As I’ve been looking at Missed Connections this week, I’ve found that they’re creative fodder for a bunch of artists, writers, social experimenters and data visualizers. Here are some of my favorites:
m-for-f: My lovely and clever friend Blaire Siefken writes these fictional posts about herself from a male perspective. Sometimes the man is someone she went on a date with, other times an imagined peeping Tom. She doesn’t post them on Craigslist, but she does read the Missed Connections faithfully. “Mostly for entertainment, but it would be fabulous to find I caught somebody’s eye someday.”
My New Year’s Dream: New Year’s Eve, 2010. Saw you through your windows on Broadway, donned in matching bird pajamas. Top: Little birds with winter hats on, with the tag line “Life is Tweet.” Bottoms: A cascade of hats with similar birds using them for nests or perches. Watched you drink the half bottle of wine (that you stingily transported from your parent’s home) while watching 30 Rock. You’re right…you are Liz Lemon. I want to congratulate you on not cutting your hair with craft scissors; that was a smart choice on your part. Happy New Year.
Shooting Chartreuse: You were the woman shooting Chartreuse at the Idle Hour last night. Red lipstick, Carhartt jacket, long johns visible above your jeans…being cajoled into “one more” by myself and the sweet bartender, constantly (nervously) playing with your right earring. I was the man from Maine who dismantled your bike and, in spite of your insistence that you were just fine, drove you home, and waited just long enough at your front door to make you think that I might like to kiss you.
Very Small Array does super-cool, lovely things with data. Like this very nice Missed Connections map a few years back that shows where the posts emanate from, state-by-state.
Jamba Juice. Huh. See a larger version here.
Then there’s Paul Shortt, a Kansas City artist who takes Missed Connections from the Internet and puts them back out in the spots they originated from. Like this cake, bearing a post from a woman smitten with a man she saw in the checkout line at Price Chopper:
He’s slipped Missed Connections into books at Barnes and Noble and written them on lipstick in bathroom stalls, too. Have a look.
And last, there’s Ships that Pass, a blog co-curated by Brett Fletcher Lauer. The premise is to post fake Missed Connections on Craigslist and then re-post them, and any responses they get, on their tumblr.
MISS YOUR ROAST BEEF HEART w4m / 39 / Dean Street, Brooklyn
The night we met I had two things in mind: a ride home and my finger in your waxy ear. Now they are tearing down that old bar and it makes me feel like yellow paper. I miss your roast beef heart, Dally.
Before we had eleven kids, before we moved to the sticks like miniature Indian schoolgirls huddling against a sandstorm in bright red saris, time was everywhere, heavy as a cast iron bath, toxic as a round of Telephone Operator. You tell me we are broke. We are broke like that apartment on Clinton that had swastikas in the tiles because it was built before the Nazis and evil even existed! You tell me we are old. We are old like diamonds, Dally. Fabulous, shining karaoke diamonds. Joey B sold the diner. Bonnie Blanche and Angie are ghosts for the west. But has the line gone gone? Black black? NO. It is GOOD LUCK to have kids with head lice, to let someone’s else lunch stink the F train. Prospect Park will come and go over THEIR heads. Eighty-eight years ago my great grandfather’s band played Concert Grove. His young son stood to the side, tapping one foot while my grandmother, his wife-to-be, as just a girl, danced under the pavilion. THEY NEVER MET. But, Dally, we did. I can assure you, eighteen children on my breasts, we did. You want to know where the money for babysitters is going to come from? I don’t know! You want a vasectomy? Fine! But come back to bed, Dally. Don’t miss me. True love always. Blue, blue, blue forever. Look up from your droid. I swear I’d make the whole thing up for you.
via Samantha Hunt
Actual Response to the Ad:
Dear Matterhorn
Your dally etude gets to me. How is it your posterity multiplies in the ruins? In how many Bensonhurst back lots or Western Montana reclamation sites does a cast iron tub fill with wreckage and make soil? Lord knows we get our hands loamy with the matter.
I stayed as long as I could reads the epitaph, but the body squirms. Across this epistemological body I drove your brother’s beater west and time exchanged it for a bonnie camilla and reset the compass rose. Now at this window with the valley’s shuddering fever within me, the crummy leaves have prettied the hew of wet life.
I wish most there were a microphone and a love in the air. The one that makes me laugh she said, and threw her arms around my neck. Today I commit to writing your Louderhorn in a what-can-it-hurt aching to be nearer you and blue and blue and blue and blue.
I have as many knees as you have breasts.
