Wordplay

Photo by Ryan Pinto/Alligator

An Evening with Diablo Cody:

This is a woman who has permanent nerve damage in her left foot thanks to stripper pole injury. She can never wear high heels again. As if she’d want to. Just as long as they’re white (men prefer white shoes, so she’s found) and weirdly orthopedic, they’ll do. Last night her kicks sported black cat heads.

This is a woman who loves roller coasters (she’s planning a trip to Canada just for the coasters soon) and graphic novels and boys hands.

This is a woman who likes to write in a Starbucks..in a Target.

This is a woman who is tremendously fascinating and ironically fascinated with the idea that she just won an Oscar for her first screenplay, Juno (applause).
The ever-popular Mike Foley, journalism professor and George Carlin fan, moderated the Cody appearance a la James Lipton style.

No longer the self-professed “princess of snark,” Cody has decided the world isn’t such a bad place. Hell, she can say something nice about anyone.
Paris Hilton?
“Paris Hilton loves animals.”
Touche.

She’s changed names (when rumors began to surface about her being the “bitchy” stripper), hometowns (she up and went to New Orleans after winning the Oscar because…just because) and jobs (as long as she could “porn-shui” her office– the way your cubicle is arranged so as to offer the best circumstances for watching porn on your computer without being caught by superiors). But after all this L.A. glitz, has she “sold out?” wondered Foley. After much confusion about what that really meant, she guesses that no, she hasn’t. But she’s learned a few things about how to make films…umm, movies (she constantly corrects herself), what actors really do (she could never be one) and how people will always blame her success on how she’s “pretty” although those same people told her three years ago that she had no sex appeal whatsoever.

So this Brook Busey, this Bon-Bon, this Diablo Cody, this ex-stripper-turned-phone-sex-operator-turned writer is just trying to ride the wave. And hell, if she’d known her most recent pseudonym would be inscribed on an Oscar, she might have picked something a little better.

It is widely known that comedian George Carlin is a poet extraordinaire and professor Mike Foley not only agrees but thought it pertinent that we begin lecture yesterday with a bit of that classic Carlin wordplay. Mind you, this is only an excerpt of his “Modern Man” bit, which is performed at top speeds with such a deliberate audacity that you can’t help but be sucked in:

“I’m a modern man, a man for the millennium. Digital and smoke free. A diversified multi-cultural, post-modern deconstruction that is anatomically and ecologically incorrect. I’ve been up linked and downloaded, I’ve been inputted and outsourced, I know the upside of downsizing, I know the downside of upgrading. I’m a high-tech low-life. A cutting edge, state-of-the-art bi-coastal multi-tasker and I can give you a gigabyte in a nanosecond!

I’m new wave, but I’m old school and my inner child is outward bound. I’m a hot-wired, heat seeking, warm-hearted cool customer, voice activated and bio-degradable. I interface with my database, my database is in cyberspace, so I’m interactive, I’m hyperactive and from time to time I’m radioactive.

Behind the eight ball, ahead of the curve, ridin’ the wave, dodgin’ the bullet and pushin’ the envelope. I’m on-point, on-task, on-message and off drugs. I’ve got no need for coke and speed. I’ve got no urge to binge and purge. I’m in-the-moment, on-the-edge, over-the-top and under-the-radar. A high-concept, low-profile, medium-range ballistic missionary. A street-wise smart bomb. A top-gun bottom feeder. I wear power ties, I tell power lies, I take power naps and run victory laps. I’m a totally ongoing big-foot, slam-dunk, rainmaker with a pro-active outreach. A raging workaholic. A working rageaholic. Out of rehab and in denial!”

Watch Carlin’s Modern Man in full.

Things I learned today:

-Men’s Health will not only gladly publish your article on rotator cuff strains, they will glitz it up with Flash drop down menus, animations and a running man with targets on his body.

-The absence of a college degree by no means limits your journalistic capabilities. Take for instance Anne Hull of the Washington Post, who spread her wisdom to my peers and I this week. Her Walter Reed Army Medical Center exposé is sure to grant her a Pulitzer prize this year and she says it’s because she learned how to be a nobody. When push came to shove, she took notes on the only material she had available and simply transcribed her arms and thighs when she got back to the hotel. “Watch life unfold organically,” she says. Simply divine.

Photo by Scott Robertson / The Independent Florida Alligator

-If you want to grow old with the one you love, drink a lot of wine and read Real Simple. Not sure why one reader’s response to the question “What is the secret to a good marriage?” gave me a tickle, but it did:

I once asked an elderly neighbor this very same question. He and his wife had been married more than 50 years. He replied, “Oh, my dear, it’s really very simple. My wife and I agreed long ago that I’d make all the big decisions and she’d make all the little decisions. And in all these years together, there just haven’t been any big decisions.”
Cecilia Saad
Washington, D.C.

-I should do something about this wasteful I-cancelled-my-printing-job-halfway-so-there-is-only-one-line-on-the-top printer paper pile. Maybe I’ll make more useless mini books (from Design Sponge) so I can cut up some old magazines while I’m saving the world!

Just because I do consider myself an integrated part of the online community, especially now with my constant self image feed, I felt particularly touched by a excerpt I came across while finishing some TV & Electronic Culture reading.

In the Information Bomb, Paul Virilio writes:

“Let us now take an example whose significance is widely misrecognized: that of ‘live-cams’, those video imaging devices which have been set up all over the place and which are only accessible through the Internet.
Though apparently aimless and insignificant, the phenomenon is nonetheless spreading to all parts of an increasing number of countires: from San Francisco Bay to Jerusalem’s Wailing Wall, by way of the offices and apartments of a few exhibitionists, the camera enables you to discover in real time what is going on at the other end of the planet at that very moment.
Here the computer is no longer simply a device for consulting information sources, but an automatic vision machine, operating within the space of an entirely virtualized geographical reality.”

By no means do I consider myself an exhibitionist but I do see his “virtualized geographical reality.” And in some small part of my brain I can see myself getting lost in this world of visual pleasures if I wanted let go of the normal constraints of my day. I could see the world by one of Virilio’s ‘live-cams’, but I could only see. There is no footprint or history of me in that place and, honestly, isn’t that why we travel? Not to say that I’ve seen Rome…but that Rome has seen me?

“Sometimes it bothers me to put my words on paper. Set in ranks, they argue I possessed a “life” (as in Lives of the Artists), one, actual and limited, and that it will become as hurtless, juiceless, entertaining and purely factual as anyone else’s, after I’m dead. I watch my own words graduating instantaneously into the past tense and becoming someone else’s someone else. They look fixed. When I’m here right now and what came next isn’t yet. What exists: this latest word, my scarred finger, myself imagining possibilities. It bothers me, the thought of my words becoming clues, something someone might peer at to try to find a lost object. I don’t want to be a reclusive beetle disappearing into a sheaf of papers. I was not one person and there is more than one way to write this. I wish there were a way to show that every latest word I write has space for anything after it. Everything could have been different and already is.”

- Shelley Jackson {a life}

This day is sure to be just another of your many. Let it be the one that reminds you. A dynamic sparkle in your fabric. Burning bright and explosive. Don’t chase beetles into darkness. You are not one person. Every breath you take has a breath for something bigger right behind it.

“What holds me together is what marks my dispersal. I am most myself in the gaps between my parts.”
- Patchwork Girl, [dispersed]

It is true that to show the life of one, you must tell the lives of many.

There can be no one end if there is no one beginning.

While poetic and simultaneously paradoxical it also sounds a bit undignified…and that too, sounds a bit familiar.

-a quaint compliation of three essay excerpts that, in the end, will be my salvation.