, and that’s a unique and special thing in itself. And a valuable thing. But I can’t think of her as cool in the same way I think of a more reserved personality is cool.

JS: I’ll tell you what No Wave band—if we can talk about No Wave, if that means anything to you…

EAG: Of course it does. I’ve done my homework, Jim.

JS: Okay. Well, Mars, that seemed like a cool band. And the people in it were cool, because their social behavior was so bizarre and seemed so disconnected from normal social behavior. And the music they were making on stage was so unlike rock and roll music of any form, that they seemed to me very cool.

EAG: What was their social behavior like?

JS: Ranging from catatonic to hallucinogenic. I don’t know if they were druggies; I don’t think they actually were. I think they were just very unusual people in a very unusual band. And maybe some of it was affected, but I think a lot of it wasn’t. I think they were just really oddballs. And by comparison with, say, Lydia Lunch and James Chance, who were always kind of very provocative and confrontational, Mars were very sort of off in their own world. Planet Mars, I guess. Anyway, enough about No Wave.

EAG: It seems like that commitment is a big part of what you’re talking about. A commitment to doing your own thing and sort of not taking the rest of the world all that seriously in terms of how much it dictates what you do.

JS: Yes, but there are a lot of people who claim to do that and yet are clamoring for attention all the time. And their behavior bespeaks that. They say, “I don’t care about what the rest of the world thinks. Do you hear me? I don’t care. I really don’t care. I hate you all. Do you hear me? I want to make sure you spell my name correctly when you quote me saying how much I hate what you think of me and how much I don’t care. Did you get that? And if you want more information, my manager and publicist can be reached at this number. But I don’t care what you think. Am I on the front cover? I don’t care.”

That’s how a lot of those people come across to me. And I don’t believe it for a second that they don’t care. I do believe that they’re doing their own thing, but I don’t think that that’s the entirety of the story. Lots of people do their own thing. Nuns do their own thing. I’m sure there are some cool nuns out there, and some that are not so cool. I mostly was educated by the ones that weren’t.

Bourdain

Posted on December 31, 2020February 26, 2021 by Emma Alvarez Gibson

ANTHONY BOURDAIN

It’s a delicate thing, to attempt a telling of the story of someone you care about. When it’s someone you’ve never met, things get weird. And they get weirder still when that person is not only recently deceased but also fiercely championed, on a deeply personal level, by millions of other people who, like you, never once met him.

At any stratosphere, death brings with it the kind of competitive clamoring that humans can’t seem to go without. Who knew him best? Who were his real friends? Who talked to him at the airport once? The television shows, books, articles, video clips, and comments from the media provide ample fodder for speculation, misrepresentation, and performative public outcries. Everyone wants to be a part of the mass consciousness, even (especially) when it borders on the ghoulish.

So, you focus. You focus on the story. How does the story of Anthony Bourdain go? We could say, for instance:

Once upon a time, a gangly kid named Tony who loved the Ramones and the New York Dolls moved to New York City for the heroin and ended up an author and host of various TV shows, and having noodles for lunch in Hanoi with a sitting American president.

Or:

There was once a kid who sailed to France on the Queen Mary and hated it until he found out about oysters and other things he could eat that made him look like a badass. He loved comic books and The Simpsons. As a rule he didn’t like sci-fi, but he loved William Gibson‘s work. He went on to graduate from the Culinary Institute of America. He became a chef, then a writer, then world famous, making friends with an incredible cross-section of people, including some of his heroes, like Joey Ramone and Iggy Pop.

Or maybe:

For a time, there was on Earth a TV host and writer and chef whose cookbooks employed phrases like “Fuck dessert,” and who said things in interviews like, “Ask yourself, before you start dabbling in what somebody, somewhere is calling molecular gastronomy: ‘Am I a genius? Am I Ferran Adrià? Am I anywhere near as talented and as visionary and as firmly rooted in a place with as much food culture as Catalonia? Or am I just kind of jerking off, here?’” But millions of people all over the world loved him because he inspired them to be themselves, to be better versions of themselves, to follow their dreams, to be unafraid.

Or even:

Tony loved and respected people as much as he loathed and reviled them, and he made no bones about either. Deemed cocksure by detractors, he was often visibly nervous on his shows: rubbing his thumb across his other fingers, or shutting down a bout of uncontrolled laughter—and hiding a protruding snaggle tooth—by quickly sealing his lips. He openly, and with regularity, expressed disgust for public figures, and treated people who were in no position to help him with utmost respect. And he packed an incredible amount of life into not-quite-62 years.

Was there ever a person so deeply and unapologetically flawed who captured the attention and the hearts of so many? After his death, I heard variation upon variation of what one particularly rational, even-keeled friend had quietly shared with me: “I can’t believe he’s gone. He was…well, he was my friend. I only knew him from his shows, but he was my friend. I genuinely saw him that way.”

In autumn of 2018 I was in New York City and briefly visited the former site of Les Halles, the restaurant where Bourdain last worked as a chef. While the mountains of flowers and cards that cropped up in the weeks following his death had, by late September, been mostly removed, the windows still bore heartfelt notes in the form of graffiti. The messages were, again, variations on a theme:

I don’t really know what to say, but I miss you more than words can describe. Maybe that sounds weird since we’ve never met… Thank you Chef for all you have done and for showing us the world through an unfiltered lense [sic].

If there is a heaven, then anyone who couldn’t live anymore deserves a head of the line pass to get in, because you’ve suffered enough. I love you man.

Thank you, Chef.

Here’s a phrase I often press into service as a yardstick for coolness: Homo sum, humani nihil a me alienum puto*. Written by the second-century Roman playwright Terence, it translates roughly from the Latin as: I am human; nothing human is alien to me.

It isn’t a perfect tool. Not every Everyman is cool; not all cool people are comfortable being one with the unwashed masses. But mostly, if you can be down with humanity in a wide variety of settings, chances are good that you’re probably pretty cool.

And Bourdain was down. He was totally fucking down.

Everyone else at that level of stardom, I will happily argue, is either the product of a PR machine or simply not as forthcoming about their personal failures. Bourdain was neither; he was particularly adept at outlining his personal failures, willing to be raw, and willing to be wrong. Here I am, he conveyed through his work. Here I am, no better or worse than anyone else, and wow, we’re a fucked-up bunch. But look at all this beauty.

Laurie Woolever is a writer and editor who for the better part of a decade worked as Bourdain’s assistant and collaborator. They co-authored Appetites: A Cookbook in 2016, and had been working on World Travel: An Irreverent Guide (to be published in 2021) at the time of his death.

Via email, Woolever wrote: “He was adamant that he wasn’t actually cool.”

He was wrong about that, of course.

The only story about Bourdain I’m qualified to tell goes like this: Once there was a man named Tony, and he was as fucked up as anyone else but he did something with his life—many somethings, in fact. He was funny and kind; rude and crass. He loved music and art, and all the ways in which people forge real connections. He was curious and intelligent, vulnerable and sarcastic. He made the world seem a much more beautiful and welcoming place than many of us suspect it is. I felt, and still feel, that he was one of my people. That he was my friend. When he died, it felt extremely personal. And it still does. I miss him.

~ Emma Alvarez Gibson

*I like to think that Tony would have been amused at this use of the word “puto”.