Josie likes to bust my balls about my tendency to over-analyze everything. Her point is that not everything is meant to be thought through and my rebuttal to her argument is that it's not because I'm not supposed to think about the significance Sylvester Stallone's film career or the difference between Beyoncé and Amber Rose's respective nudities that I won't. My relationship to culture is important to me, because it's the most meaningful relationship I developed outside of my love life.
Author Brian Alan Ellis' relationship to culture is similar to mine and his collection of poems, essays and microstories A Series of Pained Facial Expressions Made While Shredding Air Guitar made me realize something: we're a lot of people in the same boat, growing up raised by something alien to our personal life. Ellis' book is more than the iconoclast little volume it presents itself to be. It's a spirited kick in the balls to a schizoaffective culture that both fosters and combats loneliness at the same time.
A Series of Pained Facial Expressions Made While Shredding Air Guitar is anchored around three long series of aphorisms that are each the length of an elaborate Facebook status. The second longest segment is a series of discussions with author Bud Smith on movies that shaped their lives and influenced their work. The rest of the collection is composed of fragments: poems (including an oddly moving piece dedicated to Channing Tatum), essays and thoughts laid on paper in raw, unfiltered fashion. A Series of Pained Facial Expressions Made While Shredding Air Guitar is a one-way ticket inside Brian Alan Ellis' head. It's uproarious, deceptively deep and definitely not for every ears.
Internet is very good at giving people the illusions they have a life. Shit, I can barely remember my own before my family's home computer got jacked into the Matrix in 1998. Nowadays more than ever, the web bombards you with shards of information about your favorite (and not-so favorite) celebrities, your friends and people you don't really know, but wished were your real life friends. A Series of Pained Facial Expressions Made While Shredding Air Guitar is Brian Alan Ellis' way of dealing with the cultural messes of internet and social media as a child of the late eighties, early nineties that watched too much pro wrestling and played too many video games growing up.
The idea here is, I think, to put series of conflicting individualistic thoughts next to one another in order for a pattern of loneliness and alienation to emerge. Taken individually, the majority of Ellis' aphorisms are fun and/or quirky, but put next to one another, the vapidity of hammering bite-sized feelings on a keyboard and screaming them into a void of other people doing the same exact thing starts showing. Our saving grace is the links a common cultural heritage weaves between one another and Brian Alan Ellis and I have been raised on a similar diet of violent movies, butt rock bands and pro wrestling, so I could easily relate to A Series of Pained Facial Expressions Made While Shredding Air Guitar and you might too, to a certain degree, if you're from the same generation.
I've probably over-analyzed this. Josie is going to make fun of me again. Point is, I had a great time reading Brian Alan Ellis' A Series of Pained Facial Expressions Made While Shredding Air Guitar because it spoke of the boy I once was and of the man I am today through the only two things that link us: cocaine-era culture and internet. David Foster Wallace said that literature was a way to fight off existential loneliness and connect to other "selves" and it is pretty much what happened to me while reading Ellis' book. I now have the illusion of knowing Brian Alan Ellis and my only solace is that it is based on somethingconsiderably slightly more substantial than Facebook banter. A great read whenever the world is spinning too fast and you need to gain perspective on what the fuck you're doing and whoever you claim to be.
Internet is very good at giving people the illusions they have a life. Shit, I can barely remember my own before my family's home computer got jacked into the Matrix in 1998. Nowadays more than ever, the web bombards you with shards of information about your favorite (and not-so favorite) celebrities, your friends and people you don't really know, but wished were your real life friends. A Series of Pained Facial Expressions Made While Shredding Air Guitar is Brian Alan Ellis' way of dealing with the cultural messes of internet and social media as a child of the late eighties, early nineties that watched too much pro wrestling and played too many video games growing up.
The idea here is, I think, to put series of conflicting individualistic thoughts next to one another in order for a pattern of loneliness and alienation to emerge. Taken individually, the majority of Ellis' aphorisms are fun and/or quirky, but put next to one another, the vapidity of hammering bite-sized feelings on a keyboard and screaming them into a void of other people doing the same exact thing starts showing. Our saving grace is the links a common cultural heritage weaves between one another and Brian Alan Ellis and I have been raised on a similar diet of violent movies, butt rock bands and pro wrestling, so I could easily relate to A Series of Pained Facial Expressions Made While Shredding Air Guitar and you might too, to a certain degree, if you're from the same generation.
I've probably over-analyzed this. Josie is going to make fun of me again. Point is, I had a great time reading Brian Alan Ellis' A Series of Pained Facial Expressions Made While Shredding Air Guitar because it spoke of the boy I once was and of the man I am today through the only two things that link us: cocaine-era culture and internet. David Foster Wallace said that literature was a way to fight off existential loneliness and connect to other "selves" and it is pretty much what happened to me while reading Ellis' book. I now have the illusion of knowing Brian Alan Ellis and my only solace is that it is based on something
