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.
Agreed, to me they are very different takes on what is a punk attitude.
Palahniuk: Underneath the veneer of the banal, you will discover everything is rotten and sycophantic but somehow tender and relatable.
Bourdain: Underneath the veneer of the banal, you will discover an honest struggle for something far more respectable than what is typically venerated. Eat their food, dance to their music, and you will enjoy.
Later on Bourdain definitely moved past a lot of the initial style that gave him prominence (his breakout kitchen confidential was definitely of that moment in time like Palahniuk's) in terms of the shows he produced, but in the end, the thread of finding your own pleasurable interpretation of life- be it in the seedy kitchens, or on riverboats with wong-kar wai's filmographer trying to chase the "real hong kong"- that isn't beholden to anyone else, remained the defining trait of his work. His "authentic" style which wasn't a top 5 things to do in x city and more experiential and human didn't come from nowhere in terms of his personal ideology and life experiences/lifestyle.
I think it's the same mindset but in a different context. He was a well read guy with good creative sensitivities, and a fantastic conversationalist- but he's no analogue to your rick steins and rick steeves- just because he shows up on the same row on your streaming app. I think the desire to be free arrived for him long before he started frequently travelling.
And we're on our own for now- that world and those people get further and further away every year. We're seeing less and less people willing to or being allowed to contribute culturally, in the anti system humanist, mentally and socially free but financially trapped service worker, or anti sensationalist experiencer of human culture 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.