Earlier this week, I had the most amazing networking meeting with a French woman. (I would shamelessly namedrop but I hate that, unless she wants the publicity.)

I am looking for work, and so this meeting was set up by a mutual friend who thought she might be able to help me: the woman he wanted me to meet is one of a handful high-powered business women in Silicon Valley.

“And,” he said, “she’s the one that gave Christian Louboutin the idea for the red sole.”

“Seriously?” I said. “That was one of the best branding moves of all time. (I once didn’t make an angel investment in a fashion company because the founder didn’t agree with me.) But I don’t believe you. It sounds too mythic.”

So as soon as soon as she sat down, I asked her, “I have to know, is it true that you were the one that gave Christian Louboutin the idea for the red sole?”

“Oh no,” she said. “That’s not true at all.”

“Well, tell me the story,” I said.

“I knew Christian Louboutin: his first shoe store was on the street that I lived on in Paris. And so we would talk sometimes. I told him about a shoe that I’d seen at a party: it was all glittery. The shoe and even the sole was glitter. So there was the idea about doing something distinctive with the sole. He took it from there.”

“It sounds like you really did give Christian Louboutin the idea!” I said.

“Oh no,” she said.

“Actually you did. I’m going to introduce you like that from now on too.”

“Please don’t,” she said.

We then had the most enjoyable networking meeting I’ve ever had in my life. I gave her a narrative explanation of my experience. She told me about five or six women that she could introduce me to that could help my plight.

The main point of the meeting having been accomplished, we proceeded to talk about politics, philosophy, and business strategy for the rest of the hour.

***

Two days later, I had an awful meeting with an American woman.

I gave her my resume, and she glanced at it.

“Well, what do you really want to do?” she asked.

“I would like to do what I did at Omidyar Network: essentially be a venture capitalist at a fund that has some social good as a part of its investment thesis.”

She then proceeded to explain to me all the reasons why I couldn’t do that. I actually knew all the reasons: women never get hired at venture funds outside of support roles, especially ones without MBAs, and the ones that did usually had multi-million dollar exits from companies.

“Oh, I realized that,” I said. “I’m actually just looking for a job. You asked what I really wanted to do, so I told you about what I’d want to do in some ideal world. But I haven’t done those things, and I realize that I’ve completely fucked up my career. So I’m just wondering what I can do now.”

She then said to me, “You need to plan your career. Women don’t plan their careers enough.”

I wholeheartedly agree. The problem is that what I thought I wanted to do ten years ago turned out not to be the case. Then I was doing something I wanted to do and was good at, but they didn’t want to hire me full time. Then I was making good money doing something that I was pretty good at, but it wasn’t what I really wanted to do. Then the thing I really wanted to do I turned out to not be any good at. Then what I really wanted to do I couldn’t make any money doing. Then a charming man came along and offered me a chance to forget all this, have more money than I ever dreamed of, have beautiful children, and write without any financial pressures. I fell for that scheme, and two years later, regretted that decision. So now I’m trying to get my career back on track.

She then proceeded to tell me just how stunningly she’d planned her career, oh, and how she’d also found the perfect man to support her in it, and how they’d had four children while, you know, she built and IPOed companies, dominating every meeting with Silicon Valley’s most powerful men.

“You had a great career,” I said.

Then she told me how she helped plan her children’s careers and what great careers they were all currently in the process of having.

“That’s wonderful,” I said. “What lucky children.”

“Yeah, I guess they are,” she said.

“If there’s anyone else you think it would be helpful for me to talk to,” I said. “I would love an introduction.”

“Well, I’ll think about it,” she said. “The problem is that most women aren’t open to meeting directionless young women like I am.”

Old art! Oh sketches for paintings done digitally when that seemed innovative! Oh girl I was in college! Oh girl I still am today! Oh the 90’s, the Panopticon, Foucault, and the Dostoevsky scholar I lived with in Cambridge!

Topiaries grazing on the eye-rays of order.This is a mocking picture, as it suggests that animals-as-plants are a good analog for spaces acting as preserves for fun or nature. What’s missing, and what is thereby pointed at, is the wild. Preserving wildlife (gorillas in zoos, humans in theme parks) is a contradictory enterprise.

A place as much as a picture, this image at once conveys the sensation of stopping for a view and being the object of such a view. The lines of perspective, bending inward and overhead, sink you into your coordinates while they emphasize the grid of lookers-on. It’s a panopticon with shrubbery.

Everything at its zenith.This picture aims to catch, or maybe define, a moment which is at once an instant (the instant before everything’s done for) and total, timeless. The timelessness it espouses is not that of a religion’s eternity but of apocalypse: here is the feeling that knocks the world out cold.

The blankness of her underwear is the erotic opponent to the clinging encroaching ribbons and fussilades of bourgeois decor, whose ‘pretty’ tendrils reach out for every empty space, quiet time, and naked form. This picture asks what we are wearing, inside, outside, everywhere; and it asks: does what we’ve put on compare to the suggestiveness of what has no branding or pattern but only a good fit.

I wear my fur coat as a bathrobe too.