Kanishka sent this to me in email: Cliff's Notes for Trapped in the Closet. Why is Tina mentioned, anyway?

Charles managed to Tivo the complete music video this weekend, which includes a concluding chapter that my mp3 copy is missing -- an important addition. Before, I thought that the saga concluded with the discovery of the condom, leading me to wonder whether Kelly was implying a relationship between Sylvester's wife and her brother 'Twan, making the whole song a smoothly escalating instance of perverse-relationship brinksmanship. Turns out that no, it was just the cop. And nobody gets peed on! It's both a relief and kind of a letdown.

And the video has its own rewards: driving back from Cathy's house, believing his own wife to be cheating, Sylvester ponders "what [he's going to] do and who [he's] gonna do it to when [he] get[s] home", and a momentary flash-edit shows him drawing a gun on himself. Meaningful, dude.

I have yet to unpack any additional layers of allusion and narrative sleight of hand, but I'm confident they're there.

In other news, my tonsils continue to have some weird awful thing going on due to inhaling powdered deck, which is apparently a potent throat toxin. This prevents me from drinking the heroic amounts of caffeine necessary to produce interesting blog posts. So, er, take it away, Catherine!