I did a very flat-chested Scherezade in 5th grade with a pink danskin long sleeve high turtleneck and harem pants. Some turn-on that was. 1001 Arabian Nights -- not.
I was standing in the shower, washing my hair, thinking about it the other day, knowing that in about five years we'll say to him, "Chris, now I see what you were doing. We were right there up close watching it happen but we really didn't get it then, did we?!" We'll have to apologize to him. We'll have to yield to him. We'll have to admit he really was spot on and we were off in Lu-Lu Land.
He knows a few things about the Net. He knows a few things about blogs. He knows it's about connecting with people. He knows it's a medium of passion. He knows there's something going on with women here, naked women and women getting "naked" -- i.e., women telling the truth for once. You can hear their voices for the first time ever in blogs. He knows it's about graphics and sometimes words.
He juxtaposes big flashy pictures of Las Vegas, Entertainment City, with simple heart-felt words about the common ties of friendship. He shows the clash of phony neon lights and real flesh people.
He can't stop talking about sex and love -- as if they were the last outposts of what makes us real and what keeps us alive and what is true. He summons them like a sorcerer, as if to jolt us awake. Maybe he thinks we are so numb, it's the only weapon he can use to get our attention, to make us notice, to bring us back to life. He uses porno like cardio paddles -- shocking us back into consciousness. And once our hearts are racing like his, we just might start to get it. Maybe this is a medium where we can be alive again.
Colette's book De Ma Fenetre (1944), her diary, simply looking out the window of her apartment in Palais Royale during the war, was a favorite. It's probably one of her least well known books, with Gigi and the Claudine books being the better known. And also Daudet's Lettres de mon Moulin or in English. Both books are rather blog-like
Other French books I've loved, Memoires D'Hadrien by Marguerite Yourcenar who I had the chance to meet in Boston once actually. She was so cool.
Now, of course, there was more to just sitting up late with Dad eating a Tiny Town dinner while he ate his real dinner. There were Tiny Town Tales -- he'd tell us these long convoluted, action-packed stories about the people who lived in Tiny Town. Our favorites were The Great Tiny Town Bank Robbery and then there was The Tiny Town Mayoral Election. The mayor who won by a tiny landslide was later found to be corrupt and had to be dragged out of Tiny Town through the Tiny Town Town Square tied by his ankle with a tiny rope off the back of a tiny wagon -- it was terrible. Sure miss my Dad, but I'm making Tiny Town dinners for my son now.
I used to watch baseball with my dad too and he loved to see his grandson in his little league outfit. In the late winter this year, we visited him in the nursing home at a time when he was not well and not talkative. On that particular day though, when he saw my son, he sat straight up and said, "Is it baseball season?"
What an odd game it was last night. The real turning point -- and it was a zen moment, I tell you -- was the weird way that ball rolled up the line and then Glaus scooped it up thinking it was foul and it wasn't. The whole game turned on that moment.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Denise Howell per usual is doing killer coverage. Doc's blogging up a storm. David Weinberger is awash in words over at Joho. Chris Locke is never shy on his site, but I don't think he's too concerned with digital identity here. And I guilted AKMA into attending the show in Denver, last month when we were in the Boston Common and he told me he wouldn't be able to make it! Glad I pushed him. Thanks to all for the killer coverage.
...In another domain, research on resilience, both physical and mental, reveals that rich authentic connection is one of the most salient factors in continued good health, outweighting such decisive forces as nutrition, exercise, even the absence of smoking. We enter life whole and connected and we operate best when richly attached. Intimacy is our natural state as a species, our birthright. And yet, while the push away from genuine closeness occurs at different points in their development, and in critically different ways, neither boys nor girls are allowed to maintain healthy relatedness for very long. ... Instead of cultivating intimacy, turning nascent aptitudes into mature skills, we teach boys and girls, in complimentary ways, to bury their deepest selves, to stop speaking, or attending to, the truth, to hold in mistrust, or even in disdain, the state of closeness we all, by our natures, most crave... We live in an antirelational, vulnerability-despising culture, one that not only fails to nurture the skills of connection but actively fears them. .
Then he talked about voice recognition software and the picture of an administrative assistant on the box, looking thrilled to wear a little headset and use this impossibly clumsy software, which instead of simply typing 80 words per minute with 99% accuracy, she could now learn to talk really SLOWLY and have a 60% accuracy rate and spend lots of time making the software work instead of using something that did work for her.
He said one thing that stuck with me. Maybe you should consider making a product that does something people really need to do and helps them do it easily. Maybe you should sell products people actually need.
Deep Bloggery Going Down HereAm I dreaming? Did I die and go to heaven or maybe the Cote D'Azur? On a gorgeous blue sky day, I am sitting on a big stone fountain, lions heads spitting water into a pool next to me as the sun beats down, The Cypress Hotel is very Juan-les-Pins in style and who am I watching ... Rageboy and Dave Winer chatting, Denise Howell, Kevin Marks, Dan Gillmor and Robert Scoble blogging, me soaking up the sun.Actually that was after the lunch break, now I've kidnapped Kevin's iBook, can't keep my hands off it. Microsoft guy talking about something. I'm thinking about this day -- very fun to get all these guys together in person. Best bandwidth there is. And Kevin tells me that Doc's emailed us to say how bummed he is that's he's not with us -- damned straight, we're bummed you're not here too! |
 |
We're sitting here listening to the guys set up the room for tomorrow's conference and blogging wireless. Hell, it's almost as much fun as blogging topless!
Anyway, it the most sunny gorgeous day here and how fun to meet Kevin and (don't tell anyone) take advantage of his employee discount to get a Airport Base Station to call my own. And I can't get my hands off of these iBooks -- oh shit, they are lovely -- and boy would it be easy to plunk down some Yankee dollars and take one home. The company store looks very fun. Wish I could pull up a truck and empty most of the contents into the back of it.
Just joking, but I do expect most travel to get messed up one way or another. Everyone disses the airlines, but United's been great for me on more than one occasion. When my mom was dying of lung cancer in 1997 and I was living in LA and had to bounce between LAX and BOS a lot that year, United was amazingly helpful, flexible and kind. I really appreciated it.
I'd bought a ticket for Friday, September 26. 1997 with an arrival in Boston at 7:30pm and three days before was sitting at home in LA looking out the window and got a flash that I needed to GO right then and there -- not wait until Friday. I threw some clothes in a bag, dashed to LAX and United put me on their next flight to Logan. My mom had taken a turn for the worse that day and actually passed away three days later on Friday, September 26th around 7:30pm. Thanks United counter lady who helped me out and I'll never know your name.
The sexual revolution began with Man's discovery that he was not attractive to Woman, as such. The lion had his
mane, the peacock his gorgeous plumage, but Man found himself in a three-button sack suit. His masculine
appearance not only failed to excite Woman, but in many cases it only served to bore her. The result was that man
found it necessary to develop attractive personal traits to offset his dull appearance. He learned to say funny
things. He learned to smoke, and blow smoke rings. He learned to earn money. This would have been a solution to
his difficulty, but in the course of making himself attractive to Woman by developing himself mentally, he
inadvertently became so intelligent an animal that he saw how comical the whole situation was. [p. 92]
[A man delays marriage because he has] The suspicion that if he waited twenty-four hours, or possibly less, he would likely findAnd to hopefully lay to rest the musical question, "Is he really going out with her?" Let me say, "No! No! No! A thousand times No!" All bloggers in the know know that all I ever wanted was to BE Rageboy, not to DO Rageboy. My maidenly virtue now reestablished, can I sell my highly desirable slot on your blogroll on eBay? It should bring a few million Euros, dontcha think?
a lady even more ideally suited to his taste than his finacée. Every man entertained such a suspicion. Entertained it royally. He
was greatly strengthened in his belief by the fact that he kept catching a fleeting glimpse of this imaginary person -- in
restaurants, in stores, in trains. To deny the possibility of her existence would be, he felt, to do a grave injustice to her, to himself,
and to his financée. Man's unflinching desire to give himself and everybody else a square deal was the cause of much of his
disturbance. Man had become, you see, a thinking being. He had come to know enough about permutations and combinations to
realize that with millions of . . . females to choose from, the chances of his choosing the ideal mate were almost zero. [pp. 96, 99;
see also Lorenzo Da Ponte: "He who is faithful to one is cruel to the others." Don Giovanni ]
