How to Meet a Woman (Or at least a 500-pixel image of one)

Internet Marketing uses fantasy to sell the promise of a college degree

A gorgeous blonde in a tight blue sweater, peaking out from behind a tree in the quad. The same blonde, leaning against the Humanities building. Another blonde, this one slender, in the midst of a golden field of mustard flowers. A lovely dark-skinned woman, Latina perhaps, perhaps East Asian, leaning back in her tailored suit against the Business building. Take you back, college boys? Or, if you’re not a college boy, take you anywhere? Like, to what your imagination has told you college must be like?

Well, forget the fact that, for most of us anyway, college wasn’t anything like that, and just feast your eyes on these images, images from ads on the Internet, ads for colleges, yeah, online colleges. It’s like they’re saying, “Check it out, click this ad and get an online degree, and look at all these girls you’ll never, ever, ever get a chance to meet!”

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The ads from Argosy University, one of three institutions marketed by the Education Management Corporation of Pittsburgh, feature women who will attract the eyes of prospective male students, but are more likely intended to represent prospective female students: one exhibiting the attire and posture of a newly minted professional, the other embodying the freedom and happiness a college education can bring. Of course, whether intended for male prospects or not, the fact that these women are extremely attractive ensures that the males will certainly not be shooed away.

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The University of Phoenix, one of five institutions marketed by the Apollo Group, Inc., of Phoenix, takes a somewhat similar approach, though here you have just a tinge of titillation. In the last ad shown, you have a lovely dark-haired girl in a business suit gazing with something between good cheer and adoration into the eyes of a young cohort. The prospective male applicant, the guy sitting in front of this ad with his hand poised on the mouse, is of course meant to see himself as the cohort, sitting happily across from this engaging beauty. All he needs to do now is somehow put out of his mind the pesky fact that it’s an online degree! (You can do it, man! Just click the damn ad! Click it! Click it!)

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But EarnMyDegree.com, a web property of EducationDynamics of Hoboken, NJ, has to be, of all those represented, the least burdened by scruples. Here we have the absolutely scintillating blonde, peaking out, leaning back, blue eyes aglow, light blue sweater taught around her. She’s definitely the star of these ads, but occasionally you’ll see another, like this smiling—some might say, rockin’—headphone-wearing youth, who can be meant to represent nothing other than a prospective fellow student at the college of your choice. Once again, bust out the hammer, ‘cause someone's gonna need a knock over the head: It’s an online degree, man!

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Anyway, good fun as it is wagging my finger, I’m also quick to give a tip o’ the hat, and this one is earned by Kaplan University, the educational institution of Kaplan Inc. of New York. This ad features a character this despicable, middle-aged blogger can relate to. Fair warning, though: Some people just might be too cool for school.

Of Fathers and Sons, Part 3

Posted 1/23/2010

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Thoughts on our children, and what they bring.
Part 3: “Children of Men”

In the last installment, I talked about the tumultuous years that led up to Matthew’s birth in 1978. The years since then have been everything years can be for a large family like ours: painful, trying, routine, joyous, triumphant. But the bottom line is, all is well today—so much so that, when it came my time to speak at the Man Shower, my first words were, “Matthew, you’re going to be a good father because you had a good father.” Our parents have 19 grandchildren now, and three great-grandchildren. Our father has been remarried to a stepmother who is a much-loved and appreciated member of our family, and our mother’s strength through difficult times continues to serve as a shining example as eight of the nine of us (Matthew being the exception) move into middle age.

As the Man Shower closed down in the wee hours, and Matthew and I prepared to leave Kai’s house, Kai thanked me for the story I had told of Matthew’s arrival in the world, pointing out that it was a perspective that only I, of all those present, could have given. He then handed me his copy of the 2006 movie “Children of Men,” Alfonso Cuarón’s gripping apocalyptic tale, which stars Clive Owen, Julianne Moore, Michael Caine, Chiwetel Ejiofor, and Clare-Hope Ashitey. In the film, which is based on the novel by P.D. James, a world gone infertile has descended into chaos after 18 years with no new children. Kai gave me the DVD and asked that all I do in return is “watch it and write something about it.” So here we are.

In the doom-laden world of “Children of Men,” it is a cynical and disillusioned office worker named Theo (played by Clive Owen) who must give the planet hope by carrying out the simple, yet unbelievably challenging tasks that all the sons and fathers at the Man Shower spoke so poignantly about: caring for the mother, and caring for the child. In the film, Cuarón holds a magnifying glass to these challenges by creating a post-apocalyptic wasteland where Theo and a young mother (played by Clare-Hope Ashitey) must run from angry mobs and dodge bullets and bombs. But more importantly, he magnifies the effect of the new child, the import of the baby’s arrival, and the humanity that arises out of the most unexpected places when a baby’s cries are heard.

Twelve days ago, Matthew and Nanette brought their new son, Mateo, into the world. The boy whose arrival was such a blessing now has a baby of his own. Mateo, gladly, will not be called upon to rescue, by his very presence, a family reeling from a jarring transition. He will, however, have an effect on his little family no less profound and no less important. He’ll change them, he’ll challenge them, and he’ll fill them with joy. In fact, I’m sure he already has. We hear constantly about the momentous times we are living in, but all momentous times are made up of smaller, equally momentous events like these. So welcome, Mateo. Thanks, Kai. And once again, in case I haven’t said it in a while, thanks, Matthew.

Of Fathers and Sons, Part 2

Posted 1/21/2010

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Thoughts on our children, and what they bring.
Part 2: Welcome, Matthew

In the last installment, I mentioned Matthew’s arrival into our family. Here’s the condensed version of how it happened and what it meant to us:

In 1974, our father left the house for good, and our family was shattered. Within just a few years, an older brother had turned to drugs, another had decided to forego college, as had an older sister, and two younger sisters had dropped out of high school. What had been a bright future for all of us was now looking very bleak indeed. Certainly, our parents’ split cannot be blamed for all of that, but there is no doubt that it contributed, just as there is no doubt that there were a very many less visible and less dramatic ill effects, from uncertain and awkward moments, hours, and afternoons to divisions within the family, particularly along gender lines. Then, as often happens in troubled times, it was tragedy that pulled us together: In the spring of 1977, a beloved uncle, our mother’s only brother and one of our father’s best friends, was tragically killed by a drunk driver. There were many, many tears; there was an Irish wake; there was a huge hole in our extended family that could never be refilled. As one would expect, our parents reached out to each other for consolation and support. I can only imagine how desperately they must have needed it, and I can’t imagine that there could be anyone else, for either of them, who could truly understand the depth of their loss. From my teen-age viewpoint, the main thing I saw was that my father was present again.

A few months passed and there was a family meeting, which turned out to be a bit of a shock: instead of a reconciliation, which some of us had expected, our parents announced that our mother, 44 years old, was 3 months pregnant. That baby, of course, was Matthew, who came to us in the summer of 1978, four years after my father had left the house, and within months, as I understand it, from when our parents finalized their divorce.

At the Man Shower, I tried to describe all this, but was emotionally overcome and only able to say, “It was broken, and he fixed it,” pointing to my now 31-year-old baby brother. What I would have said if I could have was that our family was, as I’ve said, shattered. Our common purpose was beleaguered, and our common love was in disarray, and this beautiful, feather-light, completely vulnerable little baby forced us all to remember who we were, that we were a family, that we had not only a shared existence, but shared aspirations as well. Despite the fact that I didn’t say all this, Kai—who knows Matthew as well as anyone—seemed to divine it somehow, which led him to bestow on me a small gift.

Next: “Children of Men”

Of Fathers and Sons, Part 1

Posted 1/20/2010

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Thoughts on our children, and what they bring.
Part 1: The Man Shower

It is just a month now since I joined in a gathering in Downey, California, for what was fittingly dubbed a “Man Shower” (think, “baby shower, but with whiskey”). The guest of honor was my baby brother, Matthew, and I’m not kidding when I say “baby brother,” not because he’s a baby—he’s not—but because he is a full 18 years my junior, so to me, he will always be a baby of sorts.

The Man Shower was the brainchild of Matthew’s friend Kai-Ping Liu, and if you don’t know Kai, I strongly suggest you check out his blog, the website and music of his band, Centrevol, and the music of his former band, Concept6, in which Matthew was the drummer, and for which Kai was the creative force. He is a truly inspired soul. At a Man Shower, one eats continuously, drinks finely aged Scotch, smokes cigars—from the superb to the suspect—and plays croquet. And, once all the eating, drinking, smack-talking, and wicket abuse has subsided, the festivities turn toward the thoughtful and conversational, because Kai is as much a contemplative soul as he is a creative one.

So, most of us being older, wiser, and more experienced than Matthew, we all offered our advice and observations about the impending change that he and his wife, Nanette, were facing. When the time came for me to speak, I had no personal experience of fatherhood to share, because unlike Matthew, I have chosen not to be a father. I did, however, have a couple of things to say about children coming into a family, and what they can mean to us, because Matthew’s own arrival was pretty unique. He is the ninth child in our family, and 11 years younger than his closest sibling. To put that in perspective, in the first 8 years of their marriage, our parents brought 7 children into the world. But that’s just scratching the surface.

Next: Welcome, Matthew

Writers: Here’s What You Need to Know

Some of publishing’s best and brightest offer up stuff you can put into your brain.

Last weekend was Alumni Weekend for the Queens University of Charlotte MFA in Writing program, and if the term “alumni weekend” conjures images of idle and pointless days of golf rounds and cocktails, I can assure you, these were anything but. Sixty graduates and near-graduates gathered with 12 of the industry’s top editors and agents for spirited and vivifying discourse: in the workshop, in the seminar, around the meal table, and in the barroom.
On Saturday, a Publishing Panel featured agents and editors talking about what it takes to publish a book. During the Q&A, inspiration and desperation joined forces for fellow Bay Area writer and Queens grad Christin Rice, who had the presence to ask the following:

What is the one piece of information you have in your brains that you think we should have in our brains?

The following are some of the answers, paraphrased and bastardized in tyrannical fashion by yours truly:

• Chris Parris-Lamb, agent with The Gernert Company:
  
  “Our industry does not exist so writers can publish books. Our industry exists so readers will have something to read.”
  
  In other words, the fact that your manuscript doesn’t make it into print doesn’t necessarily mean it isn’t a great manuscript. All the connections must be made, the agent must fall in love with the work and persuade an editor to do the same, and both must be ready to put their hearts and souls behind it. And while it may seem harsh, the only thing the writer can do to influence all this is to faithfully and passionately write his or her story, and nothing else.
  


• Megan Lynch, editor at Riverhead Books:
  
  “Focus on something small and get that right before taking on something substantial.”
  
  I translated this as, get the short form first—the short story for fiction writers, the personal essay for non-fiction writers—then move on to the novel or full memoir. I may have translated it that way because that’s the path I’ve followed, but I think the wisdom is clear: a book-length project is a huge investment, and the chances of that investment paying off are improved if it has been preceded by a series of successful smaller investments.
  


• Tina Wexler, agent with International Creative Management:
  
  “Take. Your. Time.”
  
  This was a consistent message from all the editors and agents present: If, by chance, they get a chance to read your work, are impressed by it, provide feedback, and ask for a revision, they are happy to wait many months, even years, to see that revision, because it is a sign the writer is serious and is making sure the work is at its best before sending it back. This (obviously) applies to that first submission as well: make sure it’s ready.
  


• Amy Williams, agent with McCormick/Williams:
  
  “There’s nothing more frustrating than spending a good part of the weekend giving a close reading to a manuscript, then getting back to the writer and hearing, ‘Oh yeah, I’ve been doing some rework on that section.’”
  
  Again, take your time and ensure that, before you submit, you have brought the work to its absolute final, most complete, and best conclusion. One of my fellow graduates reminded me that our favorite, Fred Leebron, gave very similar advice during our days at Queens: You know a piece is ready to submit when you can read each and every page and not feel the impulse to make a single, solitary, miniscule change.

If this is all wisdom you writers have heard before, take this as a refresher; if it’s new, well, this calls for a quote from Spicoli: “Read it. Know it. Live it.”

In Case You Missed it… The State of American Journalism

The Atlantic Monthly delivers a clear, readable assessement of news media failures in the 21st Century.

Inexplicably, an insightful, intelligent, and supremely readable 3-part Special Report on the state of American journalism that appears in this month’s Atlantic Monthly was not chosen as the cover story. Instead, the editors chose to highlight an open letter to George W. Bush about his administration’s torture policy. It was a decision that had the unfortunate effect of placing W’s face on the cover of a national magazine again, which, for me anyway, has two things in common with torture itself: No. 1, viewing W’s smug, folksy, down-home (in other words, dumb-ass) countenance is, in itself, a form of torture; and No. 2, it is something I had hoped would never, ever, ever happen again. But the editors’ decision aside, the Special Report on the Media is one you should not miss.

• Dissecting the media coverage in the weeks following President Obama’s nomination of Sonia Sotomayor to the Supreme Court, Mark Bowden explains how virtually all the major news organizations in America have abdicated their news gathering responsibilities to the partisan propagandists of the blogosphere—and in so doing, are threatening to redefine (not in a good way) what journalism means to both the society at large and the individuals who still work as, or aspire to become, real journalists.
  
  
• In an enthusiastic recap of his experience watching Al Jazeera, Robert D. Kaplan explains how the Qatar-based international news network has established itself as a useful, energetic, broad-based, and far-reaching alternative to the news networks of the West.
  
  
• In an excerpt from a new book, The Curse of the Mogul, two academics and a media consultant strip the veneer off media moguls’ claims that the web and citizen journalists are killing their businesses. They instead indict the moguls themselves for the questionable decision-making and business practices that have in fact led to the tenuous fates of their media empires.

And perhaps my favorite part of the series is the John Cuneo cartoon (below) that accompanies that last article, which—rightly, in my opinion—neglects to endow the unapologetic conservative media emperor Rupert Murdoch with a rather crucial bit of anatomy. (Look closely.)

Professional Tennis, Cheapened Again

Just one small example of the pollution of professional tennis…

If you’ve ever watched a professional tennis match from the cheap seats, there’s a pretty good chance you’ve experienced something bizarre bordering on surreal. Whether at one of North America’s largest tennis venues, the Tennis Garden at Indian Wells or Arthur Ashe Stadium in New York, or just at a local tournament like San Jose’s SAP Open, which I attended last night, your cheap seat, in the early rounds of a tournament, will be separated from the tennis court itself by rows and rows of empty seats. You’ll sit trying to track, with your woefully inadequate human eyes, a fuzzy yellow ball less than 2-5/8 inches in diameter that is often traveling 100 or more miles per hour. In the many lengthy pauses between the action, when players towel nonexistent sweat off limbs and facial skin and pretend to examine each and every one of those 2-5/8-inch golden orbs, you’ll scan those rows of empty seats, some of them in the very first row, and you’ll scan the dotted speckle of fans sprinkled over the rest of the seats in the venue, and eventually your eyes will land on the people sitting dutifully in their assigned seats 10, 15, even 20 rows further away than you are and you’ll think to yourself, “What the hell are those people doing up there? There’s no way they can see shit from up there,” and then your next thought will be, “Wait a minute, what the hell am I doing here? I can’t see shit either!”

Welcome to professional tennis. For years, tennis luminaries like John McEnroe have implored tournament organizers to loosen assigned-seat restrictions for the betterment of the sport. They have wisely suggested that, if someone buys a seat but does not occupy it, it should be made available to those fans who actually took the time to drive to the venue to see the action live. If Fatso Bloatard, who seems to have so much money he can shoot $200 for a tennis ticket and then blow off the matches, actually decides to raise his bulbous ass off his Strata-lounger and have his driver take him to the stadium, then all he’s got to do is show his ticket and the cheap-seat loser like me who has been occupying his seat can dutifully return to the skies of the upper deck. And of course, everyone knows that by the time the action stretches late into the evening, as it often does, when the celebrity singles players wrap up their match and take their custom apparel, their Gucci tennis bags, their towel-worn skin, and their magazine-cover contorted screaming faces back to their five-star hotels, ain’t no chance Fatso is getting out of that chair. So when the late-evening match—typically a doubles match—starts, instead of a sprinkling of disconnected, distant spectators spread across the entire mass the stadium, you would have a cluster of devoted fans leaning in on the action, charging the players’ energies, and generating an infectious energy of its own. And, perhaps even more importantly, TV audiences would not be looking in on a sport that, judging by all the empty seats, generates about as much enthusiasm as a rerun of “Hondo,” but would instead look in on something akin to a college basketball game, albeit with long breaks in the action for players to towel themselves off and “examine” the balls.

In case you haven’t figured it out, I’ve had several of these surreal early-round cheap-seat experiences myself, including multiple visits to both Indian Wells and Arthur Ashe Stadium. But my experience last night in San Jose—and it’s very difficult for me to write this, because I am both a San Jose native and a tennis fan—absolutely took the cake. With my wife and several friends, I went to see the evening session semifinal matches of both the singles and doubles. First off and unfortunately, the overall turnout was pretty lame, so there were plenty of those $200 seats sitting empty in the front sections of HP Pavilion. We had secured excellent baseline seats for $67 each, and from there we looked out on a venue about 1/3 occupied. During the first match, the singles semi that Andy Roddick managed to fritter away by playing the coddled, spoiled tennis brat role to a tee, we learned that the doubles semi that was supposed to follow had been cancelled because of an injury to James Blake. The tournament organizers managed to pull together an exhibition match to fill the bill—a repeat of the semifinal that had been played earlier in the day: Jarkko Neimenen and Rohan Bopanna vs. Stephen Huss and Ross Hutchins. Now, one would think, given that this was an exhibition match, an 8-game pro set between players who had already played and were planning to do little more than have fun out there, and since half of that 1/3 occupancy was already on its way out of the building, this would be an ideal opportunity for the tournament organizers to garner a little goodwill and jack up the enthusiasm and the energy by announcing open seating for the remainder of the evening. An ideal opportunity that would also have given the volunteer ushers the rest of the night off. Instead, the ushers remained in place, dutifully checking the ticket stubs of everyone re-entering any section of seating and ensuring that the dispersed, disjointed, disengaged audience remained just that—even the poor bastards up in Row 18 of the upper deck. I mean, it was 10 p.m., and it was an exhibition for heaven’s sake!

The crime here is that tennis is a glorious game. It is art and drama and dance and all the trappings of sport—speed, strength, power, and finesse—all rolled into one. But in so many ways, whether it be the cheating, obnoxious “win-uber-alles” participants one encounters at the club level or the misguided, elitist ignorance one encounters at the pro level, it is a clear, flowing mountain stream that is forever being shamefully polluted. So often, those of us bending to drink from its waters end up instead turning our noses up in disgust.

“We should reach out to people to try to go after the fans the way other sports do. Because we can't just depend on the fact that it is a great game.”—John McEnroe