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‘A Beautiful Contagion’: Anthony Bourdain

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At GQ, family, friends, and co-workers share their memories of chef and television host Anthony Bourdain, who died in June, 2018.

David Remnick (editor in chief, ‘The New Yorker’): My wife came home one day, and she said, “Look. There’s a really nice woman at the newspaper. Her son is a writer. She wanted you to take a look at his work,” which seemed…adorable, right? A mother’s ambition for a son. I took this manuscript out of its yellow envelope, not expecting much. I started to read. It was about a young cook, working at a pretty average steak-and-frites place on lower Park Avenue. I called this guy up on the phone. He answered it in his kitchen. I said, “I’d like to publish this work of yours in The New Yorker. I hope that’s okay.” That was the beginning of Anthony Bourdain being published. I don’t know if there’s any way to put this other than to say he invented himself as a writer, as a public personality. It was all there.

Josh Homme (frontman, Queens of the Stone Age; composed the theme song for ‘Parts Unknown’): He was such a beautiful contagion. He presented such a fascinating doorway to so many other things that aren’t within your narrow doorway of what you do. When it was time to write the song for his show, he sent over [Joey Ramone] doing “What a Wonderful World.” And I said to him, “Are you sure you want me to do this?” And he just said, “It is a wonderful world. Isn’t it?”

Michael Ruhlman (author): There was this woman who was a foodie, but she was a student and she was poor. And she used to go by his restaurant every day. She’d just stand out there, looking in and smelling the smells and thinking about it. One day Tony came out and said, “Hey, I see you here all the time.” She said, “Yeah, I can’t afford to eat here.” He said, “Come in. I’m gonna feed you.” And so he fed her a steak and a proper béarnaise sauce while she sat amongst the crowd.

Hamilton: That’s the thing about friendship with Tony. Tony lavishes you with love and friendship and generosity and kindness, and then he disappears in the night and you don’t get to reciprocate. It wasn’t mutual. But it was breathtaking to be loved by him.

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Scholar of Mazes: Surviving Childhood Sexual Abuse

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At The Globe and Mail, Scott C. Jones writes about being molested by a neighbor as a young boy. When he reveals to his mother what’s been happening, in a bid to stop the abuse, she refuses to believe him. Knowing he has to survive on his own, he finds solace in conquering Pac-Man’s mazes.

The Atari 2600 version was not the real Pac-Man. No matter. I sat in front of the TV in our living room for hours, foolishly trying to get the mazes in Mr. Uston’s guidebook to bend to my will, to co-operate with me, to be what I wanted them to be. I kept obsessively searching for the “safe spots” in the maze that Mr. Uston’s book said existed; the mysterious places where Pac-Man himself became invisible to the patrolling ghosts. Because this is what I did when I was a kid, for better and for worse: I found silly things, like safe places in a pixelated maze, to believe in; and I had a very difficult time accepting that those silly things didn’t exist.

I still do this today.

As I explained everything to her, I braced myself for that wrath again. I looked forward to it, in fact. I wanted her to do to the man what she had done to me. I wanted her to snatch him up as if he was a rabbit she’d caught in her garden.

But there was no wrath. None whatsoever. She did not transform into the powerful creature I’d seen before. Instead, she peered at me with an indifferent look in her eyes. She shook her head from side to side, slowly. “I think you must be mistaken,” she said. She set the onion down on the newsprint. “Those people are our neighbours,” my mother said. “That man is a friend of the family. He was in the military. I know that man. He wouldn’t do something like that to you.”

I was dumbfounded. “But, Mom …” I said.

She said one more thing I’ve never forgotten. She said, “And one more piece of advice? Don’t be melodramatic all the time. It’s not flattering for a man to be so melodramatic.” She frowned at me in a theatrical way.

Then she picked up the onion off the newspaper. She resumed peeling.

My mother didn’t believe me. She did not believe me. She didn’t believe me, and so she would not help. She would not help. So I was alone.

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Bruce Springsteen: Sadness, Love, Madness, and Soul

NEW YORK, NY - OCTOBER 12: Bruce Springsteen performs onstage during "Springsteen On Broadway" at Walter Kerr Theatre on October 12, 2017 in New York City. (Photo by Kevin Mazur/Getty Images)

At Esquire, Bruce Springsteen talks to Michael Hainey about Trump’s divisive politics, raising kids to become solid citizens, how to deal with the baggage of your upbringing to be the person you truly want to be, and how, at age 69 after two serious bouts of depression, he’s still figuring it all out, just like the rest of us.

“DNA.”

This is, curiously, the first word that Springsteen says when he takes the stage. An unlikely, unromantic, unpoetic choice for a man who has always been more about the sensory than science. Yet in many ways, DNA is Springsteen’s unrelenting antagonist, the costar that he battles against.

This is the central tension of Springsteen on Broadway: the self we feel doomed to be through blood and family versus the self we can—if we have the courage and desire—will into existence. Springsteen, as he reveals here, has spent his entire life wrestling with that question that haunts so many of us: Will I be confined by my DNA, or will I define who I am?

We ignore our demons, he says, at our peril. The show is, as he calls it, “a magic trick.” But in other ways, as I tell Springsteen, it is a revival show—not just him energizing the audience through the power of his life-affirming, raucous songs; it is also a self-revival show. This is the work of a man revealing his flaws so that he can inspire us to redeem ourselves.

You’re Bruce fucking Springsteen! How do you not know who you are?”

“Ugh.” Springsteen laughs and lets out a sigh. He drops his chin into his chest and then smiles and looks up. “Bruce fucking Springsteen is a creation. So it’s somewhat liquid—even though at this point you would imagine I have it pretty nailed down. But sometimes not necessarily. [Laughs] And personally—you’re in search of things like everybody else. Identity is a slippery thing no matter how long you’ve been at it. Parts of yourself can appear—like, whoa, who was that guy? Oh, he’s in the car with everybody else, but he doesn’t show his head too often, because he was so threatening to your stability. At the end of the day, identity is a construct we build to make ourselves feel at ease and at peace and reasonably stable in the world. But being is not a construct. Being is just being. In being, there’s a whole variety of wild and untamed things that remain in us. You bump into those in the night, and you can scare yourself.”

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What Has Everyone Got Against Dave Matthews?

MONTGOMERY, AL - APRIL 27: Dave Matthews performs during The Concert for Peace and Justice celebrating the opening of The Legacy Museum at Riverwalk Amphitheater on April 27, 2018 in Montgomery, Alabama. (Photo by Taylor Hill/Getty Images)

You may remember the Dave Matthews Band from your Gen X ’90s. Despite the fact that nobody seems to want to admit to enjoying their music, they continue to be wildly successful and Dave Matthews uses his fame to help support charitable causes on a regular basis. At Seattle Met, Allison Williams wonders why there’s a Dave Matthews “dad-bod”-shaped hole in Seattle’s idea of musical genius, overshadowed by bands like Pearl Jam and Nirvana.

He married and moved to Seattle where his wife studied holistic medicine, buying a house on an unremarkable block of Wallingford in 2001. Today the tiny blue Craftsman, even with its finished basement and artfully overgrown front garden, would barely qualify as a Seattle starter home. Dave still owns the property, valued at less than a million dollars in a city where that barely buys a dog house. Seattleites do double takes when Dave pops up at QFC or an Eastlake punk show, but he seems to crave the anonymity he found here. He declined to be interviewed for this story, but in 2012 he told critic Gene Stout, “For the most part, I feel comfortably middle class in Seattle.”

Less quiet was the band’s growing philanthropic force. Dave became a director of Willie Nelson’s Farm Aid but his specialty is disaster relief; DMB played charity shows post-Katrina, post-tsunami, post-floods. And relief for human-borne disasters too: post-Standing Rock, post-Virginia Tech massacre. After white supremacists marched on Charlottesville, where he still has roots and real estate, the man who left South Africa’s apartheid headlined a unity concert in his adopted hometown.

Even as they faded from radio prominence, Dave Matthews Band racked up sales, dropping a whopping 96 total live releases on CD and digital. The most recent milestone: When the band released Come Tomorrow this June, its success marked the seventh consecutive number-one debut on the Billboard 200 list for studio albums — the first time it’s happened. To any band, ever.

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Karst: the Latest Casualty of Clear-Cut Logging

ANCONA, ITALY - AUGUST 17: A general view of the Frasassi Caves on August 17, 2018 in the province of Ancona, Marche in the municipality of Genga, Italy. The remarkable karst cave system are among the most famous show caves in Italy, discovered by a group of Ancona speleologists in 1971 are situated 7 kilometres (4 miles) south of Genga. Rich in water, the cave system is particularly well endowed with stalactites and stalagmites. (Photo by Simona Granati - Corbis/Corbis via Getty Images)

As Bruce Grierson reports at Hakai Magazine in this fascinating piece, clear-cut logging has much deeper repercussions than simply denuding the land of trees — it also affects a critical underground ecosystem of dissolved rock called karst and the organisms that depend on it.

The server returns with a glass of ice-free water. Immediately, the reading climbs past 40. The higher number is a geological tell. It’s proof that the water ran underground through karst, an underground ecosystem of dissolved rock.

“That’s more like it,” Griffiths says.

Something naturally perfect happens to water when it flows through karst. It trickles and tumbles, picking up oxygen, picking up minerals, losing its acidity. The result is life-giving, luring and nurturing organisms from the tiniest microbes to humans to bears.

To be clear, karst isn’t a kind of rock. It’s a topography, one shaped by water that seeps and squeezes through limestone or gypsum or marble or dolomite, creating cavities from the size of the ones in your teeth to caverns the size of ballrooms, filigreed with delicate speleothems, dripping down and growing up and sometimes meeting in the middle. Limestone bedrock—the kind found here—was once alive and in the tropics before plate tectonics ferried it to Vancouver Island 100 million years ago. Limestone, composed of skeletal fragments of shallow-water marine organisms, such as corals and mollusks, is found in your toothpaste, your newspaper, your store-bought bread, and the cement beneath your feet—but the true worth of this karst bedrock includes more than its commercial value. A single subterranean water droplet is an ecosystem of its own. Two drops less than a meter apart have been found to harbor entirely different biological communities. For something that’s mostly nothing, karst contains an awful lot.

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Who Really Gets to Make the Rules?

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In this poignant personal essay at Barrelhouse, Berry Grass examines the barriers we build around our true selves and the ones that others erect for us.

I used to be literally afraid to wear the clothing I loved the most. I looked at every shirt or pair of sneakers as if it had hit points, like in a video game. Each time I wore a piece I could practically see that item’s hit points drop. I was afraid of deterioration, afraid of losing this thing I treasured. I could never get myself to understand that if lock the item away, refuse its use, that I’ve already lost it.

I’ve come to see the ritual power of memory in objects. I maybe knew this power all along but denied it. Internalized something or other. I scribble notes on old notepads from Grandpa Carver’s workplace, Mission Clay Pipes. I kept a few of my Grandma & Grandpa Grass’ salt and pepper shakers from being sold in auction.

I listen to pagan black metal bands and Eastern Orthodox liturgical black metal bands and I light candles and I palm my mom’s turquoise bracelet. I’ve been wearing turquoise socks and I’ve installed a ring of turquoise gems in my pierced septum, to honor my mother. In the interest of full disclosure, this is the real reason I haven’t been writing lately: my mom passed away in summer 2016 from breast cancer that had metastasized to her lungs. She knew me. She did. And this is such cliché – perfectly rendered for the Hallmark Christmas ornaments my mom collected – but her passing, everyone’s passing, trvly helped me to realize that life is short/live how you want to live/live laugh love/etc. I watch this candle melt down, making itself gone. I fill grandpa’s notepads with ritual writing, knowing one day there will be no more notepads. I wear the clothes I love instead of saving them for some never to come day of open gates. I learn to harmonize memory and loss.

Also, I’ve been taking hormones. I’m medically transitioning. I’ve known for decades that I wanted a certain kind of body and that I wanted to be read a certain way. I just never let myself think I deserved to have it. The queer gatekeepers in my life wanted me to be a woman, which shut me off from realizing I kind of am one. The Metalheads wanted me to wear denim, a battle jacket some of them called it, and I resisted because I wasn’t them. But they were wrong about the trvth. And I was wrong to think I wasn’t in a battle. Because my body is not fixed in place. This denim jacket fades & wears & the patches accrue & nothing is being preserved here. I am not an archive. I am authentically alive. I can be a trans woman from the rural Midwest, and I can wear this denim jacket, and even in doing so I can still, in the words of Philadelphia poet Elizabeth Baber, “fuck the gatekeeper AND the gate.” I can stitch together the only kind of authenticity that matters: rivets and selvedge and frayed fabric. The tangible. The woven.

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How Simple Human Connection Can Help Save People from Suicide

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In this deeply reported piece at the Huffington Post Highline, Jason Cherkis looks at how suicide rates in the United States are at an all-time high — leaving no gender or demographic unaffected — while those of other Western or industrialized countries “have been flat or steadily decreasing.” In examining a complicated, underfunded healthcare system in the US that’s ill-equipped to serve those struggling, Cherkis finds some hope in therapist Ursula Whitehead, who uses a therapy pioneered by Jerome Motto to help suicidal people. Through short letters and texts specially crafted to reinforce positive personality traits and avoid judgement of any kind, both Motto and Whitehead have found that they’ve been able to connect with those in despair.

Over the last two decades, suicide has slowly and then very suddenly announced itself as a full-blown national emergency. Its victims accompany factory closings and the cutting of government assistance. They haunt post-9/11 military bases and hollow the promise of Silicon Valley high schools. Just about everywhere, psychiatric units and crisis hotlines are maxed out. According to the most recent figures from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, there are now more than twice as many suicides in the U.S. (45,000) as homicides; they are the 10th leading cause of death. You have to go all the way back to the dawn of the Great Depression to find a similar increase in the suicide rate. Meanwhile, in many other industrialized Western countries, suicides have been flat or steadily decreasing.

What makes these numbers so scary is that they can’t be explained away by any sort of demographic logic. Black women, white men, teenagers, 60-somethings, Hispanics, Native Americans, the rich, the poor—they are all struggling. Suicide rates have spiked in every state but one (Nevada) since 1999. Kate Spade’s and Anthony Bourdain’s deaths were shocking to everybody but the epidemiologists who track the data.

Ursula Whiteside is, above all else, a bad pun and cat-based humor kind of person. She seems never to have met a GIF of a penguin, or of Beyoncé, she didn’t like. And her therapeutic practice draws heavily on these cornball ways. One of her clients had trouble getting out of bed in the morning, so Whiteside regularly texted her things like: “Here comes the magical wake up goat to make this day less baaahhh.” And the next morning: “The rabbit needs feeding! Only you can make this happen by hopping out of bed.” When that same client went on vacation last year, Whiteside sent a text urging her to feel “FREEEEEEEE!” accompanied by a cartoon of a dog sticking his head out the window. (These texts, like all others in the piece, were provided not by Whiteside, but by the patients.)

While her messages don’t mimic Motto’s plainspoken voice, they fully capture the spirit of his work. Whiteside started sending them when she went into private practice four years ago and immediately discovered how powerful they were. So many of her patients struggled between sessions. They bristled at the artificial boundary of a 50-minute conversation. The texts acted like evidence of a relationship, tokens her patients could hold on to as proof someone cared about them. It’s hard to overstate how different this is from the correspondence patients usually receive from the medical establishment. Whiteside has a therapist friend who calls the typical automated notices people get when they miss an appointment “I Hate You Letters.”

Still, Whiteside sets rules for her patients: They must agree to receive the texts. They don’t have to text back. If they do, they need to understand that they might not receive a response for at least an hour. She might be in a session with another client, or on her way to lunch. She also wants her patients to give her clear feedback on what they like and don’t like. One person said she hated the penguin memes and would prefer to receive pictures of nature instead. “You’re always paying attention to what they find funny, to what they are saying when they cry,” Whiteside said.

She sets rules for herself, as well: Typos are OK. Being a little annoying is OK. Each text should take no more than 90 seconds to write, because anything longer might read like it’s been workshopped too much, not enough like a message between friends. She also makes sure to time her texts so they don’t arrive only when patients are in crisis. Mostly, they should appear for no particular reason. She had been thinking about them, that’s all.

“I think people die when they feel completely alone,” Whiteside explained.

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“I know I believe in the power of lining up little hopes”

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As a series of strokes robbed Michael Graff‘s dad of his mobility and his mental faculties, Graff looks at what it means to hope and what it means to love, finding them in things that are common and simple, in the clarity of a beautiful lyric, the call of a whip-poor-will, and a last loving embrace.

It’s easy to become bored with common things—a four-lane highway, or a daily schedule at the nursing home, or a type of bird or music. But maybe these days we make too much of what awes us or infuriates us, and too little of the regular life in the middle. What’s common only became common, after all, because it adapted and learned to fit in. A cliché was once original. Country music was once meaningful. Walking was once easy. A common robin once saved Jesus.

“Look,” he said. He pointed at a man standing near the door. “It’s Uncle George.”

Uncle George, who’d raised him, died in 1995, sitting alone in a chair on his back porch, his hand on the pistol he used to take the cancer pain away. Now Uncle George is the latest person to visit my father, a dying man who doesn’t believe in the afterlife. In the past two months, he’s told me he’s welcomed everyone from his mother to his deceased brothers to an ex-girlfriend named Kathy, whom he had to break up with in the 1960s because, as he put it, “You can’t treat a boat right and have a girlfriend, too.” I guess when you’re stuck in a wheelchair and can’t go where you want, people come see you, one way or another.

I put my hand on my dad’s arm and said, “Well, hell, it is Uncle George. What’s he doing here?”

“I don’t know,” my father said.

Kenny and I had gone to visit Dad around dinnertime. Dad ate most of his popcorn shrimp and tapioca pudding while news of flooding played on the television. Then he looked down and wiped his nose.

“I’m not getting up anymore,” he said, his eyes filled up with water. “I know that now.”

The moment of clarity startled us. He grabbed each of our hands and asked us to hug him goodbye. We pulled his head to our chests and asked if he wanted us to call the nurses to transfer him to bed.

“No,” he said, “I’d rather stay here and hang out with you guys.”

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The Chance of a Lifetime

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Determined to have a chance at adventure, 71-year-old Richard Carr set out in May, 2017 to attempt to circumnavigate the globe solo in his 36-foot sailboat, Celebration. As his daughter Ali Carr Troxell reports at Outside, Carr’s progress slowed and his communication became nonsensical three weeks into the journey as he sailed toward his first stop in the Marquesas. Was it sleep deprivation, mental collapse, or a pirate attack that was causing his odd behavior?

Then Mom tells me something I didn’t know. “He always felt like we got the life I wanted, not the life he wanted, filled with adventure—diving and sailing,” she says. “He didn’t care about living in a nice house. He cared more about living in other places and exploring.”

“When he talked about buying the boat, I tried to offer him alternatives to make life more exciting,” Mom says. “But he couldn’t be swayed.”

Eventually, they were too far along to turn back. “It felt like the boat was in charge of him,” she says. “I know it wasn’t personal but still, the fact that he went off on this trip felt like I wasn’t enough. Ultimately, the boat won.”

Dad loved us—that’s why he compromised on how he wanted to live. His obsession with the boat and the trip suddenly made sense to me. He wanted to reclaim his life.

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She Kept Every Letter

Canadian soldiers pose by their Bren carrier, shortly after 0800 hours when the World War II ceasefire came into effect, 5th May 1945. Photo by FPG/Hulton Archive/Getty Images.

Separated by thousands of miles and the Second World War, author Harley Rustad‘s grandparents maintained a correspondence spanning hundreds of letters over four years. As he traveled through Europe and North Africa commanding a tank troop in the 11th Canadian ­Armoured Regiment, Harry Mac­donald kept one of Jacquelyn Ruth Robinson’s letters — the one that kept him going, the one in which she said “yes.”

In that blue cardboard box, in the correspondence between a young man and a young woman who were sep­arated by conflict, I found neither myth nor fable but honest words of both pain and love. Between 1941 and 1945, Harry and Jacquie sent hundreds of letters across the world to each other. They spoke of mundane details and of big plans for their future. He sent her more than 200 dispatches and replies, around one for every week he was away, containing tens of thousands of words. She kept every letter.

The silence was broken by rapid staccato. Tap. Tap, tap, tap. Not gunfire but anxious fingers typing words onto creamy white paper with Canadian Legion War Services letterhead at the top. A soldier was writing a letter to a girl on the other side of the world.

It was the middle of March 1944, in the hills of central Italy. The Canadian soldier, a lieutenant commanding a tank troop in the 11th Canadian ­Armoured Regiment, was waiting for the rain to cease so his men could start ­moving again through the rough and sodden terrain. He didn’t write about what could lie ahead: the next assault on Monte Cassino, already one of the Allies’ deadliest battles in the Italian campaign.

The Canadian soldier, Harry Mac­donald, my grandfather, had sent Jacquelyn Robinson dozens of letters, spanning several years—letters written in spidery cursive by candlelight as rain ­pounded down on corrugated rooftops or amid the blasts of nearby shelling. His letters were often rushed or cut short, with some started and finished with hours or even days in between. He ­frequently apologized for his messy handwriting, hoping his words would be legible. One letter, sent five days before, written in haste, contained a question for which he anxiously awaited a reply. The letter had begun with a familiar two words, “Dear Jacquie,” and ended with a ­question: “Will you marry me?” But, impatient for an answer, he wrote her again.

It was March 14 when he found the typewriter. He needed his words to be as clear and as confident as his thoughts. “When I think that even now I could be calling upon you, taking you to a dance, going to a show and doing those things normal people could be doing I feel personally one of the greatest horrors of war—the separation of men from those they love,” he typed. “However, I suppose that if it wasn’t for the fact that I’m in the service it might have taken ­longer for me to realize just how lucky I am. I hope for the best, darling, no matter which way things turn out.”

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