Disquieting American

Chris Onstad not only writes Achewood, which is always high on my list of reasons to wake up in the morning, but also watches Bourdain, so you don't have to:

Tony Bourdain's various travel shows can be fairly characterized by the following standard conventions:
1) Tony will go to a third-world nation and drink their local moonshine out of used plastic soda bottles,
2) Tony will work in a lot of tough-guy references to war movies or Viet Nam,
3) Tony will eat something's cock or face.

Speaking of the 'Nam, the publicity for the show seems torn between Graham Greene and Joseph Conrad for its muse. Never mind that the graphics were jacked from a high school production of Miss Saigon-- the image looks like the jacket of a pirated edition of The Quiet American produced in a country where the only caucasian model is a long lost Kray cousin, and the copy seems to have been thrown together by someone who skipped a lot of classes in college to watch Apocalypse Now over and over again:

A Cook's Tour takes us along for a ride with chef/writer Tony Bourdain as he travels to more than a dozen countries in search of rare, legendary and sometimes dangerous foods. Some of the locales and delicacies are challenging, others are more familiar...from the heart of dark Cambodia to the streets of sun drenched Los Angeles. "There's no script, there's really scary locations," says Bourdain, "It's very different."

"Dark Cambodia"? The last fellow I heard use "dark" to describe a nation was my man Paddington, and it's OK when he does it because he is from Darkest Peru. Otherwise, it makes you sound like Stanley.

Comments

[alizinha]

But that's his old show. His new one's on the Travel channel.

[Fesser]

Mea culpa. But it will be fundamentally the same. Good to see he is rocking a Kurtz thing now, all covered in mud.