No Reservations No More

Bourdain's No Reservation is about to end. It started with a deer caught in the headlights followed by a camera creating panoramic shots of a "tell all" author out of words ditching out complains, hang overs, addict nostalgic remarks, and constant innuendos for lack of content.

Most people won't come across the hang over episodes. They have been shelved away among the massive trend of reality TV trying to discover itself as it grows up.

But at the end, Reality carries with it the profound power of Time. What is nothing like the Seinfeld's script for a pilot series, it has the power of discovery. Reality over time becomes history.

Travel can be a very simple or a very complex act. You can travel for many reasons. Travel to see the past, to experience new things, for personal quests of your profession, for achieving some bucket list, or just for the luxury of leisure. But even the simplicity of leisure can be expanded to a very complex endeavor. Leisure is a very well established philosophical movement of thought and practices from the old Japan. Later, it was even ex-communicated by Communism as a malaise.

This is why the simplicity of reality can have dramatic implications. Now you can be led by many TV travel agents that expose the world to the past or that idolize cultures which makes them easier to chew.

In the other hand, No Reservations is so real that the world has embraced it. The show is no more Anthony Bourdain leading us. It has profoundly become a phenomenon where the world is the one taking Bourdain inside to share its secrets. 

And we find Anthony Bourdain engaged in every corner of the world having us walk behind him suffering the encounter of whatever he may find, and what he finds is the world as it is in its pure greatness. There is no magical curtain of wonders, no warning of what is to come, and no rest until his final thoughts at the end of each episode.   

Even after he had taken us everywhere, and when we thought we had seen it all, Anthony Bourdain takes us to the last frontier of food: The Amazon. From prehistoric fish to never seen fruits and spices, all is still exchanged on the first Portuguese colony in the new world. A small town 100 miles up river from the sea where different and rare types of money and foods exchange hands still serving as the only link between worlds. No even Bourdain has seen this immense variety of goods. The Amazon is so rich that is still as if a Conquistador had just landed on the New World for first time. 

No Reservations is closing its doors. Our last frontier is disappearing once again. It might as well be as if the Portuguese are closing their ancient city. It might as well be as if the jungle ends up overrunning the cities for another millennium to cover us in a sleep.  It might as well just be that the best of our Reality is once again becoming our History.

The lip

Teach not thy lip such scorn; for it was made For kissing, lady, not for such contempt.

Nor no one here; for curses never pass
The lips of those that breathe them in the air.

Intending deep suspicion, ghastly looks
Are at my service, like enforced smiles;

Cousin of Buckingham, and sage grave men, Since you will buckle Fortune on my back,
To bear her burden whe’er I will or no,
I must have patience to endure the load;
But if black scandal or foul-fac’d reproach Attend the sequel of your imposition,
Your mere enforcement shall acquittance me From all the impure blots and stains thereof;
For God doth know, and you may partly see, How far I am from the desire of this.


Tut, tut, thou art all ice, thy kindness freezes.

Go muster men. My counsel is my shield;
We must be brief when traitors brave the field.

The King is angry, see, he gnaws his lip.

A horse, a horse! my kingdom for a horse!



Richard III

Circa Trova (Seek and you Shall Find)

The Latin Post-Impressionist

Among Picasso, Matisse, and Miro, there was Wilfredo Lam. This painting was a nice little find while at the Chicago Institute of Art. Born in Cuba, Lam studied under the same teacher that taught Picasso at the museum of El Prado. Fled Spain after getting involved in the Spanish Civil War, and relocated to Paris bringing a Caribbean flare to the Parisian cafes.

His originality is undisputable. With Chinese and African backgrounds, Wilfredo Lamb expressed his vision with beings unknown but familiar to us.

The object of the chair is a recurring theme in his Art. In one of his famous works, Lamb places a chair as posing surrounded by an undistinguishable and overwhelming jungle.

As sign of civilization among ancient and independent beauty, the chair also represents an unmatched symbolism. From farming country in 1920's Cuba, the chair is where workers rest, converse, and return to themselves after evaporating under a Caribbean Sun. The chair is where a person is himself. A chair posing surrounded by jungle carries the essence of the rest of us.

The Art Dealer

Picasso shared a taxi ride with a nice young man. The man asked him: why do you paint life so distorted and out of sync?

Picasso asked him in reply: how is life for you?

The young man pulls a photo of his young wife and says: this is my wife. She is beautiful.

Picasso noted: she is also very small and flat.

This is Picasso original Art Dealer. The man who believed. This is the person who understood Picasso's art to the point of pushing all the previous negative forecasts of gallery costs to a foreseen handsome profit.

He had to sit 30 times for this portrait. Picasso painted his partner to perfection, and every time Cubism overcame the figure breaking it in squared planes and merging them into the ether that surrounds him.

Another sitting and the more he wanted to express his face, art expressed itself. At the end, the portrait was that of Picasso. But the stern figure of his accountant, dealer, and passionate gallery owner emerges making sense of it all carrying Picasso's ideas like hurricane winds on his shoulders, and it couldn't be more accurate.