I Hate My Shirt
August 26th, 2010
And my jacket, too. Also, I hate my boots, the well worn, floppy ones sitting there forlornly in the corner, the socks, the toilet kit and pretty much everything else.
I’m loading into my suitcase for an insanely packed bounce across America. It’s only two days after my latest book, MEDIUM RAW, was released and already, my pupils float unseeing in my skull, my head is full of mush. I’ve been interviewed about 60 times in the last few days and every time I answer the same question in the same way, I hate myself nearly as much as I hate the contents of my suitcase — whose only crimes are overfamiliarity.
Slipping on my shirt, the boots, packing and repacking over the next few days will, I know, soon come to feel like putting on an old, previously worn jester suit at some rennaissance fair of the Damned. Green Bay, Tulsa, Pittsburgh, Los Angeles, Salt Lake City, Portland, Seattle, Chicago, Cincinatti, Austin, Miami … Reeling off the names, it sounds like a James Brown song, “Night Train” — which I will no doubt be humming to myself during many pre-dawn drives to airports.
Did I mention my riveting new book, MEDIUM RAW, yet? The perfect Fathers Day gift, birthday present and blunt object? Yes. I think I did.
I probably should have allowed a period of decompression after an idyllic work and play experience in Paris.
Making television in Paris with Eric Ripert (aka “The Ripper”) is decidedly not a chore. When it’s Joel Robuchon feeding you, it’s pretty damn luxurious. And the fact that I could bring my family along … recreating, for instance, from my childhood trips to Paris, happy times in the Tuileries, pushing around sailboats in the fountain with my daughter, her first pony ride. That made it all the better.
Sitting at La Coupole with my wife, in-laws and Eric and savaging a massive shellfish tower, I turn to see my daughter happily slurping oysters. A few moments later, recognizing her friend “Sebastian”, the adorable lobster from “The Little Mermaid” perched atop a pile of crushed ice, she calls his name — followed by “Num, num!!” and not allowing sentiment to stand in the way of deliciousness, proceeds to rip the meat out of his tail and devour him. Daddy’s little girl. So proud.
The Paris shoot was a rare example of everything — absolutely everything — going right. Just as planned — or better. It’s going to be an amazing, extremely food-centric episode and it’s appropriate, I think, that for our ONE HUNDREDTH EPISODE, we are returning to the location of our very first.
Also in the mix for this next block of shows? Liberia, Kerala, India; the American Heartland, a return to Beirut, a mind-blowing masterwork of cinematography in Rome, a deeply embarrasing look back at an independent film shot in my kitchen at Les Halles in 2000 — just as Kitchen Confidential was coming out, investigations in Dubai, a dysfunctional and even more disturbing than last time Holiday Special with some very surprising guests, and Madrid.
Did I leave anything out? I think I did. I’m pretty sure, though that I mentioned MEDIUM RAW — the hilarious, eye-searingly, funny yuk-fest that everybody — okay not everybody — but some — people are talking about.
Available in bookstores everywhere.
See you on the road.
Related posts:
Posted in Anthony Bourdain