He’s just a Sheen machine

Carlos Irwin Estévez was born in 1965, the son of big time screen success Ramón Antonio Gerard Estévez. These are not, however, the names you would recognise these two famous faces by. The latter can be seen emerging from misty waters as Marlon Brando's camouflaged assailant in Vietnam War epic Apocalypse Now or impacting on concrete like a dead fish in front of Leonardo DiCaprio in The Departed; his stage name is Martin Sheen. The former, too, can be seen engaged in combat in another Nam classic, Platoon, but he is assuredly more widely known for his mainstream reputation as a chauvinistic drinker and substance abuser; his stage name is Charlie Sheen.

Charlie 'Harper' Sheen, as I prefer to call him, is a man I don't personally know; but through his prolific efforts to wet his whistle and score a hit like a decadent mobster at a strip club, Sheen has made himself an example – of what not to do when you're in a position of fame and wealth. Or maybe he's attempting to show us we should be living life on the edge? Either way, I'm not too fond of his educational methods. In a world shadowed by the seedy operations of drug dealers, human traffickers and organised crime syndicates, you'd think that having substantial income through legitimate means would imply consumption under similar parameters? Sheen says NO, that's right, capital letters people.

If the cliché phrase 'art imitating life' could be attributed to one figure and one figure only, it would unanimously be handed over to the half of the man in all of us who Charlie Sheen embodies. His trademark bad boy image is as brazen as his hawk's wing eyebrows, and it appears to be originating at a source that is fundamentally conjoined to the unbridled lifestyle of a corrupt king he has espoused (at least that's one marital relationship he can maintain).

While the majority of his most compelling work – and by work I mean play gone Jud Apatow awry – to date has been produced by the studly star at an age most men when most men would find themselves cranking down the speed setting on the testosterone dial, it must be acknowledged by us, the obviously law-abiding audience of the higher ground to his lower, that Sheen did try to warn us about his hyperactive virility and keenness on the crack several years before it became newsworthy detail. Just rent out John Hughes' endearing portrait of teenage anxiety, Ferris Bueller's Day Off¸ to see the foreshadowing of Sheen's fashionable hangover glamour. Though his scenes are short, you'll catch enough to see what I'm getting at.

Sheen's boisterous attitude first came to the attention of the tabloids in 1990 after he was reported to have accidentally shot his fiancée Kelly Preston in the leg. Needless to say, they never got round to tying the knot on that one. In 1995 Sheen upgraded from standard domestic quarrelling to become embroiled in a high-profile court case involving Hollywood madam Heidi Fleiss and a ring of brothels, to which he had paid around $50,000 for the services they offered. During the proceedings he unashamedly justified his association to the case, saying: "I love sex and can afford it". My mother always told me honesty was a virtue – but what about transactions for nookie? Sheen says BINGO.

Two major pornstar partners, a few lawsuits, arrests and a drug overdose later and what do we have? That same old loveable crested cavalier – and I use the term of address cavalier lightly. With alleged domestic abuse and successful drug abuse available for the nosey public to ponder, you would've thought Mr Sheen, who is assuredly not clean, would have turned down the heat on the cooker that is his flaming ego. Of course, for Charlie Sheen this is not an option. Just recently he was wrapped up in another allegedly drug-related dilemma that saw him in a state of imbalance, shall we say, while he knocked an 'innocent' young pornstar's nerves for six. Nice going Charlie, we knew you would make us men proud.

To be fair to the fella, he is only acting the way 90% of all men would in his position. Now I'm not talking about a position of wealth (I would say power, but how much power can I preoccupied sex lover/drug user have over his own life, let alone someone else's), but a position of mind where the mental ropes that hold our screaming man monkeys in place have been cut, leaving the monkey to get to work on those fine ass bitches and sweet sugars from mother earth. Thankfully most of us have our monkeys under safe guard. And to be perfectly honest, Sheen's monkey has probably evolved into a gorilla by now, and gorillas need a little more than a kind banana to keep their urges in check.

Overall, despite my slightly envious cynicism and the inevitable shame the man will have made his far more respectable father feel, Charlie Sheen has done good for himself. When you consider that his current, most steady gig on the hugely popular sitcom Two and a Half Men is now reportedly earning him $1.8m smackaroons per episode, you can't help but wonder if we could all afford to be a bit more like the hedonistic sex gorilla that is Charlie Sheen. Sheen says JOIN THE PARTY.

Do you take this touch-sensitive musical mistress to be your leather-wearing, pocket-dwelling wife? i-Do.

A techno-nostalgic article by Susie Rushton inside The Independent's new i newspaper I read today has impelled a futuristic epiphany to dawn on me: sound will be completely controllable by everyone individually in the years yet to pass us by. Why do I propose this isolationist concept when I'm all about celebrating the shared euphoria of the music-mad generation? Seeing as we are currently in the process of substituting status updates on Facebook and tweets on Twitter for actual transferable conversation, I figured why not contemplate the outmoding of traditional listening as well. But briefly allow me to preach my adoration for those influential little i-watsits. A sentence from Rushton's piece on the putting out to pasture of last century's beloved personal cassette players, or Walkmen, described them as a seminal gift that "came to promote introversion, day-dreaming and private pleasure".

That astute sentence got me thinking about how much I adore my impulse-bought iPod and the constant use that I get out of it and its addictive touch-screen capability. Before the summer of my beautiful iPod romance took to the wing on the music sheet of my average lad life, I had already spent well over a quarter of my years as a teen under the influence of the world's most potent drug, aka music. From the mellow acoustics of the Stereophonics on You Gotta Go There To Come Back to the synapse-shattering metal growl of Christian Machado on Ill Nino's debut album Revolution Revolucion, my ears were definitely the most valuable parts of my body to me and still are today, despite how much I appreciate and require the other senses.

Now, thanks to the glorious contraption that is Apple's no. 1 iPod, I can go about my daily bipedal business with an eclectic accompaniment direct at hand – even better is the fact that iPods radiate intense electronic sex appeal, being the portable music player equivalent of a young Patrick Swayze or Tom Selleck. But back to what Rushton reminded me about. The invention of her favourite original Walkman was the introduction of a 'fading out' device into modern society. As she perceptively notes, accessories such as the iPod have the unique ability to block all or most intrusive background noise out, allowing the user to 'fade out' of any given interactive situation. It's this phenomenon of instant sound insulation that makes these personal jukeboxes so undeniably popular.

The key benefit is the control that can be accessed at the effortless push of a button or, in the case of the iPod Touch, the swipe of a screen. Whether you've been bottled into a tube carriage on the London Underground at rush hour or you simply find yourself drifting off in a lecture that you foolishly decided might be worth attending, the wonder that is the personal music player is both our entertainer and saviour in this relentless digital storm we're trapped in, which leads me to my next point, albeit of speculation. As we are in a position where we no longer have to aversely pay attention to every inconsequential molecular vibration that occurs around us without the sacrifice of self-induced deafness or earplugs (who would wish to hear only their own thoughts anyway?), perhaps soon we will be able to selectively open and close specific wavelengths of sound, thus making us available only to that which we deem worthy of our ear drums.

Heck, we may not even require the physical response of our ear drums to sound; we could, theoretically, augment the interpreter in our brain with a modification that constantly receives transmitted vibration and breaks the nearest sounds down into finite categories to be edited through choice, kind of like the list your computer formulates when it detects a range of wireless signals in a crowded room. This would be the pinnacle of selective hearing and the materialisation of what Walkmen, mp3s and iPods have so far enabled us to do. Of course, there would be some inevitable ethical and practical obstacles to the success of the personal inner player, or PIP – just consider how appropriate that would sound as Apple's latest and greatest innovation in the development of tiny technology.

Firstly, let's ask ourselves honestly whether or not we would stayed tuned in during those tedious collision conversations with that person you used to work with/date/be pals with at high school. Absolutely not! With PIP no one needs to feel obliged to be nice to near-perfect strangers; just edit those frequencies and fade away. Sadly, there would be times when you would either converge with others to the same frequency or be forced to because necessity or decorum dictated it, i.e. when dinner's ready. For those other negligible announcements like political broadcasts during elections or grating noises like road works you could quite happily fade out without any moral wars waged against yourself.

Secondly, problems would arise when practical scenarios such as respecting the boss's air time at staff meetings and acknowledging the direction of gunfire in combat zones were faded out of. I'm not accusing professionals and other dedicated people in employment of casual escapism – technically I can because PIP is a concept I just created – but I'd bet my neglected previous mp3 player episodes of this nature would manifest if PIP was manufactured and made available to a wide audience. Just think how badly it would affect procrastinators; as one myself I shudder to think how little I would achieve with PIP at work in my brain.

Even if such an invention was destined to hit the media market in the future, I doubt the majority of people would misuse it to the imaginative degree that I could hypothesize. If anything, the more pressing matter at hand and for the future is the worrying level of volume I persist to listen to my music at. While I'm abundantly aware of the long-term risks to my sense of hearing, I can't help but subject my war-torn eardrums to the boisterous beats and tantalising tunes hammering forth from my headphones. I suppose if I'm still capable of hearing the piercing whine of the fire alarm when I'm in my regal 60s I'll count myself lucky. For now I will continue to enjoy the control I have over my airspace and worship my iPod Touch, which I fondly dubbed The Quatro, because it's just that awesome!

Man introduced the drug wars; now women are stepping in to help finish them

Ask any person walking the streets of your traditional English high-street what they would associate Mexico with and they will fish around for the stereotypes that stick best: spicy tortilla-based cuisine, sombreros, Speedy Gonzales, drugs. Above all other metonyms for Mexican culture, drugs are the accomplice to its identity that resonate the furthest in distant countries. It's easy to gauge why we of the West subconsciously pin the proverbial tail of prejudice to the sad Mexican ass when you stare just a little closer at the big screen battlefields. Though it is the Nazi Wehrmacht and Islamist extremists, through their depiction in differing genres of film, that have left the most indelible prints on our Western psyche, the characterisation of Mexican criminals in films like Desperado has nonetheless built upon and conveyed to the masses this notion of the bullet-spraying, moustachioed Mexican maniacs at war over cocaine mountains.

While the implication of Mexico being a war-torn country stricken with poverty and marauded over by volatile drug cartels holds as much water as the Indian sub-continent in monsoon season, the more pressing association rising out of this chaotic inferno of drug-trafficking and gangland massacres is that which men have with this, the lowest form of income. Men have always been seen to wage the wars, taking on the responsibility as warriors and defeating their enemies as hardened killers, some more mentally sound than others. The onus was always on man to be the hunter-gatherer, so naturally when territories were factored into the equation it was the next logical step for man to assume the role as murderer-defender, before he ultimately crowned himself coveter-conqueror. This sequence of progressive power roles has been played out exuberantly by men for centuries, with mixed reviews coming from those stood at the side-lines and also those who survived the tasks set for them.

The end result of this compulsion to conflict has remained the same during the course of this perpetual struggle for survival: man is the murderer, woman is the mother. 19^th Century German philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche once wrote that "man shall be trained for war, and woman for the recreation of the warrior: all else is folly" – this much has been proven accurate and consistently relevant by the behaviour of men since the turn of the 20^th Century. And on the sun-baked landscape of Mexico dries the spilt blood of victims of the drug war that has become as traditional for the nation's people as its annual pagan death festival, the Day of the Dead. With a black comedy twist, Mexico's calendar could be referred to as the Year of the Dead, with an estimated death toll attributed to the escalating violence in 2009 of over 9000. Starting from 2006, the copious bloodshed now totals near 30,000 people, most of whom are cartel members – that's a figure that would make George Romero shiver on the set of one of his macabre visions of the zombie apocalypse.

But amid the ecstatic violence of the warring cartels and the factions within them, a figure of forgiveness is emerging. Marisol Valles is 20 years-old and a student in criminology. She has an infant son and is a pacifist. She sounds like the kind of person Mexican police authorities would expect to see on the grisly end of an altercation with the local drug traffickers; but she's actually just become the latest high-ranking recruit in the weakly fought offensive against the terrifying drug gangs. Valles now stands as police chief of Praxedis Guadalupe Guerrero, a border town that runs in conjunction with others in Juarez valley, an area of Chihuahua state, where the casualty figures resulting from the drug war are highest. As you and plenty of observers on the global stage would conventionally think, why was a young woman chosen to help halt this devil's parade of corruption and extermination in a locale plagued more frequently by its deadliest performers than any other state in Mexico?

The answer may well be the product of some serious, new-wave calculation behind the mechanics of rendering the belligerent cartels impotent, but I'm more inclined to believe that the smaller settlement of Praxedis Guadalupe Guerrero has adopted a modest approach to pacifying a major problem. The fact stands that women are co-operators and man are largely competitors. Hand a man the position of chief of police in a drug-addled town in Mexico, as is the norm, and he is immediately given a choice, commonly phrased as "plomo o plata", meaning lead or silver. Essentially he either has to submit to bribery and commit to corruption, or get a bullet through the eye socket, or decapitated, or burnt with acid. Here the man can no longer compete if he is on the side of the law, his handcuffs no use against the sidewinding stranglehold of the cartels. He becomes the corrupted, complicit in the misanthropic business of the corruptors.

But a woman's mind, as most men are aware, works very differently to that of a battle-fond man. She aims to reconcile, find a compromise and, ultimately, defuse a contentious situation, all through compassion and patience. She aims to co-operate, but not in the way a man is forced to. Instead of being coerced into a co-conspirator, she implores her comrades and community to unite behind her cause and face the guns with principles, not more guns. But even though, in the end, the chances of success through passive measures in this area of conflict are slim, if not infinitely incalculable, this purist approach does more to contribute to stunting the continuous cycle of violence and mortality that ensures and, in many cases, justifies retribution.

Perhaps with a woman at the helm, one whose values are not close to her heart, therefore removable without termination, but the very components of it, we may begin to witness a new form of policing against the seemingly indomitable "druggernaut" that intends to swallow Mexico whole and dissolve it in the pit of its rancid stomach. At least if "Mexico's bravest woman" becomes the Latin-American equivalent of Benazir Bhutto, it will be a life destroyed with the gain of a noble cause guaranteed in the public eye, unlike the loving women and children busy living their lives and avoiding the slaughter who get caught in the crossfire of men's futile ambition for power.

Click here for a slideshow of "Mexico's bravest woman", courtesey of the Guardian.

Nietzsche nails Nihilism and advocates the Übermensch

Friedrich Nietzsche was a lonely and intense individual – this much is made evident in the bulk of one of his greatest literary works, Thus Spoke Zarathustra. Nietzsche was a man woefully impeded by various illnesses of the body and mind, including migraines and insomnia, enough to send anyone over the edge – yet he continued to strive for the sake of his philosophy while at war with his decrepit state. In spite of his debilitating impediments Nietzsche found the determination necessary for gathering his thoughts and compiling several seminal pieces of literature.

Thus Spoke Zarathustra is a fictional autobiography by a man named Zarathustra – an adapted version of Persian prophet Zoroaster, who originally formulated the notion of the universe being altered through the conflict of good and evil. Zarathustra can ultimately be described as the fictitious re-envisioning of Nietzsche. In reality Nietzsche was put through much physical suffering and as such faced a great deal of mental anguish, meaning the progress he made undoubtedly came at the expense of his gradually failing health. Zarathustra is an enlightened man with an instinct for engineering mankind's ascendance beyond its near-nihilistic detriment. Because of his prevailing ill-health during the examination of the anthropogenic subject – the 'overman' – we can attribute Zarathustra's impetus towards defeating human weakness to Nietzsche's hatred for his ailed physiology and limited lifestyle, as well as the dreams of defeating his own weakness that he probably entertained.

The premise of this mock-biblical journal of Zarathustra's life centres on the advance of man into becoming the overman, or Ubermensch. Zarathustra observes that mankind has surpassed the stage at which worship was a worthy option for its attention; the 'herd', as he refers to the masses that persist in keeping the religion of Christianity alive, no longer needs to maintain its subservience to God, yet it continues to promote the bankruptcy of religious culture and tradition. Zarathustra's famous proclamation "God is dead" precedes the basis of the book that is to be represented by new conceptual developments later on. As opposed to the inbred idea of an omnipotent God and a redemptive afterlife of perfection, Zarathustra prefers to encourage the belief that an earthly existence is the healthiest and most honest pathway.

In light of his controversial revelation that mankind no longer needs to depend on a system of religious reverence, Zarathustra finds the herd to be unwilling to participate in the conversion from what they currently are to what Zarathustra knows they could be, if they were willing to make the daily sacrifices such evolution requires. Nietzsche espouses the term 'will to power' prolifically as he attempts to instil the necessity of wanting to improve oneself. Only through a significant struggle will man be able to overcome his deficiencies and dissatisfaction. What stands out the most in the sections devoted to preaching the struggle of becoming the overman is the way Nietzsche sublimates 'evil' to imply a device of self-improvement, a force that goes against the grain and spells a threat to defunct morals established by antiquated religion. This excerpt perfectly affirms this contrasting definition of evil and how it links to self-improvemnt: "Good and evil, and rich and poor, and high and low, and all names of values: weapons shall they be, and sounding signs, that life must again and again overcome itself!"

Nietzsche is extremely keen to remind us of the qualities he deems conducive to the inception of the overman; he recommends that we do all within our power to correct our imperfections so that we come closer to conceiving the higher being. Interestingly enough his stance on marriage is relatively conventional, though, only because he believes the self-overcoming should be as natural as the body it will be generated from. "Bitterness is in the cup even of the best love; thus does it cause longing for the Superman; thus does it cause thirst in you, the creator! Thirst in the creator, arrow and longing for the Superman: tell me, my brother, is this your will to marriage? Sacred I call such a will, and such a marriage" – once again an incarnation of evil is emphatically praised as the instigator of creation. But, as sombre as it sounds, self-criticism is the most successful tool towards achieving our most dreamt-of goals. In Zarathustra's case the optimum goal is the attainment of the overman.

The book's repetition of the indictment of man's failure to resolve his innate flaws extends to labelling those who don't wish to accept the transcendence from man to overman as 'despisers of the body'. The process of becoming is inherently linked to respecting the body and its organic place on the planet and in the environment. Once man has learnt to respect the body he can harness its abilities and potential and implement a new order. Nietzsche puts an emphasis on the word 'obedience', claiming those who suffer the most are those who lack the will power to make others and their own bodies obey their mind's persuasion. Those who command obedience will go further in their efforts to accumulate power. Virtue is another word given much attention in Zarathustra's semi-poetic search for a solution to mankind's dilemma; Nietzsche makes a valid point of reminding us that "it is illustrious to have many virtues, but a hard lot; and many a one has gone into the wilderness and killed himself, because he was weary of being the battle and battlefield of virtues."

From a broad analytical viewpoint, Thus Spoke Zarathustra is a masterpiece in conceptualising an egalitarian vision of Darwin's Origin of the Species. Zarathustra is 'bringing man a gift' on behalf of his wisdom and that gift is his proposal to redirect man on its course to supremacy. Although Zarathustra is forced to accept the majority will be disinclined to follow his example, he isn't exclusive in his ideology, just in his practice. Nevertheless, as far as those who would prefer to exist apathetic of his message are concerned, his forgiveness runs dry. He is the generous bearer of a sublime knowledge, who smiles upon those who accept themselves and frowns upon those who deny themselves the objective of becoming something higher.

Nietzsche certainly had his work cut out for him when he committed to constructing this concept of the overman, especially when it's juxtaposed to the physics of the 'eternal recurrence'. Assuming that the past stretches back infinitely, as does the future forwards, Nietzsche clarified that all the actions and moments that transpire in the present will inevitably occur again in the future, as they did in the past, because everything is dynamic and impermanent, and must therefore be repeated because conclusive development fails to disrupt the continuous cycle of change. This logical roundabout is confusing enough without the added problematic philosophy of the overman on top, so it's understandable that Nietzsche's style and form when writing were both equally inconsistent. While Zarathustra's journey is governed by a chronological timeline, started at his emergence from the mountain cave and ending at the beginning of his final stage in transcendence, the cohesion of events in the plot is scattered, with sudden diversions into parables and leaps from discovery to discovery leaving you feeling as if your perception is being shuttered erratically as you read.

We cannot blame Nietzsche for the inconsistencies of Zarathustra's journey; the inspirational method that he conducted while composing his notes meant Thus Spoke Zarathustra would read more sporadically than it does fluently, and perhaps this enabled Nietzsche to write as freely and expressively as possible. The often esoteric narrative of the book is occasionally overruled by passages of eloquent discourse, like this definitive lesson: "Man is a rope stretched between the animal and the Superman- a rope over an abyss. A dangerous crossing, a dangerous wayfaring, a dangerous lookingback, a dangerous trembling and halting. What is great in man is that he is a bridge and not a goal: what is lovable in man is that he is an over-going and a down-going".

Zarathustra's journey itself is characterised by the 'three metamorphoses' – the camel, the lion and the child. Zarathustra plays the camel throughout, being burdened after his "wild wisdom became pregnant on the lonesome mountains". At the story's climax he is approached by a lion, signalling his rise to a level where he can be proud of his wisdom; he awaits the child that embodies 'new creation'. He is also a man "hungry, fierce, lonesome, God-forsaken: so does the lion-will wish itself". In homage to Nietzsche's parody of Christ and his disciples, Zarathustra invites a group of social strays to lodge in his cave and observe his teaching. He, perhaps like Nietzsche who thought so differently in comparison to many of his contemporaries, hopes to educate these men in the doctrines of the overman and save them from themselves by empowering their pride.

Thus Spoke Zarathustra is a book I have yielded much inspiration from, mainly in regards to its positive, albeit critical philosophy on self-improvement. Nietzsche was isolated from most of humanity because of his illness and the shame this would have induced in him, so for him to have devised a system that focuses on cancelling out the negative element in one's life through the deepest, darkest introspection was a remarkable personal feat.

If Nietzsche were alive today I would be very intrigued to hear what his opinions on modern moral conundrums would be. If he was so enthusiastic about man achieving his true potential, surely he would be rallying behind genetic engineering and stem cell research that aim to provide solutions to hereditary human disabilities and diseases. Would he believe, as I do, that pervasive charitable organisations like Oxfam and Samaritan's Purse are not conducive to enabling neglected populations in less economically developed countries to becoming self-sufficient, and that the best form of assistance is up-front aid that teaches communities how to rely on themselves?

One thing goes without doubt, Nietzsche would have loved Live at the Apollo – massively intelligent and hilarious stand-up comedians addressing the issues of the world and layering them with the humour of an enlightened being. Laughter and dancing are, as Zarathustra advises, traits of the highest beings that we should emulate for the good of overcoming our insecurities and imperfections. And I think we can all affirm with Nietzsche that both these exercises offer the most assuaging therapy to the tired mind of a struggling slave to virtues.