You Are What Moves You, Not How Much You Produce

Welcome to the newsletter about the business, language, and pulse of culture—for the romantics. Step one: stop and smell the poetry.

Explore the intersection of language, culture, and innovation. Not for more. For independence, romance, wonder, and aliveness.

Hi, I’m Ana. I cover how language moves out of books and through our spaces, brands, and cultural and personal artifacts across fashion, film, technology, design, and art.

I'm an ex fashion designer turned independent writer who's worked in tech, product development, content, and branding for over 15 years. I’ve led teams, started businesses, and made myself a critical part of the growth machine wherever I was “needed”. But in 2020, amidst a sea of change affecting nearly all of us—apocalypses to Zoom-overload—I quit my startup job. Since then, I’ve been recentering my work and life around real, tangible feelings.

Here, we will traverse literature and advertising, entertainment and design, to find poetry that exists in personal spaces as an act, affirmation, and assertion of self, and commercial spaces as exchange, evocation, and economy of meaning. I write about language as material and material as language within the context of our lives. How language shapes us, and vice versa. And how it can rewire us, too.

Call it somewhere between a “lifestyle” and “industry” newsletter, a creative culture resource, a field guide to undoing bland. Or simply: Where the myths of our machines come to meet their slow, glittering, pillow-soft demise. Because sure, poetry is feeling, but it's also pulse—and isn’t that what keeps us alive?

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SUBSCRIBE FOR FREE AND GET:

• An assembly of people, products, and poetry + ways to support and shop them

• Accessible and expansive analysis to help you contextualize what’s happening today in work and art—brought to you by feelings and facts

• Inspiration to dial you (and your senses) all the way up

WHY BECOME A PAID SUBSCRIBER?

If you’re enjoying Left On Red, consider upgrading to a paid subscription ($8/month or $50/year) to support the time and effort it takes for me to consume and contextualize creative work for people directly. I don’t write for publications so as a writer, this is my source of income outside of commercial client work.

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THE MOOD:

MR. ROBOT (2015-2019)

SOFIA COPPOLA’S TAKE ON MARIE ANTOINETTE (2006)

VIRGIL ABLOH’S HARVARD LECTURE SLIDES (2017)

FROM AUDRE LORDE’S ESSAY, “POETRY IS NOT A LUXURY” (1977)

NED FLANDERS: “ALL MY LIFE I’VE WANTED PURPLE DRAPES!” FROM THE SIMPSONS, “REALTY BITES” (1997)

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WHAT’S WITH “LEFT ON RED”?

LEFT ON RED = on the way of propelling oneself, stopping at the intersection(s), and making the turn they don’t want you to make

LEFT ON RED = what to do when your attention is demanded and diverted by the ongoing onslaught of other people’s agendas

LEFT ON RED = an ode to the power of leaving and the power of friction

LEFT ON RED = an evolution and spectrum shift of Violets (this newsletter from Feb-Sept 2023), taken from the poem “Roses are red, violets are blue”

LEFT ON RED = the sister and of

Pink Slip

, two shades of the same person