Anthony Bourdain, Waffle House, and the Human Condition

Edward Hopper's Nighthawks, an American classic

"In the movement from low art to high art lies an element of the deferral of judgment. Judgment is withheld in the interest of understanding and receptivity. This is an exciting heuristic technique but also a dangerous one since liking the whole of pop culture is as irrational as hating the whole of it, and it calls forth the vision of a general and indiscriminate hopping on the pop bandwagon, where everything is good and judgment is abandoned rather than deferred. Yet artists, architects, actors, must judge, albeit, one hopes, with a sigh. After a decent interval, suitable criteria must grow out of the new source. Judgment is merely deferred to make subsequent judgments more sensitive."  

Denise Scott Brown, Learning from Pop 

A Waffle House waffle house, also an American classic

    You know what was a good show? Frasier. For those unfamiliar, here’s the gist: it’s two uppity brothers, both psychiatrists, who, as described by Wikipedia, “have expensive tastes, intellectual interests, and high opinions of themselves” and who are constantly finding themselves at odds with, among other things, the tastes and practices of the “regular” people in their orbit and of society at large. So they’re snobs and it’s funny because the real world is a tough place for a snob. 

 There’s an episode in which there’s a minor plotline where one of the brothers becomes uncharacteristically obsessed with fast food. His attempted rationalization results in the following exchange: 

Daphne Moon : I guess he's got the fast food bug. 

Dr. Frasier Crane : And which one would that be? E. coli? 

Dr. Niles Crane : Now, keep an open mind. After all, we've embraced the peasant cuisine of Italy and France, why shun the peasants in our own back yard? 

Dr. Frasier Crane : You've changed, Niles. 

Daphne Moon : He hasn't changed that much. He sent back his Big Slurp. 

    Re the ordinary, keeping an open mind is a hard thing to do. It’s easy to embrace the accessible for the sake of convenience and just as easy to dismiss it as nothing more than that. Like there’s a hierarchy that exists that separates ordinary things from high design and high culture. And, in a lot of ways, there is, and I’m not trying start a whole “is this art?” thing. 

    What I am trying to say, though, is that what Denise Scott Brown writes in the “Hop on Pop” passage of Learning from Pop is really important to me because it’s, or at least, should be, a central tenet of critical thinking, especially in the context of design. I’m not saying that the fact that something is popular means that we should hold it in particular esteem (obviously), but because popularity is, inherently, the result of widespread adoption, it implies that the popular thing in question is popular because it satisfies some set of requirements that is overwhelmingly recurrent out there in the world. There’s a tremendous amount that we can learn about the human condition by studying the success and failure of “ordinary” things. 

 

Anthony Bourdain discovers the Waffle House

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bct8stbZafI&feature=share