From zero to hero, online dating pros offer tips

Kenneth Li , Reuters
Published: Thursday, February 14, 2008
NEW YORK (Reuters) - "Long walks on the beach, a passion for music and movies" just isn't going to cut it anymore in the rough and tumble world of online dating.

Struggling at finding love on the Web? Start by blaming your online dating profile, which may contain out-of-date photos, bland descriptions, or one too many white lies. Correcting these common mistakes should go a long way toward avoiding another Valentine's Day alone.

"Look around; you tell me -- how good are profiles these days," said Evan Marc Katz, dating expert and author of "I Can't Believe I'm Buying This Book: A Commonsense Guide to Successful Internet Dating." Katz has written some 500 profiles for clients on his online profile writing service, E-Cyrano.

"People, after years of doing this, they've gotten the message that they've got to do better," he said. "But most people don't know what that means."

Just ask Mark Sweeney how the wrong profile can doom dating. Sweeney, 49, a gay retired mental help aid in upstate New York who bought his first computer last year on friends' recommendations, had been out of the dating scene for seven years.

When he first put up his dating profile, he suffered through a number of bad experiences and mismatches. "People were just looking to regularly exchange with as many people as they can," he said. "They were just perverts."

Sweeney later joined Match.com, which helped him polish his image. "They can help put into words if you're not a good writer."

He said his new and improved profile helped him land a date 3-1/2 months ago with Joe, who lived 30 minutes away. They're heading to Bermuda on a cruise soon.

Still, Sweeney admits, he initially worried that he wouldn't find anyone online. "It was kind of depressing at first," he said.

LOOKING FOR LOVE?

If you're alone, you're in good company. Some 82 million adults were unmarried in the United States in 2000, or about 40 percent of the population, according to the U.S. Census bureau. The unmarried adult population is projected to reach 106 million by 2010.

"There's a lot of people looking for love; they don't know what they don't know," Katz said.

Avoid being one of them by starting out with a few tips.

The profile sprucing begins with the very first line -- your user name. Make it pop, advises Gail Laguna, spokeswoman for Spark Networks, owner of sites including JDate.com, ChristianMingle.com and BlackSingles.com.

Forego generic abbreviations of your name such as JSmith101. Laguna suggested something more expressive, like Live2Laugh or WhiteWaterWarrior.

Experts also suggest that you try to be more specific in your profile. Anyone can say they love candle-lit dinners and sunsets, said Janet Siroto, the editorial director of Match.com, a division of IAC/InterActiveCorp .

"Try to replace them with things that are more specific or unique to you," she said. "If you're a great vegetable gardener, not everyone can say that. You like bluegrass music on weekends, share that."

Paltrow and Martin Consider Adopting Brooklyn Baby

Gwyneth Paltrow and Chris Martin are considering adopting an orphan from the actress' hometown of New York.

Amid reports the Oscar winner is pregnant with the couple's third child, Paltrow insists she's eager to follow in the footsteps of pal Madonna and adopt.

She tells the New York Daily News, "We might get one from Brooklyn. No baby is more helpless than another baby. And I'm a New York girl."

Paltrow also plays down her recent hospitalization for a "gastrointestinal situation" insisting she is fully recovered.

She adds, "I feel great -- people made a big deal about nothing."

Kate Moss wedding rumour

Kate Moss is set to make a "special announcement", sparking further speculation she is to wed her rocker lover.

The supermodel - who was recently seen inquiring about weddings at London's Claridge's hotel - is taking her pals to Amsterdam where she is going to tell them some "important news".

A source close to Kate - who has been dating The Kills guitarist Jamie Hince since last August - said: "Kate wanted to go away with five female friends and tell them some important news. She had told them that she wanted to go to Amsterdam to have some girlie fun and also to make a special announcement."

Her friends are speculating the trip could even be her hen night.

The source added: "Some of her mates think it could well be a bachelorette party but Kate won't confess until they are there.

"But knowing Kate and her fun-loving attitude it would be no surprise if it was."

Last week, mother-of-one Kate was seen picking up wedding brochures at Claridge's sparking rumours she plans to hold her nuptials there followed by a lavish reception in one of the many decadent ballrooms.

A source said: "Kate looked radiant when she came by to pick up the wedding brochures. She has the air of a woman who is loved and looked after."

Kylie Minogue Back with Martinez?

Kylie Minogue has taken the French boyfriend who broke her heart back after he promised to marry her, according to new reports. The Aussie pop superstar has been spotted hanging out with actor Olivier Martinez in recent months, but has constantly dismissed rumors she's back in her ex-lover's arms.

But, after the former couple was spotted taking a romantic late-night stroll together in Paris at the end of last week, media sources have gone into overdrive suggesting Minogue and Martinez are an item once again. (View photos.)

A photo taken of the pair, which appeared in the British tabloids over the weekend, shows Minogue leaning playfully against the actor as he reportedly walked her back to her hotel. Britain's Daily Mail reports the couple has reunited after Martinez spent months chasing a reconciliation, promising to settle down with the pop singer.

Martinez's father Robert refuses to confirm or deny romance reports, but tells the Sydney Daily Telegraph, "We all love seeing Kylie in Paris, especially Olivier. She makes everybody very happy."

Minogue and Martinez dated for four years and he helped her through a cancer battle. They split at the beginning of 2007 after the actor was photographed kissing Spanish actress Penelope Cruz, and reported to be dating model Sarai Givati.

Cavallari's Book of Love

Valentine’s Day is almost here, but don’t even think of giving a box of chocolates or a dozen roses to Kristin Cavallari.

The reality-show starlet is only 21 years old, but she says she’s not looking to celebrate the love and romance holiday this year. “I’m boycotting it,” Cavallari said at the Victoria’s Secret pre-Super Bowl "What Is Sexy?" party on Saturday. “I’m going to be in Vegas with my girls, so no valentine!”

Cavallari has had her share of love woes, so much so that she says she may try to put together a book about dating. The tome, she said, will be about “how to get over breakups.”

Even so, Cavallari spent some time at the party chatting with her ex-beau Brody Jenner.

And that’s not all. She also hung out with her maybe onetime flame, Arizona Cardinals quarterback and former USC champ Matt Leinart.

I’ll have more Super Bowl dish later today, but if you need a fix right this minute, make sure to click over to Hollywood Party Girl.

The Foxy, the Dead, and the Foxier

Seeing the expanded DVD version of Death Proof is a definitively different experience from seeing it as part of Grindhouse in the theaters (if you were one of us few who managed to make the effort). Tarantino's film — which was the bottom half of the Grindhouse double feature — is really two films in itself — and maybe more, and at least one of those is a deconstructive art film, and who wants to deal with that after the 100+ minutes of over-the-top gonzo blood splattering which is Robert Rodriguez's Planet Terror, and assorted trailers? Even the best of early Godard, such as Breathless and Pierrot Le Fou, can be an ordeal after an hour or so, due to all their Brechtian devices keeping one from getting "swept up" in the narrative, as it were. For me at least, Godard's films are better the second or third time anyway, and the same seems true of Tarantino's Death Proof. Like the best of "cult cinema," it offers pleasures both transgressive and visceral, and like the best of "art cinema," it offers deconstruction of same, even as it's roaring along at 200 mph.
The biggest addition to the DVD "extended cut" is a scene at a rural Tennessee gas station that bridges the two halves of the film and adds enough termite art-style details to confirm Death Proof as a work of post-nouvelle vague gold. What was once just seemingly extraneous female characterization, car stunts and highway safety film gore mixed unevenly together becomes — with this scene — an edgy intellectual critique of the aging male gaze and its tenuous relationship to feminine bonding rituals that — once completed — will preclude it, in a sacrificial orobous-like snap of the neck as past and present zip past each other, eliminating the need for the male spectator, who assumed he was safe from the perspective of his death-proof viewing chair. Oh foolish vain male viewer, beware!
French theorists no doubt will love this restored gas station scene, recognizing in it a quadruple-Lolita-simulacrum: the ghosts of Baudrillard and Nabokov hang back in the empty sky, slowly filling up the film in both directions like the wave of spilled petrol in The Birds. Rather than being just a "normal" convenience store, the gas station convenience mart carries a wide array of magazines such as Film Comment, Fangoria, and Pulp Cinema. There's even Italian Vogue (which the cashier keeps "under the counter,") the mere mention of which causes the girls to perk up with desire. The mix of cineaste wish-fulfillment with consumerism-satire is a direct link to l'esprit de Godard but true to his American auteur roots, Tarantino keeps it all sun-baked and rural. The spirit of Baudrillard may be in the back seat, taking notes, but the spirit of Russ Meyer is clearly at the wheel.
This new scene fills in some important story info that was lost in the edited theatrical version: we learn these girls here are part of a location film shoot. The never-seen Christian Simonson is the director, the same guy Jungle Julia (Sydney Tamilia Poitier) was dating in the previous segment. Now the foursome is much more "professional." They are film people: Lee (Mary Elizabeth Winstead) and Abernathy (Rosario Dawson) are the beauties, and Kim (Tracy Thoms) and Zoe Bell (playing herself) are badass stuntwomen. As the scene begins, Abernathy lounges in the back seat of their car, her feet sticking up through the rear window while Lee sits in the driver's seat, singing along to her iPod. Stuntman Mike watches them from his death car, parked a few spots away, forming his obsession (like Tarantino presumably, he has a real thing for strong women with cute feet).
The playful furor over the Italian Vogue could have ended with the girls buying and forgetting about it, burying it under newspapers or tossing it out of the car after a precursory flip-through (ala Jeff Beck's guitar neck in Blow Up); instead here comes Stuntman Mike (Kurt Russell), the psycho-motive maniac who spies, leers and otherwise scopes the girls in the lounging, even licking one of their toes on the sly, as he lines them up in his sights as the next target for his obscene auto-erotic Crash-collision practice. For Mike, all these girls are sweeter than Italian Vogue, all the more so for being unavailable to him at any price.
Just by being "present" in le mise-en-scene, the men in Death Proof — Stuntman Mike included — become, in effect, Bosleys (to use the Charlie's Angels vernacular). Only the men who are never on camera maintain a "Charlie"-style innocence; all the men onscreen seem to know this and cringe in the presence of these goddesses like unworthy eunuchs. Stuntman Mike, however, is the only one who does anything about it, lashing out with automotive fury, a fury born from the burden of immaturity and age in tandem. He's too old to win these girls, too young to give up gracefully. When it's hinted that Rose McGowan's character might go home with him after their evening in the Texas Chili Parlor, she turns around and whispers loud enough for him to hear, "He's old enough to be my dad!" He doesn't act hurt, then, but it's only because he's a sociopath; his revenge is already laid out. If he can't play, he will wreck the game.
With Tarantino's sly penchant for deconstruction, the Stuntman Mike voyeur scenes carry the queasy feeling of sudden proximity of the Lacanian object petit a. For my non-Lacanian readers, this translates to a loss of fixed identity in the presence of your idealized desire, which is usually sexual and is so strong that it incites panic in your average guy, and homicide in your average Norman Bates. Coming into contact with the petit a is akin to being suddenly confronted by the end credits to the film of your life when the movie is only halfway through. There are only two ways to survive this trauma: art (transformation/sublimation) or attack (elimination). The director sublimates his desire for the actress into the film, capturing the image of his chosen goddess and making her his own that way. The artist paints her, the viewer locks into her identity as a baby watching giant mommy vacuum from the safety of the playpen. Unlike us lucky invisible camera-eye viewers, the embittered stuntman can only run her over.
In real life there are straight males who can be friends with beautiful, smart women and not let feel the need to have sex with them: usually these are artists; able to harness the otherwise unbearable attraction to a nobler purpose. Nonetheless, any man who continues hanging around young hotties for more than a decade or so becomes suddenly old. He has to deal with the feeling he is a bit of a creep, living in a state of arrested development. Gus Van Sant and Larry Clark get bad reputations mooning over the hunky mid-western male skate punk set, and everyone suspects Samuel Jackson's been sleeping with Christina Ricci (above) in Black Snake Moan. The truth may be less corrupting and more positive, but it thrives on the close proximity of corruption and negativity; scandal is as foul-smelling mulch to its fragrant fruit. Sam Jackson's preacher in Moan would not have the same grace and power in our eyes if the Christina Ricci character was, say, old and unattractive. Thus the desire is always present, no matter how saintly those involved; it can't be fulfilled, only transmuted — whether it's turned to shit or gold is perhaps a matter of personal alchemical discipline.
Meanwhile, the girls your own age are getting old, man. You look in the rearview mirror and see wrinkles around your eyes; isn't this what horror movies are all about? Ask not for whom the bell tolls? Tarantino was already exploring that shit in Jackie Brown; by the time he gets to Death Proof he has found a dozen new ways to rationalize his continued role in these girls' lives: he's the bartender; he's the off-screen director; he's in the death-proof driver's seat and he's not afraid to take a punch.
Thus the new adult cinema: weathered old dudes like the Big Liebowski, Stuntman Mike, and Elvis in Bubba Ho Tep, standing at the lip of the void and making crazy surfing gestures to mask their world-weary terror. It's a terror you freeze-frame on; you play it back in slow motion in a loop of weiderholungszwang.

The only alternative to that slow, sad waste-away is the auto-erotic release, a la Ballard's Crash. Because Stuntman Mike is no longer tied to the movies and TV, he is cut out of the loop that would allow him even a cursory role in the lives of these packs of cool girls. Once inside the screen he is now an outsider, neither in nor out of the movie (re: his continual acknowledgments of the camera).
When walking out of Grindhouse last spring I felt confused and bothered by Death Proof; I loved the shock of the ending, but felt that overall its construction was slipshod. It was too sure of itself; it had too much pointless exposition for characters so casually slaughtered. But now, seeing it on its own, without Planet Terror still pulsing through my synapses, I realize Death Proof is simply another step forward for the titanic and magnificent poet whom the angels name Tarantino. The best cult films always shock us and alienate us just a little the first time; they are transgressive in that they spread our boundaries for us. But if we return for another viewing, we may find a whole new film waiting for us, one with cool new catchphrases we can add to our lexicon; the film has changed us, so seems changed itself. And so obsession creeps in to the watching process, the movie becomes a persona training manual. It's we and the eternal auteur looking at each other through an identical mirror-keyhole eye whom the angels named Janet Leigh.

France's President Weds Former Model

French President Nicolas Sarkozy got married Saturday to former super model Carla Bruni, becoming the first sitting French president in more than 70 years to tie the knot. Lisa Bryant reports on the marriage from Paris.

President Sarkozy's marriage to Italian model-turned-singer Carla Bruni was widely expected, and confirmed by Paris district mayor Francois Lebel who presided over the ceremony.
Lebel told France-Info radio the marriage, at the Elysee Palace, was a family affair with only a few guests present. It lasted just 20 minutes and was celebrated at the end by toasts raised with orange juice. The mayor said he was aware the marriage would take place for the last 10 days. He noted the event was exceptional, adding the bride wore white.
Mr. Sarkozy, who divorced his second wife Cecilia in October, had been dating Bruni for a few months. Their relationship was highly publicized in the media, apparently not to the liking of the French. Surveys found that while many French did not mind the affair, they did mind the fact it was so public.
Meanwhile, Mr. Sarkozy's poll ratings have been plummeting in recent weeks, with one survey published this week giving him only 41 percent support among those questioned.
Experts say many French citizens worry about their shrinking purchasing power and feel the French president has failed to deliver on promises to turn around the country's lagging economy.

A Short Introduction to Lindsay's New Maybe, Sorta, Kinda Boyfriend

It's always great when a big starlet like Lindsay Lohan is linked to a small-town boy. The local paper gets so excited, and we're able to learn more about him than from any tabloid.
After being spotted leaving the Four Seasons with Linds in New York, Jeremy Greene quickly became her latest rumored suitor, and this is what we found out from his local Maine paper, the Morning Sentinel:
He wears the hood of his jacket over his baseball hats. (Note to Jeremy: Please stop that.)
Ali Lohan is hoping he makes a serious love connection with her big sis. During the interview with the paper, she texted him: "I asked her, and she said you're very handsome." Score!
He's not sure he'll be able to save our Lohan, but he said, "I think I could probably be a good, positive person in her life."
He would like his own reality show. Get in line, dude.
With a smile, he said, "I'm not saying I'm Lindsay's boyfriend—I'm not saying that at all. We're just friends." We know what that smile means.
It was Dina Lohan that brought him into Lindsay's life.
And finally, if you would like to hear more from this budding young musician, check out "The One" and "Mo' Money" on his MySpace. That way you'll be able to say you knew him when.
Considering Lindsay's dating record, we're not sure if we should actually file any of this away into the long-term memory section of our brain. However, if Dina is behind all this, we have a feeling he'll be around a lot longer than that snowboarder guy Linds met in rehab. What was his name?