The Bourdain/Bateman Axis
Malt Liquidity 131
If you asked me what I wanted to do when I grew up, as a child, I would have instantly answered “sports journalist” (s/o 2000s ESPN). After I developed actual cognitive faculties, of course, I fell in love with markets, indicating a severe level of mental issues.
Kids want to do all sorts of things, but overwhelmingly, once people hit the yuppie stage, they only dream of one thing: to be Anthony Bourdain. Without a doubt, the most common sentiment around his death was “how did the guy with the best job in the world kill himself?” (Of course, it was over a woman — all stories end the same way.) And, as an incredibly quality-obsessed person who globe-trotted in the same vein (getting drunk in cities, trying random stuff, looking for Actually Good™ times), I can fully respect that his show was authentic and fun for a good amount of time. It’s plainly obvious why people wanted to mimic his lifestyle, and until he got full of himself and started to think of himself as a statesman (~2009 onwards), I did truly enjoy his show.
However, the staying power and ensconcing of American Psycho in unironic culture adds another angle to this flavour of life. Consider my “levels of satire”:
Satire on level 1 is just making fun of something. Level 2 is the satirized missing the joke. Level 3 is the satirized getting it and mimicking the joke adoringly and unironically. Level 4 is the joke reshaping reality.
It’s not a coincidence that there are 4 stages here.
When we compare this to Baudrillard’s 4 stages of simulacra, we note a couple key differences: my stages rely on the mocking of reality rather than the representation of reality leading to a full abstraction of reality itself — a simulacrum.
As I like to say, fiat is the original ponzi. You need everyone to buy into the collective delusion of money and magically economics starts to work. You can do as much math as you want, but it relies on that collective “trick” to kickstart liquidity. I ask this all the time: “why do things trade?” The only correct answer is because other people are trading it. This is the root of “postmodern markets” as I call it, or “simulacra” as Baudrillard does.
Thus, the idea of Dorsia is not simply a representation of the “impossible to get reservation”, but rather a direct mocking of the fact that Bateman’s entire identity crisis is tied to the fact that Paul Allen can get a table and he can’t, demurring by allowing jokes about he won’t “give the maitrê-d head”. Dorsia sits between a level-2 and level-3 concept: you might chide your friend for “not being able to get a rez at Dorsia” when he fails to get the 8 pm reservation at Carbone that your Instagram-influencer date wanted, or tell him “No can do! got an 8 pm rez at Dorsia. Great sea-urchin ceviche” when he asks you if you’re free that Saturday night. The crux between level 2 and level 3 lies in the intention: wearing a Patrick Bateman halloween costume to the business school soirée or judging others for not being able to get a table in this manner is definitively missing the point, while the lingo becoming an in-joke that’s beloved in the industry is an adoring usage, even with the biting context. Stage 4, of course, is that the hottest restaurant reservation app out there is flat out called Dorsia.
The core difference between my stage 4 and Baudrillard’s state of simulacrum is that there is a recursive/retroactive ability allowed. While Baudrillard’s stages erode reality, my stages allow for a future where we can go forward — we no longer have to lie to ourselves that the fundamental valuation or the sale of a North Face parka is supposed to impact a stock price in real time, but it does allow a world where this can still be factored in and created around. Consider the concept of “contango” and negative spot oil prices, as happened in April 2020:
U.S. crude oil futures collapsed below $0 on Monday for the first time in history, amid a coronavirus-induced supply glut, ending the day at a stunning minus $37.63 a barrel as desperate traders paid to get rid of oil.
“Contango” is a parodic situation: the price is higher in the future, so it makes sense to sell it then. However, you have the product now. When constructed in a manner such that there’s nowhere to store the oil, as happened in April 2020, you literally got paid to take oil off of others’ hands — the problem was, of course, there was nowhere to store it. Thus, a theoretical step 3 scenario — where everyone knows the concept of the “physically settled future” is largely a tacit technical agreement that we no longer considered relevant due to the gentleman’s practice of rolling a contract over — ended up in a pure step 4 scenario where, when a joke scenario (what happens if we run out of space to store oil) ended up warping reality and making instant multi-millionaires in anyone who actually found storage space. XIV blowouts and bitcoin ETFs follow this same scenario, but step 4 is a stage of cagey existence — it trades because it trades — and we can sort of continue to operate going forward taking this into account.
The point of the comparison between Bourdain and Batemen is that Bateman was never real in the first place:
there is an idea of a Patrick Bateman, some kind of abstraction, but there is no real me, only an entity, something illusory, and though I can hide my cold gaze and you can shake my hand and feel flesh gripping yours and maybe you can even sense our lifestyles are probably comparable: I simply am not there.
Bourdain, on the other hand, is a Baudrillardian concept: what started from a tell-all stage revealing the “true reality” of the culinary industry (Kitchen Confidential). Building off of this reputation of depicting reality as he witnessed it, Bourdain begins to pervert reality: of course the idea of taking a film crew and trying to bring “authentic” boozing and cruising culture to be consumable through television episodes is inherently impossible. Remember Don DeLillo’s famous “barn” concept (from White Noise):
We drove 22 miles into the country around Farmington. There were meadows and apple orchards. White fences trailed through the rolling fields. Soon the sign started appearing. THE MOST PHOTOGRAPHED BARN IN AMERICA. We counted five signs before we reached the site. There were 40 cars and a tour bus in the makeshift lot. We walked along a cowpath to the slightly elevated spot set aside for viewing and photographing. All the people had cameras; some had tripods, telephoto lenses, filter kits. A man in a booth sold postcards and slides -- pictures of the barn taken from the elevated spot. We stood near a grove of trees and watched the photographers. Murray maintained a prolonged silence, occasionally scrawling some notes in a little book.
"No one sees the barn," he said finally.
A long silence followed.
"Once you've seen the signs about the barn, it becomes impossible to see the barn."
How, exactly, is a TV show depicting a “Part Unknown” actually supposed to be unknown? Thus, the show evolves once more — Bourdain as a traveling statesman, the envoy of the culture of “authentic cultural respect and experience” he wanted to bring. Really read this profile, one which contains deeply telling passages as such:
Bourdain, who is sixty, is imposingly tall—six feet four—and impossibly lean, with a monumental head, a caramel tan, and carefully groomed gray hair. He once described his body as “gristly, tendony,” as if it were an inferior cut of beef, and a recent devotion to Brazilian jujitsu has left his limbs and his torso laced with ropy muscles. With his Sex Pistols T-shirt and his sensualist credo, there is something of the aging rocker about him. But if you spend any time with Bourdain you realize that he is controlled to the point of neurosis: clean, organized, disciplined, courteous, systematic. He is Apollo in drag as Dionysus….
As he sipped a beer and picked at a platter of delicate spring rolls, he was still fidgeting with exhilaration from the encounter with Obama. “I believe what’s important to him is this notion that otherness is not bad, that Americans should aspire to walk in other people’s shoes,” he reflected. This idea resonates strongly with Bourdain, and, although he insists his show is a selfish epicurean enterprise, Obama’s ethic could be the governing thesis of “Parts Unknown.” In the opening moments of an episode set in Myanmar, Bourdain observes, “Chances are you haven’t been to this place. Chances are this is a place you’ve never seen.”..
Bourdain himself is aware of the contradiction in the idea of his show. His later episodes exist as a pure simulacrum, attempting to bring a place to the “uncultured” that simply cannot and will not ever be experienced in the way he wants it to. In effect, the extended Bourdain network is its own simulacrum, as is the culture it reflects: a desire for the “authentic” street food (nevermind that we regulated this away in the US), an “authentic” good time (that everyone is clamoring to go to and tries to reserve), the “best” food (when the best food is simply the night you make of it.) Reflect on the inherent sadness in this passage:
You know, it's not on the - it's not a tourist-friendly place. The response I'm looking for is to hear from someone from the neighborhood saying, how did you ever find that place? I thought only we knew about it. It's, you know, a - truly a place that we love and is reflective of our culture and our neighborhood.
But on the other hand, that's kind of a destructive process because if I name the place - and I don't always when it's a place like that - I've changed it. The next time I go back, there's tourists. There's people who've seen it on the show. And then I might hear from the same person from that neighborhood say, you ruined my favorite bar, (laughter) you know? All the regular customers have run away and it's filled with, you know, tourists in ugly T-shirts and flip-flops.
The Bourdain/Bateman axis, therefore, is one of reversability and redefinability. If you find yourself stuck in the Bourdain space of irony, existentialism, and warped authenticity, the only logical place is depression. The Bateman game of reservations, “nobody goes there anymore, it’s too crowded”, and banter does allow for a “return” to “actually good.” While I joke about star-counting on an instagram bio and posting restaurant reservations like Broadway playbills, I do understand that tourism locations in a lot of the world are supposed to showcase the best of the country. That’s the part of the beaten path they want you to see, a function of a bit we’re all in on together.
Thinking in terms of fundamentals, valuations, P/E ratios, market capitalizations — this is Bourdain axis thinking. Markets have moved beyond this — intangible, simulacratic concepts such as “liquidity as a store of value” or “ponzinomics” or “it trades because it trades” is the only place to move forward from. With Bateman-axis thinking, you can still implement fundamental concepts and the intuitions behind them — why do we want a real-use case, how does this prevent pure (3,3) — and prevents a lot of depression at things seemingly being “dumb” — there is no part unknown anymore.