Dark Side of Coke

My desire to be a Coca-Cola sponsored blog brought many interesting viewpoints to my doorstep. Little did I know today ACT UP NY was protesting Coke's treatment of their workers in Africa for providing limited HIV health benefits. Check this out. Thanks to Daniel Raymond for the info.

Real Porn

Terrence Real writes about porn in his new book, How Can I Get Through To You. First he does a devastating analysis of the movie, American Beauty and talks about the Kevin Spacey character, Lester, and his infantile sexual fantasies. He follows with this:

The essence of porn is a fantasy in which everything the man does is perfect, and the woman's sexual pleasure lies in the giving of pleasure. This archetype of male desire resonates with another. Who else in our culture is pictured as deriving pleasure in the giving of it? What Lester most yearns for, as do most of the men in my practice, indeed in my life, is the unstinting limitless nurturer, she who was untimely ripped from his arms as a little boy. I call this voluptuous pleasure-bestower the sexual mother; the caregiver boys did not get enough of, now transposed to manhood and eroticised.

Harvard Conference Rocks NYC

We rocked the town yesterday at the Four Seasons. Despite the most monsoon-like conditions, we got a killer audience of enthusiastic, smart folks who really are so eager to do business. If this is a dead economy, it sure looked lively yesterday. I feel so much pent-up energy in NYC and Boston. Good stuff coming down.

Halley's Comment's Comments

Certain parties are suggesting I add comments to my site. Okay, all right, already. Will do. But I'll be doing a bunch of upgrades, so give me a little time, hokay?

Show Me The Money

There has to be a way for bloggers to have sponsors, make money, share a percentage of that money with the people who build the blogging platforms, fully disclose who's paying whom AND keep their editorial integrity.

Magazines separate church and state by making editorial copy look like editorial and advertising copy look like advertising. The loathsome beast in print publications called "advertorial" is not an attractive animal. TV does it with commercials -- again the look and feel of commercials are different from "programs." Infomercials are that spooky grey area where editorial and marketing mingle, again, with embarrassing results.

I want Coke for a sponsor. I want to write about Coke because I like Coke. I have written about Coke, but have never received money or products or anything from them to influence my writing. So ... I get Coke as a sponsor and then ... what, I never write about them again to demonstrate they can't compromise my editorial integrity? Or I do something way more fun like get Rageboy to do some insane graphics for me and I make some trompe l'oeil wacky Coke ads, semi-naked goddesses imbibing Coke, as well as disclosing how much I paid him to help me get my new improved Coke ads up on my blog and how much Coke paid me?

Or maybe I get a new color hyperlink, that indicates an ad -- every time you see a blue link, you know it's not an ad, but every time you see a red link you know it's to one of my sponsors?

This money + bloggers issue is coming up all over town. Dave Winer points to Mitch Ratcliffe today on the subject of bloggers paid by Microsoft to attend their Mobius 2002 conference. Don't miss it.

Let's Stay Together

This book I'm reading Terrence Real's How Can I Get Through To You makes a good case for staying together and even shows you how. But golly, maybe sometimes it's just not meant to be. I mean check out Al Green's bio -- and he wrote the big 1972 hit "Let's Stay Together". Gotta say "ouch" here!

Besides musical waves, Al Green made headlines on October 18, 1974, when a girlfriend, Mary E. Woodson, poured a pot of boiling grits over Al as he was getting out of his bathtub, because he refused her proposal of marriage.

Love's Small Murders

Once again, this Terrence Real book, How Can I Get Through To You, on the psychology of partriarchy and how it kills passion, is amazing me.

So go love's small murders, tiny everyday escalations of injury, reacted to by disconnection, causing more injury, until one fast-forwards to a couple whose initial passion has become so 'encrusted' with disappointment that they barely function as a couple anymore.

Still, it's one of the most optimistic books on staying together and working things out -- in radical new ways -- that I've ever read and he even gives you the tools to do it.