Winner?<\/p>\n
Malcolm Gladwell, who posited you have to spend 10,000 hours at your craft to be world class.\u00c2\u00a0 Sheen spent next to nothing.\u00c2\u00a0 He sucked.<\/p>\n
You’re no longer at the mercy of the critics, you’re at the mercy of the public.\u00c2\u00a0 An audience member is no longer passive, he can render an opinion not only via catcalls and boos, he can text and tweet and blog and those who care can follow along right at home, as I did.\u00c2\u00a0 And what unfolded in Detroit was more than a mess.\u00c2\u00a0 It was an utter disaster.<\/p>\n
Charlie Sheen made the mistake of thinking the audience was on his side.\u00c2\u00a0 This is what happens when you descend from your showbiz perch, step out of the television and enter the realm of the people, you find out we’re all equal.\u00c2\u00a0 And that if you don’t give a great presentation, we tear you down from your peak.<\/p>\n
What happens now?<\/p>\n
Cancellation I assume.\u00c2\u00a0 It’s the only way out.\u00c2\u00a0 To play to ever fewer people and even less attention would just be disheartening.\u00c2\u00a0 Chuck Lorre and CBS may not have been able to crush Charlie, but he was no match for the proletariat.\u00c2\u00a0 That’s the story of the past year.\u00c2\u00a0 The people rule.\u00c2\u00a0 It happened in the Middle East, it’s happening here.\u00c2\u00a0 How long do you expect people to overwork just to make ends meet while an "undeserving" upper class gets to live in an alternative universe?<\/p>\n
Let this be a lesson.\u00c2\u00a0 If you’re one of the privileged, don’t intersect with the public.\u00c2\u00a0 Fly private, live behind a gate or a guard, avoid publicity.\u00c2\u00a0 Because the throng is there, waiting to pounce on every misstep.<\/p>\n
Then again, the crowd is ready for a true leader, who knows all this, who is not beholden to the throng so much as cognizant of the landscape and willing to march forward into the future.<\/p>\n
That does not describe our politicians.<\/p>\n
Nor does it describe the entertainment industry.<\/p>\n
Nor does it describe Lloyd Blankfein, who famously said that Goldman Sachs was doing "God’s work".<\/p>\n
Don’t equate attention\/fame with talent.<\/p>\n
Don’t equate notoriety with a career.<\/p>\n
Don’t think that just because people paid to see you, they’re on your side.<\/p>\n
In other words, true professionals don’t create a song in GarageBand the day they buy their Mac, put the result up on YouTube, make a deal with Tunecore for sale on iTunes and e-mail everybody to buy it.\u00c2\u00a0 To do that is to set yourself up for ridicule.\u00c2\u00a0 Isn’t that the story of Rebecca Black?\u00c2\u00a0 Her mother thought she was doing her kid a solid, both were too ignorant to realize that a hunger for fame has a stink that can be smelled worldwide, and even ten year olds know what’s good.<\/p>\n
And Charlie Sheen performing live is little different from Rebecca Black singing.\u00c2\u00a0 Only Rebecca Black was smart enough to have someone else write the material.\u00c2\u00a0 Charlie took the stage with an ill-formed presentation of his own device and was roundly booed.\u00c2\u00a0 Because we know what is good comedy, what is good live theatre.<\/p>\n
There’s very little of it out there.<\/p>\n
But we’re looking for more.<\/p>\n
Don’t equate the initial demand for Charlie Sheen’s live tour with longevity.\u00c2\u00a0 It was a stunt, no different from Bobby Riggs playing tennis with Billie Jean King.\u00c2\u00a0 To do it again is just creepy.\u00c2\u00a0 You made your money, go home.<\/p>\n
But someone at Live Nation was only thinking about money.\u00c2\u00a0 Connecting fame with theatres.\u00c2\u00a0 There was no consideration of show, of value for money, only gross receipts.\u00c2\u00a0 That’s how low we’ve sunk.<\/p>\n
But the public is not having any of it.<\/p>\n
While the live industry fights its petty little wars over ticket fees, the public is fed up and stays home. While acts demand ever more to make up for the loss of recording revenue, the people stay home.\u00c2\u00a0 But they overpay for that which they believe is real.\u00c2\u00a0 And Charlie Sheen in concert was not.<\/p>\n
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Winner? Malcolm Gladwell, who posited you have to spend 10,000 hours at your craft to be world class.\u00c2\u00a0 Sheen spent next to nothing.\u00c2\u00a0 He sucked. You’re no longer at the mercy of the critics, you’re at the mercy of the public.\u00c2\u00a0 An audience member is no longer passive, he can render an opinion not only […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":false,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[3,9],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-4010","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-live-shows","category-the-media"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p96vPs-12G","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/lefsetz.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4010","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/lefsetz.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/lefsetz.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lefsetz.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lefsetz.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=4010"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/lefsetz.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4010\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":4011,"href":"https:\/\/lefsetz.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4010\/revisions\/4011"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/lefsetz.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=4010"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lefsetz.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=4010"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lefsetz.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=4010"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}