Naturally, I’m referring to this guy.

Because there’s definitely something off about both men. But there’s also something very on. And I don’t think the people who are referring to Sheen as bi-polar have the credentials to do so. And those who do are not referring to him as such because, well, that would be irresponsible. You don’t watch a 15-minute interview, listen to a few radio interviews and come up with a professional diagnosis. Not in the real world, anyway. Maybe on Lie to Me or some other procedural where they have to squeeze a story into a formula, but not here. This is the Charlie Sheen show. And it probably won’t last for long.

There’s a total lack of responsibility in his hilarious, poetic, defiant words. And his energy is extremely unreceptive to outside observation. It’s entertaining because it’s troubling—and that’s what we human beings do with things that scare us: we ridicule them, if we can. Call it God, call it Sarah Palin, call it the embattled leader of Libya—we’ll make a joke of it because there is power in laughter. Laughter can disguise denial, pain, fear.

But Sheen is troubling, nonetheless. His statements are wiping away fantasies, challenging paradigms and strafing the status quo with full metal spitzers from a jet going under the radar in a no-fly zone. He’s the Red Baron of this shit right now. It’s important to note that Sheen was well-known as drug and alcohol abuser who’s had documented episodes of violence against women. He also liked the company of porn stars—women whose time and presence he purchased as one would a hooker. Which all seemed to be fine and good with his corporate backers—until he started referring his show’s creator by his Hebrew name and giving inside baseball interviews outside of the locker room. Then, and only then, did Sheen become a real liability. Before that, his conduct was bitchin’ and his condition was perfect.

He’s making his legend as he goes along, each statement adding to his own greatness and solidifying the madness that was said—it’s like a rapper bragging so well about how good his rapping is to the point where the bragging itself becomes the proof in the eating of the pudding. Charlie Sheen is awesome because he keeps coming up with awesome  ways of saying how awesome he is while telling his multibillion-dollar checkwriters that’s he’ll give them one piss test for free—but the next one goes in yo’ mouth. The fact that he hasn’t been sniped down or blackballed into silence or wound up like Marilyn Monroe means that he’s winning. Every moment he breathes air and can exclaim that he’s winning is evidence that he’s winning. Each time he claims that he’s a warlock proves that he indeed does have something greater protecting him. This is a guy who’s told one network to lick his feet, promised an exclusive interview to another—a promise that he reneged on in order to give that network’s competitor an interview as well. The only reason Fox hasn’t jumped to get some of Sheen’s sheen is because Charlie is a serious lefty who hangs out with Alex Jones (who may or many not be a counter-intellgence agent as far as I’m concerned). Sheen’s got Twitter, Facebook, the whole internet and traditional TV going nuts. (Meanwhile, Gaddafi/Kadafi/Qaddafi/Gadhafi’s material is not nearly as entertaining.)

Unfortunately, Sheen’s stance of give, give, give and no take isn’t sustainable for an extended period of time. He’s pre-emptively defensive to the point where his protective maneuvers seem like offensive strikes; he moves like a man who knows he’s wrong, but figures that if he can possibly convince the world that he’s right, his opponents will cave in and he will be rhyming with winning. He’s not being receptive to any information except what comes from his 10,000 year-old brain. Those who cannot get him are retards who can’t think outside the box. Those who have come before him and failed are fools, trolls, weak, defeated. Which may all be true, but this universe—forever expanding, ever changing, never static— is not a closed system. And if Sheen continues to pinch himself off from it if he won’t continue to exist in it. Science won’t allow, neither will physics. When and how the end will come is way beyond my ken, but I do know that he can’t keep at this rate in that direction for long. Because nature abhors a vacuum, he cannot become one and remain. And, because nature abhors a vacuum, his truths, now created, must continue.

That’s good because his truths are fascinating, compelling, entertaining—it’s like the best of Kenny Powers, minus the dancing and clumsy, reluctant introspection. It could be because he’s far from having run through the $1.2 million (about $2 million with “backend”) per episode that he was getting from CBS. His position is the logical and radical end to the monsters that Hollywood has created for decades. He’s not the first and he won’t be the last. But, usually, we have to deal with caricatures or premium cable facsimiles or self parodies of these gods amongst men. Yet here is Charlie, coming as a real life wild man at this time in this space where we can exclusively watch him watching his “exclusive” interview as the results of his drug tests are revealed by RadarOnline.com, an entity that treats Tila Tequila with the gravity of world dignitary. And, for most of us, it may be our first time seeing someone snort a lit cigarette. That’s some tiger blood, Adonis DNA level shit right there.

In this world, at this time, Charlie Sheen is not just a high priest Vatican assassin warlock, he is a gladiator. He’s the god of our arena, no homo. These are good times. Too bad they can’t last.

Stuff like this upsets me, mainly because Steve Stoute, whose creatively profitable career  has been based on getting a percentage of the profitably creative careers of musicians, should know better than most people that the people producing the Grammy show and the voting body behind the Awards themselves are entirely different entities with separate goals in mind.* He even says as much. Which makes his whole argument pretty much bullshit.

Not to say that Stoute doesn’t have extremely valid points—because he does. The NARAS’ ability to be out of touch with the driving forces of culture is something of legend. Which I feel everyone pretty much understands by this point.

Which leaves me kinda confused as to why Stoute: 1) felt the need tomake this argument in such a public manner; 2) why he’s making it such a shoddy way. It reads like he had his panties in a bunch. Either that or he realized that Lucky Strike was gonna dump him and decided, No, we get to dump you, a la Don Draper.

Now, I’m not to say that Stoute’s being disingenuous, or that there’s anything wrong with with him making millions by getting 10 and 15 and 20% off rap artists and flipping that into making big coin deals telling clueless corporations which negro to use sell their cheaply made products. As a matter of fact, I kinda admire the guy for that. Someone’s gotta keep those sweatshops running; it might as well be Reebok or HP or Samsung or whomever. And if he can get Jay-Z or 50 Cent or Drake some of that blood money while sucking off a few drops for himself, so be it. We’re all guilty in this interconnected world, and if his part in the game has him in a Maybach, more power to him. No matter who you sleep with at night, you always sleep with yourself. Or something profound.

Back to the point: It’s mindboggling that someone with Steve Stoute’s depth and width of experience in the music industry (and business at large) writes an open letter as if he has no idea how the music industry works. We have blogs for all that, Steve.

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*I’m pretty  sure there’s one very old, very rich, very wrinkled white man who controls all of it, though.

I was the crackhead in Jungle Fever. I was two weeks out of rehab. I’d been smoking cocaine for a year and a half, two years, and I understood the nature of the disease. I had done the research. So when I started talking to Spike about it, I said, “You don’t see him high that much. You always see him when he needs something. He’s on a mission to get some shit. That’s what I wanna do.” And that was my breakthrough. That got me into Hollywood. It was the perfect marriage of experience and opportunity.

—Samuel L. Jackson

What’s great about this country is that America started the tradition where the richest consumers buy essentially the same things as the poorest. You can be watching TV and see Coca-Cola, and you know that the President drinks Coca-Cola, Liz Taylor drinks Coca-Cola, and just think, you can drink Coca-Cola, too. A Coke is a Coke and no amount of money can get you a better coke than the one the bum on the corner is drinking. All the Cokes are the same and all the Cokes are good. Liz Taylor knows it, the President knows it, the bum knows it, and you know it.

—Andrew Warhola

MJ gone—our nikka dead.

Let me sign your boobs.

I never thought I’d get to photograph him. He’s one of those people that very rarely does external shoots out of his record label’s sort of control. And for some weird reason he decided to do a couple of shoots that year and I was fortunate enough to be asked to do it. The whole shoot was extraordinary. He was eight and half hours late and it was backstage—it was actually underneath the stage of an arena where he was playing in Tennessee. He was on tour, so I was supposed to photograph him at one in the afternoon and they kept telling me he’s gonna come in any minute, any minute, any minute. And it went on and on and on until eight o’clock at night when he was already half an hour late to go onstage and by now threw arena was filled with 30,000 people—all screaming, banging on the floor, Prince! Prince! Prince! And i just thought, It’s never gonna happen—he’s not gonna pose now when he should be on stage in front of an arena. And you could hear the thunder of everyone’s feet. All of  a sudden he just appeared on a little golf cart and he just looked amazing. He just looked like a dream. And we did the picture. I said to him after the picture, I said “Prince, can you slip me the answer?” And he said, “I have the answer.” And he was cool as a cucumber. He wasn’t even nervous about people banging on stage. He was getting ready to go on performing for 30,000 people and he was calm and cool like I’ve never seen anything like it. I said to him, “Can you slip me the answer?” He took me aside and he put his arm around me and with his other arm put a hand in his lapel and pulled out an object, put it in my hand and then just like magic he disappeared and within mere seconds he was onstage. I looked down at the object as soon as he’d gone and it was  Jehovah’s Witness pamphlet. So that was his answer. I still got it. I keep it as souvenir; an amazing experience. And, again, I was fortunate to have got it.

—Platon Antoniou