Photo: Vladimir Weinstein
Someone recovered a chunk of Anthony Bourdain’s old li.st posts, including his recommendations, complaints, memories, and fascination with antique tools for drilling holes in skulls.
Li.st, if you don’t remember it, was a 2015-ish app from that brief window when tech bros believed every human activity deserved its own social platform. BJ Novak was involved somehow. The servers went quiet.
Sandy Uraz went looking through public crawl archives and put together what survived: posts that would otherwise be difficult to find after the app closed.
Bourdain, being Bourdain, did not make lists of productivity hacks or “10 Books Every Entrepreneur Should Read.” He made lists about trepanning instruments, dead New York bars, spy novels, sandwiches, Persols, and the cheese crust on onion soup gratinée.
What He Left Behind
There is something almost uncomfortably intimate about reading these now. Not because they reveal a secret Bourdain. Anyone who watched Parts Unknown knew the man’s obsessions. They matter because these brief entries let him record an interest without developing it into an essay.
His Objects of Desire list includes things he wants without trying to explain the appeal:
“Vintage Persol sunglasses… I wear them a lot. I collect them when I can.”
“19th century trepanning instruments… I don’t know what explains my fascination with these devices, designed to drill drain-sized holes into the skull often for purposes of relieving ‘pressure’ or ‘bad humours’. But I can’t get enough of them.”
There is no pitch here. No essay trying to justify the want. The same man who could write beautifully about the ethics of eating also wanted antique skull-drilling tools and could not explain why. I like that he included an interest he could not explain.
Television and spy novels
His desert island TV picks are exactly what you would expect from someone who read le Carré the way other people read beach novels:
- The Wire
- Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy and Smiley’s People
- Edge of Darkness
All three concern distrust and failing institutions.
His spy novel recommendations follow the same logic. Not Clancy. Not Fleming. The quiet stuff:
“If the main character carries a gun, I’m already losing interest. Spy novels should be about betrayal.”
That’s the whole philosophy in two sentences. He liked stories where the damage happened in conference rooms, safehouses, and the silences between old colleagues who had sold each other out.
The Food Lists, Obviously
His Steaming Hot Porn list is just food. Which is the correct use of the word porn:
- Bun Bo Hue
- Kuching Laksa
- Jamon
- Oily Little Fish
- Meat on a Stick
The I’m Hungry and Would Be Very Happy to Eat Any of This Right Now list is more revealing:
“A big, greasy double cheeseburger. No lettuce. No tomato. Potato bun.”
“A street fair sausage and pepper hero would be nice. Though shitting like a mink is an inevitable and near immediate outcome.”
“Some uni. Fuck it. I’ll smear it on an English muffin at this point.”
These are immediate cravings rather than carefully considered restaurant recommendations.
The Hotels
“CHATEAU MARMONT (LA): if I have to die in a hotel room, let it be here.”
I’ll leave that one alone.
His hotel list reads like a Graham Greene itinerary: Le Continental in Saigon, The Metropole in Hanoi, Hotel Olofsson in Port au Prince, “sagging, creaky and leaky but awesome.” He did not want comfort exactly. He liked places with a distinctive atmosphere and history.
The Dead Bars
There is a list of Great Dead Bars of New York that functions as a kind of elegy:
“SIBERIA in any of its iterations. The one on the subway being the best.”
“BILLY’S TOPLESS (later, Billy’s Stopless) an atmospheric, working class place, perfect for late afternoon drinking where nobody hustled you for money and everybody knew everybody. Great all-hair metal jukebox. Naked breasts were not really the point.”
One Hawaii Kai line includes the sort of dated Bourdain language that belongs to the archive but does not need help from me:
“THE BAR AT HAWAII KAI. tucked away in a giant tiki themed nightclub in Times Square with a [dated description of the doorman] and a floor show. Best place to drop acid EVER.”
These places are gone. Most of them have been gone for decades. He knew it when he wrote the list. The point was that they were gone: places close, and a description can preserve something of what people enjoyed about them.
The Observations
There is a list called Observations From a Beach that I will quote sparingly:
“In which my Greek idyll is suddenly invaded by professional nudists.”
“T-shirt and no pants. Leading one to the obvious question: why bother?”
Some of the rest has aged exactly as you would expect. That is also part of the record. Not every observation is appealing. The archive includes his less considered remarks alongside the recommendations.
Preserving the posts
I don’t know that it does, in the grand sense. People have written a lot about Bourdain since June 2018. Most of it is either hagiographic or uncomfortably speculative. I’m not interested in adding to either pile.
What interests me is simpler: somewhere between the shows and the books and the public persona, there was a guy making low-stakes lists on a forgotten app. Lists about jiu-jitsu gis and R. Crumb collections and Captain Crunch. Lists nobody was going to study.
I’m glad someone preserved them. Small posts on a short-lived app can disappear easily, even when they tell us something about a writer whose larger work remains available.
These lists show what Bourdain noticed and enjoyed when he did not have to turn it into a book or an episode. That is enough reason to read them.
The preserved li.st archive lives here. Go read the whole thing.