Anthony Bourdain and Modest Mouse

On Saturday night, I went to see Anthony Bourdain talk about his new book, travelling, and of course, food, at the book festival. It was fantastic! He was promoting Medium Raw, which is a sort of follow-up to Kitchen Confidential. He chose to read a bit of it about making his 2.5-year-old daughter believe that Ronald McDonald is a smelly, cootie-having child-eater in order to prevent her from wanting McDonald’s evil, disgusting offerings, which was absolutely hilarious. Then he basically answered a bunch of questions from the audience – some good, some pompous, but all handled with the same no-bullshit attitude. Save for a slightly overharsh poke at vegetarianism, I agreed with pretty much everything he said about food, travel, and life in general.

Bourdain did mention Jamie Oliver briefly during the event to give him props, but not before admitting Oliver annoys the crap out of him. But it’s good to see he’s the kind of person who can credit someone for what they stand for even if he doesn’t particularly enjoy the way they go about it. I mean, Anthony Bourdain is pretty much the polar opposite of Jamie Oliver in terms of attitude and the way he presents himself in general, but they have similar philosophies about food and the food industry, and I like that that can come across in two totally different, and yet equally refreshing, ways.

The other big difference between the two is that Bourdain comes from the French school of cookery, while Oliver clearly comes from the Italian. My own cooking has nearly no French influence, but I finally bought Anthony Bourdain’s ‘Les Halles’ Cookbook before the book festival event, and it’s absolutely awesome. I can’t wait to start learning the basics, French style. I think my first adventure will be Rillettes, because hello! Pork and fat? Best thing on the planet. Why did I not know about this before? There are clearly whole worlds of culinary delight that have not yet opened up before me in my short life. Thank you, Anthony Bourdain, for continuing my enlightenment.

I didn’t get my cookbook signed by the way, because the queue for signing was so incredibly long that I decided having a beer was a better use of my time. And I figured Anthony would appreciate the opportunity to get to the bar himself that little bit quicker by having one less thing to sign.

My weekend continued on its path of awesome on Sunday night, when I got to see Modest Mouse at the HMV Picture House courtesy of some seriously generous friends. First of all, barring the 9:30 Club, which is the greatest venue of all time, the Picture House is now my favourite place to see a show. It’s similar in size to the 9:30 Club, and it has a brilliant balcony with cushy bench seating for lame-o old people like me who can’t be bothered to stand up with all the sweaty folk down in front of the stage. Absolutely love it.

I didn’t think I was going to get to see Modest Mouse because I had decided not to buy any more concert tickets for the year after spending so much on Gorillaz tickets. But then that got cancelled and I just kind of forgot about Modest Mouse til Thursday, when by luck and the awesomeness of others, I was put on the guest list.

And seriously, lucky me. Because the show was fantastic. They had two drummers! They had loads of crazy instruments! They played the hell out of everything, and it was an amazing wall of sound. I was occasionally a little bummed by the fact that the vocals were sometimes drowned out by the music, but the mixing desk is downstairs, so that could be a part of that, and it didn’t matter too much in the end, because the quality of the instrumental stuff was just so, so incredibly good.

And I have to say, I do like a band who don’t think too much about what they’re wearing on stage. I don’t mind theatricality and dressing up either, but sometimes it’s refreshing to see a guy in a thermal henley playing accordions and horns and whatnot and being awesome at all of it without obviously giving two shits about fashion.

I didn’t get into Modest Mouse until the time in my life when I didn’t bother to find out much about the bands I was getting into aside from actually listening to as much of their stuff as possible, so they’ve always been strictly musical for me. I didn’t even know what they looked like as people. I don’t know their names. Nothing. I just love what they do. And I’m delighted to say they do what they do damn well live on stage.