An excellent essay Sunday in the NY Times Magazine on the cult of Anthony Bourdain. (The biopic Tony is now out, though it depicts just one formative summer in Provincetown.) The author of the essay, Aaron Timms, presents a sharp overview of Bourdain’s life – he describes his Hanoi dinner with Barack Obama as an “encounter of the high-liberal megafauna” – and offers a brilliant analysis of his lasting popularity, which, Timms claims, is based on our fascination with, and envy of, his transition “from a life of work to a life of play.” His post-kitchen vocation – writer, traveler, eater, TV star – “was still ‘a job’ in the strict sense,” Timms acknowledges, “but it had none of the drudgery of work as most people experience it.”
Travel writers, reading those words, could all relate. Though most of us get the envy without the adulation.
