The impetus for beginning work on Excerpts From an Online Dating Service was a TV special I saw in 2005 called “Marriages Gone Bad: is Your Spouse Cruising From Home?” or something equally sensational.  At that time I had no idea how pervasive Internet dating/cyber sexual communities were and I really wanted to know more. Now, I’ve always been interested in the underlying meaning of how we as humans interact. Strange little quirks I see on the train going back and forth on my daily commute always catch my attention. I find discovering things like while dining, if you are exposed to television(s) you eat faster and drink more booze and why women buy cars with more than five cup holders over cars with fewer cup management possibilities really exciting. So, this little ten-minute special sent me off on a project that I have been working on – on and off – for three years.

There are a few things that become immediately apparent when you scroll through your first batch of M4W, MW4W, T4M ads. One is, you have no idea what the hell all these three-to-sometimes-ten letter abbreviations mean. After three years I’m still in the dark about how to decipher this insiders code. Another striking aspect of these ads is the instantaneous openness and vulnerability within the medium. This heightened level of frankness is unnerving and completely unthinkable in a non-cyber environment. The third and possibly most pervasive social trait within this Internet subculture is the fluidity of persona and detachment from personal responsibility.

What initially piqued my interest was the amazing level of vulnerability people are willing to show on the Internet, as well as the level of immediate intimacy that develops between people who have never met and may have only communicated a handful of times via e-mail. Divorce, kids, fetishes, dress sizes, issues surrounding religion and faith, earnest searching for love (or at least a good substitute for the night or afternoon), overwhelming loneliness, joy, and plain all-out lust can all be found on any “Casual Encounters” web site. Virtually any topic is freed from the Taboo allowing the community to interact without self-censorship or traditional social filtering. It is unfettered human experience, something we rarely witness outside our own minds conveniently rolled into a few sentences and put in front of an anonymous and captive audience.

Mostly dull and poorly written, these descriptions are not very good advertisements if you were, say, advertising a lawn mower or a new shampoo. But a good many are remarkably personal and sometimes startlingly creative, and some of these make up the core of texts that have become Excerpts. Creativity goes a long way in such a mass of people looking to connect. You want to pop. You want to be fabulous. What can one really say about themselves in a paragraph or two? We as people are too complicated to get into the specifics of ourselves right away, but showing someone your take on life in an individual way is as good a start as any. Sharing maladies seems to be another way people connect. “My wife is a bitch.” “My husband can’t get it up.” Trivial and easily solved issues (Therapy, Viagra, divorce etc.) - frankly boring issues in non-internet life - become as enormous and as glamorous as Hollywood.

Another aspect and maybe the most immediately recognizable and interesting trait of connecting via the Internet is the possibility of personal reinvention. You can be whomever you want. You can walk away at anytime to explore another persona. When you meet someone in a hotel room you can simply say when questioned as to your real identity, “Oh, my driver took the Bentley home” as your rusted Dodge sits quietly and unassumingly in the parking lot, all the while imagining your small basement studio apartment complete with dripping pipes, hotplate and communal bathroom. This is the real life manifestation of a Technicolor Wizard of Oz, this time in HD.

On the Internet people are free to say whatever they please without the fear of social scrutiny, rejection or embarrassment. Anything goes when there is no one checking facts. Most people on the Internet, or at least in this subculture, seem to be the folks we normal-looking people long to be while we self-obsessively pinch the doughnut that has made its home just above the hips on our 5’7.75” pasty frame: 6’3”, toned and muscular, a smile like George Clooney, like a bronzed god etc.

All of the texts in Excerpts From an Online Dating Service are unchanged, with the occasional exception of a little word repetition here and there. Each one is an artifact that highlights some aspect of this amazingly specific and highly stylized Internet subculture. The texts have been gathered from cities all over the United States and Canada and sometimes bare regional bits of language and content. Robo Girls Seeks Titanium Clad Male for example comes from the computer mecca Semi Valley. I find the ads in the song cycle to be beautifully written. I find them all to be somehow intended for an audience larger than the author might have imagined. These ads speak to the human condition and somehow are able to stir feelings we can all relate to.

For example, Afternoon? explores the kind of pull a mother experiences between caring for her kids and fulfilling her needs. She is taking a calculated risk and doesn’t hesitate to let everyone reading the ad know it. She says in relation to what must be her ex or soon to be ex-husband, “discresion [sic] is a must. I love my kids to much to have the corts [sic] give them to him.” She opens the ad with a summation of her emotional state: “I feel alone with my family and my church. I need someone special who can make me feel alive even if just for an afternoon.” Holidaze [sic] looks into one woman’s battle with loneliness on Christmas. She says, “My funds are low - that’s nothing new. How much could it cost to hook up with you? … No gift-wrap needed, that’s for sure. Why can’t there be one day I have some joy?”

The Internet personals ad just might be a new poetic medium. You will hear in the songs how carefully some people piece these advertisements together, consciously poring over word choice; sometimes, a writer inadvertently creates large-scale internal rhyme patterns that spin out over the course of the text. Those people who take their time writing an ad really manage to say something about who they are and how they see life. They give the world something special.

You can hear tracks from Bad Girl? (Excerpts From an Online Dating Service) in the music section of this website or at http://www.myspace.com/nicholasurielargeensemble