Chef of savage insights will be sorely missed
MOST food and cooking shows leave me cold. Vast and frequently unattractive egos going full blast, pretending to prepare meals that few home cooks would ever bother with. Yet, go figure, the Dstv bouquet is full of food shows and even dedicated food channels.
But there was one presenter who always demanded a high level of attention: the recent tragically dead Anthony Bourdain. His books, especially the first one, Kitchen Confidential, successfully undermined the entire concept of the celebrity chef, and provided savage insight into the world of expensive restaurants internationally.
What a man. Not only could he out-cook most chefs, but he wrote outstandingly and presented show after show on television. What we got wasn’t the common chef on holiday routine, but careful insights into other cultures and further revelations about the international language of food.
And now he’s dead at 61, a victim of suicide and assumed depression. Yet somehow the universe allows trailer trash like Trump to live large and undermine dignity, democracy and world peace. Go figure.
Which brings us to the news in general. Television viewers believe, truly believe, that having a clutch or a gaggle or a posse of 24 news channels somehow implies a higher level of information. It doesn’t.
What we get, even as we channel-flip spasmodically between CNN, RT, BBC and Al Jazeera, is a low-brow collection of opinions, each one honed to a sharp point to reflect exclusively the point of view of the channel concerned.
Does this necessarily lead to a diversity of opinion among us humble viewers?
Sadly, and I truly mean sadly, this refulgent light emitting thought is not true.
Research shows that even the spasmodic channel flippers among us seldom emerge from windowless silos of narrow bands of information invariably contaminated by free-flowing untreated opinion.
As CNN so tiresomely reveals, opinion is the biogas that fuels damn near the entire channel. CNN tirelessly presents one single, unarguably true, empirical, fact, namely, that Trump is a crock of evil with a large helping of presenile stupidity on the side.
That’s the whole story. Yet for the remainder of each and every 24 hour-news cycle, all we get are camera-facing quartets (and sometimes trios) of paid bloviators talking over each other.
Former president Nixon, a moral giant in comparison to the current US president, called such folk “pointy-headed intellectuals”, an insult I’ve never quite understood.
All the intellectuals I know, even the wrinkly ones, have roundish flat-topped heads.
Finally, the return of hope and purpose to that ramshackle ox wagon with a wonky disselboom called South African Rugby. We refer to the Springbok-england game at Ellis Park, in which
God’s gift of high altitude and the new South African team and its blessed captain provided this gnarled and trembling hack with a selection of emotional highs second only to the non-stop no-intervals entirety of Robert Lepage’s production of The Ring.
And what a difference a huge live audience made! So much happiness to witness! Not to mention such thrilling displays of gladiatoral rugger, even by the sad, bewildered Poms.