If You’re Not Part Of The Solution… – Review Of Anthony Bourdain’s “Get Jiro!”
When I was growing up, my mom had a saying: “If you’re not part of the solution, you’re part of the problem.” She meant it in relation to voting. Her feeling was, if you didn’t like how things were, you couldn’t legitimately bitch about the direction the country was going if you hadn’t tried to make the effort to make your voice heard. Conservative or liberal didn’t matter so much as you at least tried to make your feelings known.
She had a point, I suppose. I’m not a particularly political person myself, though, so I tend to take more of the view that change starts with me. Do unto others and all that. Say “thank you” to the guy holding the door open for other patrons at Dunkin Donuts. Avoid calling my condo association to get my neighbors’ cars towed for parking in the common area, because I might need that spot in a pinch someday. Be cool to the pizza delivery dude. In short, as Wil Wheaton put it, “don’t be a dick.”
In Get Jiro!, Anthony Bourdain proposes a future in which, lacking options for whatever reasons, the world has become food obsessed. To the “haves”, a hot restaurant reservation is more valuable than money. To the “have nots”, fresh food options have become scarce and Twizzlers are dealt like drugs. Society has become beholden to warring factions that control the distribution of food and the cops are staying right the hell out of it. Seems like a lot of dickery right out of the gate.
Sushi, smugness, and spoilers, after the jump!
Is Get Jiro! a realistic view of where American society is headed? In an interview with MTV Geek, Bourdain doesn’t completely believe so, but doesn’t dismiss the notion entirely:
Geek: How about the warring factions in the book – the militant vegans, and the haughty-taughty restaurant… Is that where things are heading at all in real life?
AB: I don’t think so, it’s an exaggerated riff on the worst of douche culture. Any place there’s a velvet rope and bottle service, it’s not hard to imagine that kind of a world. [Laughs] I mean, we deliberately took it to extremes.
Geek: Regular people don’t get off too well in the book, either…
AB: Again, it’s a savage and unrealistic take on reality. But on the other hand, if you go to working class, and working poor areas of America, the food sources that are relegated to them are generally limited to unhealthy ones. There’s no doubt, it’s a mean take on what is left of the poor. But what is left of the poor? Try to buy a fresh f**king vegetable in West Baltimore. It is a not completely inconceivable scenario in the future, we’ll all look like that… Waddling from convenience store to fast food outlet, chewing mindlessly on 99 cent hamburgers.
As much as Bourdain, and co-writer Joel Rose, do touch on these issues within the book, Bourdain also points out that he wrote the book for the usual host of reasons: loved comics as a kid, wanted to write about subjects he loved like food and “Dashiell Hammett’s Harvest, classic spaghetti westerns, samurai flicks…”. He does manage to wrap all these areas up into one big maki roll here. But, is it any good?
Let’s start with the art. Langdon Foss does a nice job channeling Geof Darrow. He draws vivid action scenes. The storytelling in his artwork is easy to follow, even when the panels become busy with minutiae. He also includes little cute bits of business in the backgrounds (a storefront named “Touch Of Bosnia”, capers in a pantry labeled “Free Range”) that call to mind Darick Robertson’s work on Transmetropolitan. The art is solid. How about the story?
Page 1 of 3 | Next page
