Rule·of·Three | Part 1: The Businessman |

Good things come in threes, yes?  My use of triads continues.  Lately I’ve been calling on it to figure out how to proceed with partnerships, both business and personal.  After three meetings or interactions I usually have enough information to figure out if I want to continue with a person.  These posts highlight my decision-making processes as I attempt to navigate a world that is completely foreign to me.

I’m using this mini-series of posts to tell the stories the surround my announcement to start my own business, to trust my instincts, and to give my readers a look into what it’s been like for me to begin to explore the world of San Francisco fashion.  I am an outsider to these things, a newbie, and what some might call ” a poor kid (although I have riches you can’t even fathom).”  A man recently looked at me and my designs and after asking me if my dad had money,  told me that “poor kids don’t make it in fashion.”   Another burgeoning designer told me the same, and then qualified it, “Well, Chanel was an orphan, but she slept her way to the top.”  WTF!  So my option as a woman and a “poor kid” is to prostitute myself?  I reject these ideas.  While I truly trust and believe in the power of the erotic, there would be little to use it for without vision, talent, drive, and commitment.  To say that Chanel built her brand through vaginal interactions discredits these necessary components of success.  And besides, what wrong with having a little sex sometimes.  I reject again and again.

Back in September it started to become painfully clear that we would not be able to stay at Million Fishes and I realized that my time in San Francisco might be ending.  After spending the better part of two years creating this blog, working at the fabric store, and designing/making clothes I took a step back and noticed that I hadn’t given any attention to my relationships, especially my friendships.  Also, I hadn’t gotten drunk enough.  I’d actively avoided all fun.  It was the only way to get any work done, but when the walls of my life started falling down I realized that I needed people.  Not art, not jobs, not even this blog could bring we what I wanted to feel – I needed people.  So I started going out, to try and forget myself…no, change that.  I went out so I could remember something I’d forgotten.

I decided to use facebook to find one of my first social gatherings.  I went with an art happening at a club close to the museum district.  Not really my scene, but so what?  I convinced my friend TQ (pictured below) who I affectionately call Big Black (as he’s half Boricua whether or not you can see it), to drop me off at the club while he was out doing deliveries on his motorcycle.

He agreed and Jay, my housemate and TQ’s girlfriend, fitted me up in her jacket, helmet, gloves, and a scarf.  I’ve never felt like such a badass.  TQ said he’d be back to get me when his shift ended.  That meant I had a couple of hours to kill at the club.  I walked into the club with a helmet under my arm and bought myself a drink.  Clubs are weird.  Especially when you’re an unattended female and you have no interest in grinding you ass against some dude’s chub. I’d forgotten this.

Two hours and quite a bit of small talk with a shy-ish dude who eventually asked me for my number but never called (men do this a lot, what’s the deal?), I made my way to the bathroom.  On my way back to the bar a man got my attention and handed me his card.  He informed me that he was a businessman.  TQ came to retrieve me moments later, which was good cause I was ready to get the hell outta that club.  I left as quickly as I’d appeared.

I called the businessman the next day.  He’d requested I do so as I ran out the door the night before.  He told me he wanted to show me the product he was selling, and I made my way to his workspace.  My dream is both my strength and my weakness.  It makes me fearless, even when I should know better.  Any other person would have been able to see straight through this.  Not me, I’m blinded by pure optimism and unchecked ambition at times.

It all started out pretty innocent.  The businessman, a reporter, who he said was documenting a day in the life of him, and his lawyer were among the company that afternoon.  He asked that I bring a sharpie to the meeting. I have a decent sized collection and brought a few with me.  When I arrived he, knowing that I considered myself an artist, asked that I make up a design and draw it out, something to make his product look more original.  I agreed.  I asked him if he’d even looked at my art (I’m not really a sketcher, more of an erotic photographer at the moment) and pulled up my website.  I instantly regretted showing my work to him.  I am still new to this (erotic) art thing, and I’m guessing the pictures of my ass had the same affect as dancing at a night club might.  Whoopsies.

At some point I finished drawing and he asked if he could take some photos of me in the product I’d just made.  I have no problem with photos.  I take them everyday.  The pictures that I initially posed for were very G-rated, but he started pushing, asking me to take my pants off for a photo.  I wouldn’t.  I explained that all the photos on my website were self-portraits and that I certainly wouldn’t pose for him like that.

He pushed more. I pushed back more.  He got angry because I refused to cooperate.  ”This must work on some girls,” was all I could think.  At one point during all of this he got in my face and said, “Don’t you know who I fucking am?  I can make you famous.  You must not really want this!”  I was on the defensive at this point, and responded to every absurd statement with my own ego driven maxims.  I definitely remember saying “I can make myself famous!  Who needs you?”  Yuck.

I’ve never in my life seen a person behave the way he had from a few glasses of wine, which is all that I’d seen anyone have.  I could have left at anytime during this whole experience, and at times I wanted to, but I actually had a certain curiosity about the life of this person, about the rabbit hole that I’d somehow tripped and fallen into.  You see, I’ve spent the last year living in a dark, semi-dank artists collective, and somehow, that afternoon, found myself  doodling in a light-filled workshop being asked to do things I wouldn’t even consider doing font of my own camera, let alone the lens of a complete stranger.

He informed us that we’d be going to a promotional event sponsored by his company.  I got a ride to the club with the lawyer, enjoyed a bit of bottle service, watched a fashion show, danced by myself, met a few folks, hitched a ride with the lawyer again, ate tacos, and returned home safely.  I wish the story ended there.  You would think that after that I would have never contacted him again, but I am no stranger to sexual aggressiveness, have even possibly been conditioned to accept it, so while I saw his behavior as strange, it was not outside of the realm of my experiences with men.  Reconditioning myself, learning to reject this kind of behavior, has taken lots of time and energy.  I still have my weak moments.  This experience falls under this category.  I momentary lapse in judgement, a slip, a reminder of what I no longer have to accept.  But I still pressed forward…

What I’d wanted when I met him that first time was business advice, so I texed him a week or two later and asked if he would be willing to meet me for an hour or so to share his thoughts.  I made sure to mention that I would not be accepting any sexual advances.  He seemed to agree to these conditions, and we met one night at an Irish pub with an Indian restaurant in the middle of it.  This second meeting was an altogether different experience from our first encounter.  He gave me some good pointers about what steps to take next.  I agreed to a work exchange with him.  I would help him with a new project he was starting and he agreed to give me occasional business advice.

San Francisco Fashion Week approached, and I thought it would be a good idea to attend some of the events as they could provide good guidelines for the work I need to do.  The Businessman suggested I attend a talk about local manufacturing, which featured Janet Lees of SF Made (who I’ve seen speak before) and Sean Peng of Inspirare (who I applied for a job with a few months ago.  I introduced myself to him after the event.  Awkward.).

This was my first major networking event since moving to San Francisco.  In my past life I was a notorious networker.  Eager, hungry, down to attend almost any event that offered free food.  I’ve been tempering this part of myself in an attempt to make better decisions/not get ahead of myself.

After the event ended we had a few drinks at a nearby hotel.  We spoke about his business, about the trouble he’d had recruiting and keeping creative talent (apparently we’re hard to manage), about a friend that he’d competed with.  I saw some parallels in his stories to the struggles I’ve had as creative force while trying to establish partnerships.  I appreciated hearing his perspective.  The conversation was pretty neutral, and then towards the end of our time at the hotel he flipped.  I can’t remember his exact words, but he basically started speaking down to me for asking that he temper his sexual advances.  ”Don’t fucking flatter yourself.  You’re not shit,” was the gist of his statements.  I wasn’t really offended or frightened by his words, in fact, there was something I appreciated about his raw showing of insecurity.  I’ll argue that it’s better to see a person’s bad side early, so you know exactly what you’re getting into and whether or not you can deal with it.  His bad sides show clearly.

I had hesitations from our first meeting.  San Francisco acts like a big city, but it only took a tiny scratching of the surface to learn that I was dealing with a person who had a specific kind of reputation.  And while I don’t like to base my actions off of hearsay, I appreciated the feedback I got from the community as my judgment faculties had gone haywire under the stress of pending eviction.

That being said, he had his good qualities.  He expressed his desires clearly, something I admired.  I sometimes struggle with expressing my true desires, and sometimes I superstitiously believe that if I hang around the right people things will rub off on me.  That was not what he wanted to rub off on me.

Also, he seemed to have a sort of unbridled confidence that was impossible to sway, also an acknowledged weakness of mine.  I’ve inhibited my talents to calm peoples insecurities, which is stupid.  It’s important to keep the bright light shining no matter what people think, something I learned from this businessman.  And perhaps this was just the erotic tension that he aroused, but there was a certain highly generative creative forcefield that he carried around.  He seemed to understand what I was trying to create, my brand, my concept, my target market, and I noticed that our minds worked in creatively harmonic ways.

In the end I made my decision to part with him based on the disrespectful words he said to me in those moments of insecurity, and the overall way I felt he regarded women.  Also, once as we walked down the street a man told me I looked like Angela Davis, and the businessman claimed to not know who she was.  That’s a deal breaker.

How was I supposed to carry out my task, live my life peacefully and and artfully, while associating with a puffed up fellow like him?  Also, I wasn’t sure exactly what I’d be expected to do for him in the long run.  Am I willing to go down that road to get what I want?  Do I want to be remembered and regarded for vision, talent, drive, and commitment, or for impressive vaginal acrobatics?  Do I even have any say in if or how I will be remembered?  As a woman who is not afraid to express aspects of my sexuality is there any way to avoid being thought of as promiscuous (whether or not that’s the truth) at this point?  Does that really matter?  Maybe I should embrace it without fear.  Probably that’s what I should do.

At the end of all this, I found a business class to take.  And that’s how I got the information that I needed, not through some dude in exchange for a series of favors.  Long live education.

Love and enjoy.

Ad·Space

Every now and then I see products, advertisements, and window displays that speak to me, so here is the space where I’ll put this collection photos.

Window at Neiman Marcus

Love and enjoy.

Harmonic·Article |Gucci Gucci|

I got the swag

And it’s pumping out my ovaries

Gucci Gucci

 Louis Louis

Fendi Fendi

Prada

The basic bitches wear that shit

So I don’t even bother

Harmonic·Article |Shopping for Clothes|

Now you go back there and you get that paper

and let me sign on the dotted line

And I’ll make sure I get all my payments in

right on time

Hey wait a minute buddy, let me go back there

and do a little checking on you

Then the man come back, he said

“I’m sorry my man but your credit didn’t go through”

Harmonic Article |She Bought A Hat Like Princess Marina|

She’s bought a hat like Princess Marina’s
To wear at all her social affairs
She wears it when she’s cleaning the windows
She wears it when she’s scrubbing the stairs
But you will never see her at Ascot
She can’t afford the time or the fare
But she’s bought a hat like Princess Marina’s
So she don’t care

He’s bought a hat like Anthony Eden’s
Because it makes him feel like a Lord
But he can’t afford a Rolls or a Bentley
He has to buy a secondhand Ford
He tries to feed his wife and his family
And buy them clothes and shoes they can wear
But he’s bought a hat like Anthony Eden’s
So he don t care

Buddy can you spare me a dime
My wife is getting hungry
And the kids are crying
This poverty is hurting my pride
Buddy can you spare me, buddy can you spare me a dime

She’s bought a hat like Princess Marina’s
And her neighbors think it suits her a treat
But she hasn’t any food in the larder
Nor has anybody else in the street
But to look at her you’d think she was wealthy
‘Cos she smiles just like a real millionaire
‘Cos she’s bought a hat like Princess Marina’s
So she don’t care, she don’t care, she don’t care, she don’t care

The·Transformation…

I’m not sure why the female sexuality class I’m taking isn’t mandatory for every woman.  I never took any women’s studies classes in college because the women who I knew who were taking them seemed smug, and I doubted that my views would be equally represented.  I imagined having to fight to be heard and even then, not being understood.  These were my fears.

The range of topics we’ve covered is breathtaking.  I’m so happy I made the commitment.  This week we are talking about power and privilege, which in reality, is what Confederate Articles is all about.

It’s about me finding my power in a culture where none of my physical identifiers are seen as privileged.

I was assigned to read The Transformation of Silence into Language and Action by Audre Lorde for class this week.  It’s an amazing piece, so I thought I would share it.

Swiped from The Incredible Shriking Phallus
_ _ _

This speech by Audre Lorde was originally delivered at the Lesbian and Literature panel of the Modern Language Association’s December 28, 1977 meeting. It was then published in many of Audre’s books, including “The Cancer Journals” and “Sister Outsider.” It contains a poem that was originally published in Audre’s “The Black Unicorn” (1978).

This is the version appearing in “The Cancer Journals,” published 1980 by spinsters press.

——

I would like to preface my remarks on the transformation of silence into language and action with a poem. The title of it is “A Song For Many Movements” and this reading is dedicated to Winnie Mandela. Winnie Mandela is a South African freedom fighter who is in exile somewhere in South Africa. She had been in prison and had been released and was picked up again after she spoke out against the recent jailing of black school children who were singing freedom songs and who were charged with public violence… “A Song for Many Movements.”

Nobody wants to die on the way
and caught between ghosts of whiteness
and the real water
none of us wanted to leave
our bones
on the way to salvation
three planets to the left
a century of light years ago
our spices are separate and particular
but our skins sine in complimentary keys
at a quarter to eight mean time
we were telling the same stories
over and over and over.

Broken down gods survive
in the crevasses and mudpots
of every beleaguered city
where it is obvious
there are too many bodies
to cart to the ovens
or gallows
and our uses have become
more important than our silence
after the fall
too many empty cases
of blood to bury or burn
there will be no body left
to listen
and our labor
has become more important
than our silence

Our labor has become
more important
than our silence.

I have come to believe over and over again that what is most important to me must be spoken, made verbal and shared, even at the risk of having it bruised or misunderstood. That the speaking profits me, beyond any other effect. I am standing here as a black lesbian poet, and the meaning of all that waits upon the fact that I am still alive, and might not have been. Less than two months ago, I was told my two doctors, one female and one male, that I would have to have breast surgery, and that there was a 60 to 80 percent chance that the tumor was malignant. Between the telling and the actual surgery, there was a three week period of the agony of and involuntary reorganization of my entire life. The surgery was completed, and the growth was benign.

But within those three weeks, I was forced to look upon myself and my living with a harsh and urgent clarity that has left me still shaken but much stronger. This is a situation faced by many women, by some of you here today. Some of what I experienced during that time has helped elucidate for me much of what I feel concerning the transformation of silence into language and action.

In becoming forcibly and essentially aware of my own mortality, and of what I wished and wanted for in my life, however short it might be, priorities and omissions became strongly etched in a merciless light and what I most regretted were my silences. Of what had ever been afraid? To question or to speak as I believed I would have meant pain, or death. But we all hurt in so many different ways, all the time, and pain will either change or end. Death, on the other hand, is the final silence. And that might be coming quickly, now, without regard for whether I had ever spoken what needed to be said, or only betrayed myself into small silences, while I planned someday to speak, or waited for someone else’s words. And I began to recognize a source of power within myself that comes from the knowledge that while it is most desirable not to be afraid, learning to put fear into a perspective gave me great strength.

I was going to die, if not sooner then later, whether or not I had ever spoken myself. My silences had not protected me. Your silence will not protect you. But for every real word spoken, for every attempt I had ever made to speak those truths for which I am still seeking, I had made contact with other women while we examined the words to fit a world in which we all believed, bridging our differences. And it was the concern and caring of all those women which gave me strength and enabled me to scrutinize the essentials of my living.

The women who sustained me through that period were black and white, old and young, lesbian, bisexual, and heterosexual, and we all shared a war against the tyrannies of silence. They all gave me a strength and concern without which I could not have survived intact. Within those weeks of acute fear came the knowledge– within the war we are all waging with the forces of death, subtle, and otherwise, conscious or not– I am not only a casualty, I am also a warrior.

What are the words you do not have yet? What do you need to say? What are the tyrannies you swallow day by day and attempt to make your own, until you will sicken and die of them, still in silence? Perhaps for some of you here today, I am the face of one of your fears. Because I am a woman, because I am black, because I am myself, a black woman warrior poet doing my work, come to ask you, are you doing yours?

And, of course, I am afraid– you can hear it in my voice– because the transformation of silence into language and action is an act of self-revelation and that always seems fraught with danger. But my daughter, when I told her of our topic and my difficulty with it, said, “tell them about how you’re never really a whole person if you remain silent, because there’s always that one little piece inside of you that wants to be spoken out, and if you keep ignoring it, it gets madder and madder and hotter and hotter, and if you don’t speak it out one day it will just up and punch you in the mouth.”

On the cause of silence, each one of us draws her own fear– fear of contempt, of censure, or some judgment, or recognition, of challenge, of annihilation. But most of all, I think, we fear the visibility without which we also cannot truly live. Within this country where racial difference creates a constant, if unspoken, distortion of vision, black women have on one hand always been highly visible, and so, on the other hand, have been rendered invisible through the depersonalization of racism. Even within the women’s movement, we have had to fight and still do, for that very visibility which also renders us most vulnerable, our blackness. For to survive in the mouth of this dragon we call america, we have had to learn this first and most vital lesson– that we were never meant to survive. Not as human beings. And neither were most of you here today, black or not. And that visibility which makes you most vulnerable is also our greatest strength. Because the machine will try to grind us into dust anyway, whether or not we speak. We can sit in out corners mute forever while our sisters and ourselves are wasted, while our children are distorted and destroyed, while our earth is poisoned, we can sit in our safe corners as mute as bottles, and still we will be no less afraid.

In my house this year we are celebrating the feast of Kwanza, the African-American festival of harvest which begins the day after Christmas and lasts for seven days. There are seven principles of Kwanza, one for each day. The first principle is Umoka, which means unity, the decision to strive for and maintain unity in the self and community. The principle for yesterday, the second day, was Kujichagulia– self-determination– the decision to define ourselves, name ourselves, and speak for ourselves, instead of being spoken for by others (emphasis mine). Today is the third day of Kwanza and the principle for today is Ujima– collective work and responsibility– the decision to build and maintain ourselves and our communities together and to recognize and solve our problems together.

Each of us is here now because in one way or another we share a commitment to language and to the power of language, and to the reclaiming of that language which has been made to work against us. In the transformation of silence into language and action, it is vitally necessary to teach by living and speaking those truths which we believe and know beyond understanding. Because in this way alone we can survive, by taking part in a process of life that is creative and continuing, that is growth.

And it is never without fear; of visibility, of the harsh light of scrutiny and perhaps of judgment, of pain, of death. But we have lived through all of those already, in silence, except death. And I remind myself all the time now, that if I was to have been born mute or had maintained an oath of silence my whole life long for safety, I would still have suffered, and I would still die. It is very good for establishing perspective.

And where the words of women are crying to be heard, we must each of us recognize our responsibility to seek those words out, to read them and share them and examine them in their pertinence to our lives. That we not hide behind the mockeries of separations that have been imposed upon us and which so often we accept as our own: for instance, “I can’t possibility teach black women’s writing– their experience is so different than mine,” yet how many years have your spent teaching Plato and Shakespeare and Proust? Or another: “She’s a white woman, what could he possibly have to say to me?” Or, “She’s a lesbian, what would my husband say, or my chairman?” Or again, “This woman writes of her sons and I have no children.” And all the other endless ways in which we rob ourselves of ourselves and each other.

We can learn to work and speak when we are afraid in the same way we have learned to work and speak when we are tired. For we have been socialized to respect fear more than our own needs for language and definition, and while we wait in silence for that final luxury of fearlessness, the weight of that silence will choke us.

The fact that we are here and that I speak not these words is an attempt to break that silence and bridge some of those differences between us, for it is not difference which immobilizes us, but silence. And there are so many silences to be broken.

How·It’s·Made |Coins|