Today marks the 101st anniversary of the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory Fire, which killed close to 150 New York City garment workers in under 18 minutes. It was one of the deadliest industrial disasters in the United States history.
Many people, mostly immigrant women, endured severe working conditions while working in sweatshops. Similar to Wal-Mart, workers had been locked into the factory to prevent them from stealing/taking unauthorized breaks/talking to union organizers. When the fire broke out in the Triangle factory, similar to the World Trade tragedy, people jumped through open windows in an attempt to save themselves.
To me, the fire represents the failings and dangers of mass-production.
Cornell University has been maintaining a site dedicated to the fire. Check it out here.
1. to excel or be conspicuous; to distinguish oneself in an activity or a field
2. to give forth or glow with light; to emit, shed or cast light.
3. to be bright with reflected light; glisten; sparkle; glint.
4. to appear brightly or strongly, esp. uncomfortably so
5. to be or appear unusually animated or bright, as the eyes or face.
6. to appear with brightness or clearness, as feelings.
7. slang: disparaging and offensive. a black person.
This project just got a little crazier.
I had a little run in with the SF fire department last night. Fine men they were. Quick, and thorough.
After writing, and reading, and sketching for most of the day, I decided I was ready to get my hands dirty. It was time to give the burnt cork paste a second try.
I’ve been using this little stainless steel bowl and mixing in accelerant (rubbing alcohol) until the cork burns to ashes, which takes a lot longer than you would imagine. Corks expand like crazy when you burn them and it takes ages for the flames to penetrate all the way down to the middle. This was my problem with the first batch. The ashes weren’t really ashes. I ended up with blackened pieces of cork bit. Not effective for paste making.
Last night was going to be different. I planned on burning the shit out of one cork. I didn’t care how much alcohol it took or how long I had to stay up. I’d been working on one for about ten minutes on the balcony that faces the street, and other houses. I saw a few people walking around, some folks in the house across the street seemed to be enjoying a late night dinner. Nothing much going on. I put on Window Seat, while I watched the cork burn through the glass balcony door. Does this song have sirens in it? I stepped onto the balcony and watched as a fire truck turned rounded the corner of my street. I naively thought, “they’re not coming here, right?” The first truck passed my apartment as I exhaled.
Then came the second, and the third. And the little fire SUV. Damn. Damn. Damn. Damn. I went out to the balcony and yelled at the hoard of civil servants gathering below, “Hey, what’s up?!” “What are you doing up there?” they asked. “Funny story,” I responded, “burning corks.” “Can you put that out?” said the one of them. I did as I was told and put out the tiny flame with no more than 4 oz of tap water. Shit. Another batch ruined!
Three firefighters followed me into the apartment, and surveyed the scene.
ME: I’m working on this project, did you know that they used to make blackface makeup out of burnt corks?
FIREFIGHTER 1: Blackface for hunting?
ME: No, blackface for minstrel shows.
FIREFIGHTER 1: Oh.
MARK (neighbor): What are you doing up there!!
ME: (Ignoring Mark) Yeah, they would burn cork into ash and then make it into a paste. So I’m doing that, but I’m just going to paint with it.
MARK: Our landlord is not going to be happy about this!
ME: (nervously, as I’m technically not a tenant yet) I’ve been using alcohol as an accelerant.
Other two firefighters are doing god knows what, one is screaming “corks” through his walkie-talkie.
FIREFIGHTER 1: (taking my DIY kiln in hand) Well next time make sure you have a fire extinguisher handy, in case any accelerant spills.
ME: Ok.
FIREFIGHTER 1: It’s not a big deal, just do it during the day so your neighbors don’t freak out.
ME: Ok. Sorry guys.
FIREFIGHTERS: No problem!
END SCENE
I think I finally made some new friends, folks!
I tell people all the time that wearing the six items of clothing will be the easy part, getting my head around the historical and cultural implications of what I’m doing has been incredibly challenging. And making blackface paste has been even harder!
It’s not up to me to figure out what this project is going to do, or how it will affect people, cause really, those things are neither guaranteed or predictable. Obviously. So far I’ve managed to freak out the whole neighborhood. Shit. I hope I don’t get exiled from the Castro. At least the Mission is close by. I could easily live in a homeless shelter.
I will take Mos Def’s advice and try my best to “shine my light on the world,” because words have multiple meanings, because people see what they want to, because not everyone asks questions, because some people assume the worst, because others assume the best, because there is only so much I can control, because there is always some lightness in the dark and always some darkness in the light, because I want to challenge myself, and most of all, because I want everyone to sparkle.
When we hear another person's thoughts, beliefs, and feelings it is more difficult to project on to them our perceptions of who they are.
—bell hooks, All About Love
Love is the condition in which the happiness of another person is essential to your own.
—Robert Heinlein
I could feel it unspooling behind me - the old thread I'd lost, the new one I was spinning...
—Wild, Cheryl Strayed
“This is one more piece of advice I have for you: don’t get impatient. Even if things are so tangled up you can’t do anything, don’t get desperate or blow a fuse and start yanking on one particular thread before it’s ready to come undone. You have to figure it’s going to be a long process and that you’ll work on things slowly, one at a time.”
—Norwegian Wood, Haruki Murakami
It doesn’t let you off hard work. You’ve got to keep plugging like mad, perfecting whatever kind of expression you’ve got; adding constantly to your skill, whether it’s in acting or painting, or even making a dress. So that, when the chance for self-expression does come, when the time arrives for you to call on your subconscious power to express itself, you have a good set of tools for it to work with; a proper medium through which your creative urge can be portrayed . . . Catch on?
—Angela Lansbury
There is so much to learn from life. Don't be afraid to be yourself either. Hide when you want to hide. Love when you want to love.
—Firth Griffith
What may appear as coincidences are not coincidences at all, but simply the working out of the pattern which you started with your own weaving.
—Claude Bristol
The function of the erotic is to encourage excellence and to give us strength to pursue it.
—Audre Lorde
The woman who follows the crowd will usually go no further than the crowd. The woman who walks alone is likely to find herself in places no one has ever been before.
—Albert Einstein
So, you must see that when you thought you were only doing little things, you were really doing very big things. It is very important to realize that.
—Bucky Fuller
Gradually I discovered that a golden thread runs through all the teachings and makes them work for those who sincerely accept and apply them, and that thread can be named in the single word – belief.
—Claude Bristol
Your image is a game - an illusion. Play with it. Make a work of art out of me. Be free.
—Mannequin's reflection to mannequin at the Jean Paul Gaultier exhibit in the de Young Museum.
You are not paying me by the hour, you are paying me for all the time I have spent working in my life so that I can make this in an hour.
—Picasso
Sexuality is not about finding a lover or a friend, it is about overcoming separateness by giving life and blessing it.
— A Christian Website
Art without a purpose is like a gun without a bullet. Choose your weapon wisely.
— Part something my dad said, part something I said.
And now here is my secret, a very simple secret: It is only with the heart that one can see rightly; what is essential is invisible to the eye.
—The Fox from The Little Prince
Writing, to me, is simply thinking through my fingers.
—Isaac Asimov
America is woven of many strands. I would recognize them and let it so remain. Our fate is to become one, and yet many.
—Ralph Ellison, Invisible Man
Decisive works of art participate directly in the fabric of history surrounding their maker.
—David Bayles and Ted Orland, Art and Fear
...“love” is just another word for resonance or harmonious vibration.
—Bob Proctor
All our differences and similarities are vast and rich - their interplay is the fabric of all relating.
—Carol Queen, The Queer In Me
There is no time for cut-and-dried monotony. There is time for work. And time for love. That leaves no other time.
—Coco Chanel
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.
—Audre Lorde
Any idea that is held in the mind
that is either feared or revered will, begin at once
to clothe itself in the most convenient
and appropriate physical forms available.
—Andrew Carnegie
The rear end exists, I see no reason to be ashamed of it. It's true that there are rear ends so stupid, so pretentious, so insignificant, that they're only good for sitting on.
—Josephine Baker
According to her cloth she cut her coat.
—Dryden, The Cock and the Fox
To send a letter is a good way to go somewhere without moving anything but your heart.
—Phyllis Theroux
Words, once they are printed, have a life of their own.
—Carol Burnett
Writing is a struggle against silence.
—Carlos Fuentes
Be a yardstick of quality. Some people aren’t used to an environment where excellence is expected.
—Steve Jobs
You need to learn how to select your thoughts just the same way you select your clothes every day. This is a power you can cultivate. If you want to control things in your life so bad, work on the mind. That's the only thing you should be trying to control.
—Elizabeth Gilbert, Eat, Pray, Love
The work that comes from deep down in our insides is the
work that will carry the heftiest price tag in the decades to
come.
— Tara Gentile, The Art of Earning
Love is, like, a feeling you have for someone you have feelings about.
—Milo from The Love Competition
The practical dreamers have always been and will always be the pattern-makers of civilization.
—Napoleon Hill, Think and Grow Rich
I beg you…to have patience with everything unresolved in your heart and try to love the questions themselves as if they were locked rooms or books written in a very foreign language. Don't search for the answers, which could not be given you now, because you would not be able to live them. And the point is, to live everything. Live the questions now. Perhaps then, someday far in the future, you will gradually, without ever noticing it, live your way into the answer…
— Rainer Maria Rilke
Easy reading is damn hard writing.
— Nathaniel Hawthorne
What is uttered from the heart alone, will win the hearts of others to your own.
—Goethe
The real voyage of discovery consists not in seeking new landscapes, but in having new eyes.
—Marcel Proust
The art of writing is the art of discovering what you believe.
— Gustave Flaubert
Dreams are illustrations from the book your soul is writing about you.
— Marsha Norman
The desire to write grows with writing.
— Desiderius Erasmus
If you really
want to love me,
well, then do it.
—Okkervil River, from the song Maine Island Lovers
It matters how we feel about ourselves - that African American women's internal life experiences are part of the American story. So when we're listening, for example, to the GOP rhetoric about this nostalgia of this America when things were simpler and better, you can never tell that story if you bother to think about African American women's experiences.
Cause there's no moment in American history when it is nostalgic and better to be a little black girl.
—Melissa Harris-Perry, The Colbert Report, January 9th, 2012.
Once you learn to read, you are forever free.
—Fredrick Douglass
A Toltec is an artist of Love,
an artist of the Spirit,
someone who is creating
every moment,
every second,
the most beautiful art -
the Art of Dreaming.
Life is nothing but a dream,
and if we are artists,
then we can create our life with Love,
and our dream becomes
a masterpiece of art.
— don Miguel Ruiz, The Mastery of Love
It would evidently take more than a political regime, more than dire poverty to stop a woman from wanting to be well dressed: it was a desire as old as the world, as old as the desire for children.
—From the novel Balzac and the Little Seamstressby Dai Sijie
I ended up as an artist. It wasn’t a decision I made, it wasn’t a choice, it was what I was reduced to.
—William Kentridge
You are already naked, there is no reason not to follow your heart.
—Steve Jobs
...So I stumble forward and with caution, in search of new worlds/a new path/new context for living and working together. Equally. Whole. Black women and Black men. Not as homosexuals and heterosexuals but as sexual beings. Free from the domination of race, sex and class. This is my naked stance: These are my feminist priorities.
—Alexis DeVeaux
When life is viewed from a higher perspective, above the self, we can see that wisdom is not in the details it’s in the space between them—the interstices. It’s in the story, the overview, the universal. Wisdom is not in the fabric, its in the holes. It’s what is going on between the events. “In a sense,” wrote philosopher Alfred North Whitehead, “knowledge shrinks as wisdom grows: for details are swallowed up in principles.” Psychologist William James reminds us that, “the art of being wise is the art of knowing what to overlook.”
—I have no idea where this came from. It's been on a sticky note on my dashboard for months.
In this here place, we flesh; flesh that weeps, laughs; flesh that dances on bare feet in the grass. Love it. Love it hard.
Love your hands! Love them. Raise them up and kiss them. Touch others with them, pat them together, stroke them on your face 'cause they don't love that either. You've got to love it, you!
—Baby Suggs, a character in Toni Morrison's Beloved
The fear of love is one of the biggest fears human's have.
— Don Miguel Ruiz in The Mastery of Love
Thus all art is propaganda and ever must be, despite the wailing of the purists. I stand in utter shamelessness and say that whatever art I have for writing has been used always for propaganda for gaining the right of black folk to love and enjoy. I do not care a damn for any art that is not used for propaganda. But I do care when propaganda is confined to one side while the other is stripped and silent.
—W.E.B. DuBois, from the speech Criteria of Negro Art
If thou must love me, let it be for nought
Except for love’s sake only.
—Elizabeth Barrett Browning, Sonnets From the Portuguese, Sonnet XIV
Start a huge, foolish project, like Noah…it makes absolutely no difference what people think of you.
— Rumi
The difficulty of the doubleness can be resolved in multiple ways. One way that we might think about resolving that doubleness is by trying to knit it together, trying to create an Americaness that doesn't require a lack of recognition of the blackness. There are two other ways to imagine coping with the doubleness, and that is rejecting the blackness or rejecting the Americaness.
—Melissa Harris-Perry, speaking about ways to resolve W.E.B DuBois' notion of double consciousness
You can't connect the dots looking forward, you can only connect them looking backwards. You have to trust that the dots will somehow connect in your future. You have to trust in something - your gut, destiny, life, karma...whatever. Believing that the dots will connect down the road will give you the confidence to follow your heart, even when it leads you off the well worn path, and that will make all the difference.
—Steve Jobs, Stanford commencement address 2009
Your photography is a record of your living, for anyone who really sees. You may see and be affected by other people's ways, you may even use them to find your own, but you will have eventually to free yourself of them. That is what Nietzsche meant when he said, "I have to get rid of him." He knew how insidious other people's ways could be, particularly those which have the forcefulness of profound experience, if you let them get between you and your own vision.
—Paul Strand
O love, o love, o careless love
I only want to lay with you
My love, my love, my careful love
I've found the hard way
Love is true
—Bonnie Prince Billy, Wai
Photography is the only "language" understood in all parts of the world, and bridging all nations and cultures, it links the family of man. Independent of political influence - where people are free - it reflects truthfully life events, allows us to share in the hopes and despair of others, and illuminates political and social conditions. We become the eye-witnesses of the humanity and inhumanity of mankind.
—Helmut Gernsheim, Creative Photography, 1962
Identity would seem to be the garment, which one covers the nakedness of the self. In which case it is best that the garment be loose, a little like the robes of the desert, through which ones nakedness can always be felt and sometimes discerned. The trust in one's nakedness is all that gives one power to change one's robes.
—Eddie Glaude Jr., speech at Wheaton College
Poverty is no more surreal than wealth; a body clad in filthy rags is not more surreal than a principessa dressed for a ball or a pristine nude.
—Susan Sontag, On Photography
Your task is not to seek for love, but merely to seek and find all the barriers within yourself that you have built against it.
—Rumi
We act as though comfort and luxury were the chief requirements of life, when all that we need to make us happy is something to be enthusiastic about.
—Albert Einstein
Just enjoy.
—Philippe Daguillon
I belong to a mass-production country when any of us, all of us, deserve the right to good fashion and where fashion must be made available to all.
—Claire McCardell
Know that love is the most powerful energy in the universe.
—Orin and Sanaya Roman in Soul Love
Perfection is achieved, not when there is nothing more to add, but when there is nothing left to take away.
—Antoine de Saint-Exupery
Being sure of yourself and doing creative work is a fatal combination. You always have to doubt.
—Jacques Polge, Master Perfumer for Chanel
Hell is not a place you go
if you're not a Christian
It's the failure
of your life's greatest ambition
—Immortal Technique, Leaving the Past
I thought that the occidental clothing tradition was too tight. I wanted to make things that were free both mentally and physically.
—Issay Miyake, designer
Fashion is a tug-of-war game between knowing yourself and acting a part. To seduce yourself, to be your own mirror, to deflect the truth in order to emblazon a trompe l'oeil portrait on fabric, a portrait that is only slightly distorted since the pleasure of printing you own image on the material is far from innocent.
—Alison Lurie, The Language of Clothing
Minimal styles do no need to be restrictive and should, in fact, be liberating.
—Francisco Costa, designer for Calvin Klein
Most of all, remember that it is not only the images of art or the sound of music that pass through the walls to give pleasure and inspiration - it is in the very spirit of art to be defiant of categories and obstacles. They are, as transcendent forms of symbolic expression, agencies of human freedom.
—Ralph Waldo Ellison, from the essay The Little Man at Chehaw Station
New clothes help me achieve class denial, and when I get a pair of shitty pants from Ross from my aunt, I can no longer deny it.
—B. Wilding
God created black people and black people created style.
—George Wolfe
The spirit of our clothes was free.
—Yohji Yamamoto
Sometimes I think that if every person in the universe truly manifested their creative powers, if each of us took seriously our role as creator and created as if the world depended upon us, then maybe that is all it would take to bring order to the chaos. Maybe that would be enough to end all wars, for it is impossible to be engaged in the act of creation while simultaneously destroying the beauty before us.
– Jan Phillips
From “Marry Your Muse”
A great work of art is one that truly moves and inspires you. You yourself must be moved. Don't look at art with others' eyes. Don't listen to music with others' ears. You must react to art with your own feelings, your own heart and mind. If you allow yourself to be swayed by the opinions of others—" It must be good because everyone else likes it," "It must be bad, because no one else likes it"—your feelings, your sensibility, which should be the very core of the artistic experience, will wither and die. To enjoy art to the fullest, you must abandon all preconceived notions, leaving a blank slate. Then confront the work directly, with your entire being. If you are deeply moved, then that work is, for you, a great work of art.
—Daisaku Ikeda
It really boils down to this: that all life is interrelated. We are all caught in an inescapable network of mutuality, tied into a single garment of destiny.
—Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.
Nature has further complicated her task and added to our confusion by providing not only a perfect rag-bag of odds and end within us...but has contrived that the whole assortment shall be lightly stitched together by a single thread. Memory is the seamstress, and a capricious one at that. Memory runs her needle in and out, up and down, hither and thither.
—Virginia Woolf
Let us hope and pray that the vast intelligence, imagination, humor, and courage of Americans will not fail us. Either we learn a new language of empathy and compassion, or the fire this time will consume us all.
—Cornel West, Race Matters
The Negro is the central thread of American history.
—W.E.B. DuBois
Representations of blacks [then] function as the site of remembering and denying the inescapability of the body in the economy.
—Paul Robeson
True individuality never comes to full flower without hard work. Therefore, you're making a big mistake if you think that who you are right now represents all you are capable of being.
—Daisaku Ikeda
Know first who you are, then deck yourself accordingly.
—Epictetus
Hibernation is a covert preparation for a more overt action.
