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i think you get it pretty well comrade 9. there's any number of ways to see what ellis is up to in this essay. but mostly i think it does what it talks about so is itself charlie sheen-like. it's a lot about attitude but in a way that is only possible in a televisually saturated environment and one that's particularly american in the way the fourth wall is dissolved. american teevee spills out into life and mixes up with it (people who watch a lot of sitcoms think they have more friends in meatspace than those who don't, they say) but at the same time there's a distance that allows for an aestheticization of everything. so charlie sheen---whose performances of late i have in the main been assiduously avoiding as i don't find them interesting to watch--to think about maybe for a minute at a time, or through something like the essay---but to watch....nah----isn't someone whose actual meltdown you or i experience like the actual meltdown of someone we actually know in meat-space. it's meltdown lite, really. tv framed. a spectacle. empty and performance art at the same time. qualities like "deep" or "shallow" don't really apply. its the difference between a trainwreck and a "trainwreck"....and there's something creepy and disturbing about the insertion of that aesthetic distance into everything really....nothing is real. or everything is real but in the same way. back in the old days when people still worried about fascism (not any more....now the word is a problem but the reality is fun fun fun) the aestheticization of politics was a bad thing. the aestheticization of everything a problem. not any more.
but it's hardly charlie sheen's fault. he's just using his agent to get maximum exposure creating a juggernaut of stupid in the process. the event is interesting. he is not so much.
i gotta go.
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a gramophone its corrugated trumpet silver handle
spinning dog. such faithfulness it hear
it make you sick.
-kamau brathwaite
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