pearwaldorf | (no subject)

A guy told me he wanted to do a television show, "like Anthony Bourdain's but for books." The guy is middle aged, and he's traveled in the way that he sometimes goes to publishing conferences in Europe. His ideas for the show were mostly ways to cross-promote his own books with an international backdrop. There was another man, who basically pitched the same idea at me, at some horrible swanky PEN party, "Anthony Bourdain but with writers," although he soon got distracted by his complaints about the suburb that he lives in, and the domestic mundanity he lives in with his wife and kids. "I could be Anthony Bourdain," he told me, and I whispered, "I don't think Anthony Bourdain hates his wife and kids" into my champagne.

The difference between these men and who they wish to be is that the man they wish to be is the Queen of Coins. The Queens work from a place of love. The Queen of Coins works from love and expresses it through work, through the body, through pleasure, through presence. And it's easier to copy the form of embodiment (the leather jacket, the forms that pleasure takes) than what is being embodied.

All Queens come from places of love, empathy, intuition. It's not about gender, it's about the source material. And you see it in Bourdain's show, the way he never tries to make himself look better by humiliating someone else, the quality of his attention give to whoever he is talking to, his sincerity and frankness. He's not trying to make himself look clever or like the expert about something (a Kingly attribute), nor is he a dilettante (a Knightly one). He's a Queen.

...

The men who think they can be Anthony Bourdain, they think of him as swagger, as bravado, as dick-swinging, because that is what they themselves are capable of. They are not Queens and can't be Queens. It wouldn't even occur to them that was something to aspire to. Most of the time I feel like I am stuck in Knight mode, in bomb-throwing and self-righteous anger, but I see Bourdain's queenliness, and I am aspiring to get there myself.

—Jessa Crispin