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- If you're in a place, #17: Anthony Bourdain and My Los Angeles
If you're in a place, #17: Anthony Bourdain and My Los Angeles
#17: Anthony Bourdain and My Los Angeles
If you’re in a place, watch the Los Angeles episode of Anthony Bourdain’s show Parts Unknown (Season 9, Episode 1).
(Note: prior to my publishing this, Netflix sadly removed the series from their collection. I was able to find a couple of clips and articles about the episode that are great, but they don’t match watching the full episode at all, so after reading this post, if you feel inclined to do so, I highly recommend spending $2.99 to watch the episode on Amazon or YouTube. I did. It’s worth all 299 pennies.)
I’ve read, watched, listened to many a book, movie, podcast that all claim to be “love letters to Los Angeles.” And everything I’ve consumed that bears that description, or one similar, share something in common: they don’t portray my Los Angeles. My Los Angeles is the one east of downtown. El Sereno and Boyle Heights. Huntington Park and Alhambra. El Monte. My current home, Whittier.
These places, in the grand national and global cultural conversation of Los Angeles, are often erased. And, in so many ways, I’ve always felt like my experiences were erased. Absent from all conversations on Los Angeles and culture in general. In their place, we get narrow and luxury car filled streets lined by designer shops. We get, by American beauty standards, gorgeous humans. Tall and light-skinned. Blonde hair. Cell phones to their ears. Screenwriters. Directors. Reflections of the sun off glassy buildings. When people say they hate Los Angeles, a large majority of the time I know it’s this Los Angeles they are talking about.
This was never my Los Angeles.
I drove through this part of LA just a couple of weeks ago, and I was floored by how foreign it felt. How far from home.
The Los Angeles I know is made up of wide roads. Disheveled and unique houses. Taqueros outside grocery stores. The panaderia my family has been going to since before I was born, the one that makes a soft corn-shaped bread filled with jelly and covered in sugar. The brown and aged skin of older women lugging wheel crates with food and laundry. Thick black sunglasses to match thick black mustaches. Lowriders. Of course, lowriders. Shitty Spanish spoken intertwined with shitty English. Dirty hip-hop followed by classic soul followed by a mariachi hit. One after the other after the other.
This is my Los Angeles.
And it’s the same one Bourdain so beautifully explored in this episode of Parts Unknown. In the curious way that he once did.
I miss Bourdain. I’ve watched this video of him cooking a steak over a 2700 degree furnace about 20 times. He was an ally in the best of ways: he engulfed himself in the lives of others. Appreciated them. Tasted them. Lived in them for a brief second. And then left those lives exactly as they were. And his untimely loss was a reminder of the massive weight that so many live under, both in public and in silence.
He was constantly looking trying to connect with his world. And I feel so lucky to have a record of his attempt to connect to my, and so many others’, Los Angeles.