"CNN's Anthony Bourdain dead at 61
By Brian Stelter, CNN Updated 5:42 PM ET, Fri June 8, 2018
https://www.cnn.com/2018/06/08/us/anthony-bourdain-obit/index.html
"New York (CNN)Anthony Bourdain, the gifted chef, storyteller and writer who took TV viewers around the world to explore culture, cuisine and the human condition for nearly two decades, has died. He was 61.
CNN confirmed Bourdain's death on Friday and said the cause of death was suicide.
Bourdain was in France working on an upcoming episode of his award-winning CNN series, "Parts Unknown." His close friend Eric Ripert, the French chef, found Bourdain unresponsive in his hotel room Friday morning."
So it goes.
"Bourdain was a master of his crafts -- first in the kitchen and then in the media. Through his TV shows and books, he helped audiences think differently about food, travel and themselves. He advocated for marginalized populations and campaigned for safer working conditions for restaurant staffs."
And it went this way.
"We ask very simple questions: What makes you happy? What do you eat? What do you like to cook? And everywhere in the world we go and ask these very simple questions," he said, "we tend to get some really astonishing answers."Friends and acquaintances remembered Bourdain's curiosity for the world's variety of cultures and cuisine rubbing off on them."
Alas, Hong Kong was the last, season #11 the end.
"In his final weeks, Bourdain said he was especially looking forward to an episode about Hong Kong, which aired Sunday.
He called it a "dream show" in which he linked up with longtime Hong Kong resident and cinematographer Christopher Doyle.
"The idea was just to interview him and maybe get him to hold a camera. He ended up being director of photography for the entire episode," Bourdain told CNN in April. "For me it was like asking Joe DiMaggio to, you know, sign my baseball and instead he joined my Little League team for the whole season.""
"Travels with Anthony Bourdain"
By Patrick Radden Keefe June 8, 2018
"When I woke up this morning and read that Anthony Bourdain had died, at the age of sixty-one, reportedly by suicide, it did not compute. Who was more volcanically alive? A chef turned writer and television host, he had designed a fantasy existence—travelling around the world, budget be damned, meeting interesting people and eating delectable food—and turned it into a paying job. When people asked Tony about his improbable life story, what they were really asking was how he had managed to get away with it. Tony himself tended to describe his good fortune as if he’d pulled off a spectacular heist"
So creative, like a Pablo Picasso of food stories.
"Tony will be remembered for his infectious enthusiasms and his brash exuberance, but I was most inspired by his capacity for reinvention. As a young man, he had plunged, willfully, into heroin addiction—he had wanted to be an addict, he told me—and then decided, willfully, to quit. He was a good chef but never a great one, and, recognizing his limitations, he hustled to establish a writing career, eventually, in 2000, publishing the bestselling memoir “Kitchen Confidential,” which grew out of an article that appeared in this magazine.
In later life, Tony would recount his literary origin story in breezy terms: he wrote a little article about life in the kitchen, sent it off to The New Yorker, and, Whaddayaknow! They wanted to publish it. But, in truth, he had labored mightily on his writing, submitting fiction to literary magazines and publishing a couple of crime novels before someone suggested that he try nonfiction."
