Cinemorphosis

Category: TV and Movies

  • Bottom-Trawling and Other Sins That Ruin My Appetite

    Bottom-Trawling and Other Sins That Ruin My Appetite

    Watching a David Attenborough documentary feels less like casual viewing and more like sliding into the pew for the Church of Planet Earth. The man’s diction alone could resurrect the dead—each syllable polished, each pause wielded like a scalpel—while he preaches an all-natural gospel: paradise isn’t some vaporous hereafter; it’s right here, pulsing under our sneakers. And we, the congregation of carbon footprints, are the sinners. We bulldoze forests, mainline fossil fuels, and still have the gall to call ourselves stewards. His sermons don’t merely entertain; they indict. Ten minutes in and I’m itching to mulch my own receipts and swear off cheeseburgers for life.

    I’ve basked in Attenborough’s velvet reprimands for decades, often drifting into a blissful half-sleep as he murmurs about the “delicate balance of nature” and the tender devotion of a mother panda—as soothing as chamomile tea and twice as guilt-inducing. His newest homily, Ocean on Hulu, finds the maestro wide-eyed as ever, a silver-haired Burl Ives guiding us through Rudolph’s wilderness—only this time the Abominable Snowman is industrial bottom trawling. Picture a gargantuan steel mouth dragging across the seabed, gulping everything in its path. Rays flutter, fish scatter, and then—slam—the net’s iron curtain drops. Most of the hapless catch is unceremoniously dumped, lifeless, back into the brine.

    The footage left me queasy, a queasiness only partly soothed by Attenborough’s grandfatherly timbre. I’ve already been flirting with a plant-forward diet; Ocean shoved me into a full-blown breakup with seafood. Good luck unseeing hundreds of doomed creatures funneled into a floating abattoir while an octogenarian sage explains—as gently as one can—that we’re devouring our own Eden.

    So yes, I’ll skip the shrimp cocktail, thanks. My conscience already has acid reflux.

  • A Missed Opportunity for Nicolas Cage in The Surfer

    A Missed Opportunity for Nicolas Cage in The Surfer

    Yesterday, I subjected myself to The Surfer (2025), a cinematic hallucination starring Nicolas Cage, filmed somewhere in a fictional Luna Bay, Australia—or at least in a version of coastal Australia designed to feel like a fever dream. Cage plays a middle-aged man who seems to believe he lives inside a Lexus commercial and is some kind of real estate baron returning to reclaim the beachfront childhood home that slipped through his fingers decades ago. A house that, in his mind, will grant him redemption, absolution, and perhaps a complimentary cappuccino.

    Here’s the twist: he’s almost certainly homeless and entirely unhinged.

    The local surfing gang—shirtless nihilists who act like they’re in a meth-fueled remake of Lord of the Flies—perform what can only be described as satanic hazing rituals and torment Cage’s character with such sadistic flair that one wonders if they were cast straight from a skate park exorcism.

    The whole production gave me flashbacks to the art house theaters I frequented in Berkeley in the early ’80s. It has the self-important weirdness of Jodorowsky’s El Topo (a film I admired in theory and loathed in practice), but desperately wishes it had the quiet transcendence of Nicolas Roeg’s Walkabout, a true masterpiece. Alas, The Surfer is neither.

    Once it becomes clear—about twenty minutes in—that Cage’s character is a delusional man harassing beachgoers, the rest of the film becomes a masochistic ritual for the viewer: 80 long minutes of escalating humiliations. He’s mocked by surfers, snubbed by a barista, rejected by a dog-walking woman, and disdained by a real estate agent with the warmth of a lizard in escrow. Each scene checks off another indignity in a cinematic punishment parade.

    And yet, somewhere in this wreckage is the seed of a decent story. Imagine this: Cage plays a sane, if eccentric, man with a legitimate past beef with the local surf gang. The setting becomes a character in itself. The plot thickens into a psychological turf war. Give it ten episodes and some competent writers, and you’d have a fascinating limited series. But no—The Surfer opts for a half-baked film that commits the worst artistic sin: not provocation, but tedium.

    This movie didn’t just reaffirm my bias against most modern films—it fortified it. This is why I stick to television. At least TV has the decency to pretend it respects my time.

  • Muhammad Ali and the Rent We Pay for Heaven

    Muhammad Ali and the Rent We Pay for Heaven

    During the chaos of finals week—when my inbox floods with apologetic, last-ditch emails from students begging for an extended deadline—I found solace in something far removed from academia: Antoine Fuqua’s What’s My Name: Muhammad Ali. It’s a two-part documentary, but it feels more like a sermon and a love letter rolled into one. Like Fuqua, I’ve always had a boundless reverence for Ali—the most charismatic athlete to ever live—and watching him slowly succumb to Parkinson’s at just forty-two broke something in me.

    There’s a word for the dark thrill we sometimes feel when others suffer: schadenfreude. But what’s the opposite of that word–the anguish we feel when our heroes fall? When they suffer with such dignity and pride that they won’t accept our sympathy, even though they deserve every ounce of it? We don’t just mourn them—we mourn the version of ourselves that believed they were untouchable. Seeing Ali’s mind remain sharp, his wit flickering through that neurological prison, was unbearable and beautiful all at once.

    In his prime, Ali wasn’t just a boxer—he was a superhero, a shapeshifter, a one-man Broadway show in a heavyweight’s body. He was a sharp observer of American racism, yet never a scold. He wielded humor like a blade—cutting through injustice with charm and rhythm. His facial expressions alone could dismantle a room. And above all, he had soul. He was a poet, an actor, a preacher, and a provocateur.

    His conversion to Islam was not cosmetic. It reshaped him. He carried a sense of divine accountability, speaking of God not as abstraction but as a constant, watchful presence. He lived with the weight of eternity in mind, casually discussing the soul as if he’d already made peace with his fate. One of the final moments in the documentary captures this perfectly: Ali scribbles a note to a fan asking for an autograph—“Service to others is the rent we pay for our room in HEAVEN.” The line made me stop in my tracks and pray that I could live such a life rather than momentarily be inspired by it or tell others about it, because I know from experience that “talk is cheap.”

    The film doesn’t critique Ali—and truthfully, I didn’t want it to. I didn’t want the version of him that stayed too long in the ring. I didn’t want to watch his brilliance dimmed by punches that should’ve stopped years earlier. I found myself irrationally angry with him. I wanted him to become an actor, a comedian, a talk show philosopher—anything but a late-career boxer whose brilliance was traded for one more round. But of course, I’m lying to myself.

    We place athletes like Ali in the realm of myth. They are our Achilles, our Hercules. His greatness was inseparable from the ring. The same inner fire that made him a champion refused to let him leave the stage quietly. That fire gave us the epic—and, inevitably, the tragedy. I only wish that the spiritual clarity that shaped his faith could have overruled the gladiator in him. But maybe that’s the final paradox of Ali: he lived as both prophet and warrior, and the cost of greatness was always going to be high.

  • Becoming Led Zeppelin: A Fan’s Liturgy in Sweat, Hair, and Feedback

    Becoming Led Zeppelin: A Fan’s Liturgy in Sweat, Hair, and Feedback

    In the Bay Area of the 1970s, nothing was more quintessentially American than Led Zeppelin. Not apple pie, not hot dogs, not even fireworks detonating under the banner of freedom on the Fourth of July. No, Led Zeppelin was the national anthem of hormonal turbulence, a sonic passport to lust, rebellion, and ecstatic doom. At the center of this swirling pagan mass stood Robert Plant—shirtless, golden-maned, howling with the tortured elegance of a fallen angel whose job was to make teenagers believe that transcendence came through hips, heartbreak, and hair-whipping.

    Plant wasn’t just the house prophet of sexual revolution-era America; he was its prisoner. His voice didn’t just seduce—it ached. It howled. It bled. It was priapism as opera, libido turned operatic suffering. Meanwhile, Hugh Hefner—the so-called high priest of sexual liberation—was a fraud with a bubble pipe. With his crusty cardigan and smug, soft-core smirk, Hefner sold a sterilized fantasy built for TV sitcoms. Robert Plant, by contrast, sounded like he’d clawed his way out of the underworld in leather pants, carrying every orgasm and every regret with him.

    In Bernard MacMahon’s Becoming Led Zeppelin, we encounter Plant as the elder beast—still leonine, still mythic. He reclines in a richly shadowed room worthy of Masterpiece Theatre, his face now a craggy relief map of rock’s excesses. The documentary doesn’t dwell on the groupies, trashed hotel rooms, or aquatic legends of infamy. Instead, it gives us the roots: Plant’s soulful debt to Little Richard, Page and Jones’ studio stint with Shirley Bassey’s “Goldfinger”—that thunderclap of a song that still sounds like someone hurling a piano at the moon. Watching that scene took me straight back to 1973 Nairobi, where my father and I first heard Bassey belt that monster in a theater so loud it felt like the walls were peeling.

    There’s archival footage of Zeppelin playing to a crowd that looks less like Woodstock and more like a family reunion gone sideways. Grandmothers clutching their pearls. Children plugging their ears. No one knew what had hit them. This wasn’t just music—it was a mass exorcism.

    So no, Becoming Led Zeppelin won’t give you the tabloid filth. It won’t dive into the daisy chain of destruction that came with their rise. But it offers something more interesting: a portrait of a band that didn’t just soundtrack my youth—they were my youth. And Robert Plant, in all his howling, tormented glory, was its golden god of doom.

  • Old Money, New Misery: My Southern Charm Obsession

    Old Money, New Misery: My Southern Charm Obsession

    Yes, I’m hooked—addicted, really—to Southern Charm, Bravo’s televised safari through Charlotte, South Carolina’s aristocratic swamp of ennui, vanity, and monogrammed dysfunction. Most of the men are local fixtures: old money, old habits, old egos. They drift through their curated lives like shirtless Gatsby extras, tumbling into affairs, start-up flops, and half-baked rebrands of their own manhood—usually involving whiskey, dubious real estate ventures, and “branding consultants” who charge $8,000 to tell them to get a podcast. They aren’t villains exactly—there’s a flicker of decency beneath the smugness—but they are prone to recreational cruelty. Boredom gives their mischief a sadistic edge. Monogamy is a punchline. Direction is a punch-drunk memory. They’re trapped in a gilded cage of their own entitlement, slouching toward irrelevance with cocktails in hand. For the most part, they are a cast of man-child babies performing businessman cosplay.

    The women, in contrast, seem genetically engineered for composure, ambition, and unearned patience. While the men unravel like overpriced cable-knit sweaters, the women balance jobs, goals, and the emotional labor of pretending to be intrigued by yet another man-child’s whiskey brand. They hold the show together. They’re smarter, sharper, and infinitely more emotionally competent. Frankly, they deserve their own spin-off where they leave the men behind and conquer the Southeast in blazers and heels.

    And presiding over this high-society soap opera like a Southern Sphinx is Grand Matriarch Patricia. She doesn’t walk—she presides. Draped in silk and judgment, she rules from her settee with a cocktail in one hand and a butler at her heels. Her hobbies include throwing theme parties for her yapping purse-dogs, matchmaking with surgical precision, and purchasing $30,000 gold elephants out of sheer boredom. She’s not a character; she’s a living monument to genteel tyranny. Watching her is like watching Downton Abbey if it were sponsored by bourbon and Botox.

    Honestly? The show makes me want to move to Charlotte. The humid rain gives me Florida flashbacks. The homes are plush, the restaurants look sinfully inviting, and every time I watch Southern Charm, I find myself daydreaming of strolling through the city in linen pants, pretending I too have nothing better to do than flirt, sip, and emotionally combust in a well-upholstered room.

  • Stage-Crafted Selves: The Art of Self-Building in Mike Tyson and Chris Rock (College Essay Prompt)

    Stage-Crafted Selves: The Art of Self-Building in Mike Tyson and Chris Rock (College Essay Prompt)

    Background: From Wreckage to Branding: The Art of Curating Your Chaos

    In the Amazon Prime documentary Group Therapy, Neil Patrick Harris plays a surprisingly restrained version of himself as moderator while six comedians—Tig Notaro, Nicole Byer, Mike Birbiglia, London Hughes, Atsuko Okatsuka, and Gary Gulman—dissect the raw material of their lives. The big reveal? That material doesn’t go from trauma to stage in one dramatic leap. No, it must be fermented, filtered, and fashioned into something more useful than pain: a persona.

    Mike Birbiglia delivers the central thesis of the show, and I’ll paraphrase with a bit more bite: You can’t stagger onto stage mid-breakdown and expect catharsis to double as comedy. That’s not a gift—it’s a demand. You’re taking from the audience, not offering them anything. The real craft lies in the slow, deliberate process of transforming suffering into something elegant, pointed, and—yes—entertaining. That means the comic must achieve emotional distance from the wreckage, construct a precise point of view, and build a persona strong enough to carry the weight without buckling. In other words, the chaos must be curated. Unlike therapy, where you’re still bleeding onto the couch, stand-up demands a version of you that knows how to make the bloodstains rhyme.

    This process is a perfect metaphor for what college students must do, whether they realize it or not. They’re not just acquiring credentials—they’re building selves. And that takes more than GPAs and LinkedIn bios. It requires language, history, personal narrative, and a working origin myth that turns their emotional baggage into emotional architecture. And yes, it sounds crass, but the result is a kind of “self-brand”—an identity with coherence, voice, and purpose, forged from pain but presented with polish.

    We see this high-wire act pulled off masterfully in Mike Tyson: Undisputed Truth and Chris Rock: Tamborine. Both men dive headfirst into their demons—not to wallow, but to narrate. They show us the bruises and the blueprint. Their stories aren’t cries for help; they’re lessons in how to survive the spectacle, reclaim the mic, and turn personal damage into public insight. And that’s the point I want to bring to my freshman composition class: that the most powerful voice you’ll ever write in is the one you’ve built—not from scratch, but from salvage.

    Essay Prompt:

    In both Mike Tyson: Undisputed Truth and Chris Rock: Tamborine, we witness two public figures transforming their emotional damage, private failures, and traumatic histories into something far more than therapy—they become performances of self-mastery. Drawing from the concept explored in the Group Therapy documentary—that comedians (and by extension, performers) must process their pain into curated, audience-ready wisdom—this essay invites you to compare how Tyson and Rock construct their public selves through performance.

    Using the metaphor of self-building, analyze how each man converts raw experience into crafted identity. How do they achieve emotional distance from their past? What techniques—tone, structure, persona—do they use to signal that their pain has been worked over and transformed? How do their performances imply growth, responsibility, or redemption without becoming preachy or self-pitying? And how might their journeys of self-construction offer insight into how college students, too, must build coherent identities from the chaotic raw material of their lives?

    Your essay should analyze both performances as acts of narrative curation—exploring not only what Tyson and Rock reveal, but how and why they do so. Finally, reflect on what their examples suggest about the larger cultural demand to “become a brand,” to craft a self others can recognize, consume, and respect.

    Three Sample Thesis Statements with Mapping Components:

    1.
     Thesis:
     Mike Tyson and Chris Rock both engage in self-building by transforming personal failure into performance, but while Tyson leans into theatrical confession to reclaim a shattered image, Rock uses surgical wit and emotional restraint to reshape his own flaws into lessons about maturity and ego.
    Mapping:
     This essay will examine how each performer processes trauma through their unique style, how narrative control becomes a form of public redemption, and how both offer models for emotional coherence in the face of cultural expectations.

    2.
     Thesis:
     Tyson’s Undisputed Truth and Rock’s Tamborine reveal that successful self-building is not about perfection but about narrative ownership; each man carefully packages vulnerability into a performance that signals strength, reflection, and a refusal to be defined by past mistakes.
    Mapping:
     This essay will analyze the construction of persona, the implied emotional work behind each performance, and the public’s willingness to embrace complexity when it’s shaped into coherence.

    3.
     Thesis:
     Though Tyson and Rock work in different genres, both use the stage to convert unprocessed pain into curated identity, offering their audiences not a plea for sympathy but a model of self-knowledge forged through honesty, humor, and performance.
    Mapping:
     This essay will explore how distance, control, and structure allow for public healing, how each man avoids the pitfalls of therapy-as-performance, and how their stories model self-construction for others navigating chaos.

    Classroom Writing Activity:

    Title: “Self-Building: From Chaos to Clarity”

    Instructions:
     Have students write a 250-word response to the following:

    Think about a challenge, contradiction, or painful experience that has shaped you. Now consider how you’ve talked about it—to friends, in writing, or in public. Have you processed it, or is it still raw? What would it take to turn that experience into a story you could tell not to vent, but to help others—like Tyson or Rock? What persona would you need to craft to tell it well?

    Encourage students to reflect on the difference between therapy and performance, and how both require different levels of readiness and emotional clarity.

    Here are seven parallels between Mike Tyson and Chris Rock in terms of self-building, using the passage you provided as a guiding framework. Both men, in Undisputed Truth and Tamborine respectively, present emotionally processed versions of themselves—not raw therapy, but crafted, honed, and performative identities that transform trauma into narrative power.

    1. Emotional Distance as Craft

    Both Tyson and Rock take deeply painful, private material—Tyson’s history of violence, poverty, and public shame; Rock’s divorce, infidelity, and insecurity—and present it only after significant emotional distance has been achieved. Like Birbiglia suggests, neither man is asking the audience to “hold their pain” in real time; instead, they shape it into something digestible, stylized, and structured.

    2. Persona as Public Shield

    Tyson becomes a theatrical confessor—brutally honest, yet clearly in control. Rock, in Tamborine, is self-deprecating but razor-sharp, balancing remorse with authority. Both performances rely on constructed personas that allow them to explore dark material without unraveling on stage. Their “selves” are curated: still vulnerable, but framed by irony, structure, and control.

    3. From Confusion to Clarity

    Therapy is about murky beginnings—questions with no resolution. Tyson and Rock give us the aftermath of that journey. In their performances, they’ve metabolized confusion into clarity. Tyson articulates how his rage was a mask for fear. Rock admits how his ego and emotional detachment destroyed his marriage. Both offer processed truths, not raw data.

    4. Curation of Trauma

    These are not “live breakdowns.” Tyson doesn’t re-live trauma; he narrates it with biting humor and tragicomic flair. Rock doesn’t ask for sympathy—he delivers punchlines about personal failure. Both are examples of curated trauma, shaped into art for audience consumption, transformed into narrative coherence rather than chaotic catharsis.

    5. Mastery of Narrative Control

    Both men reclaim their public images by telling their own stories. Tyson had been labeled a monster by the media; Undisputed Truth rehumanizes him. Rock had been seen as invincible, slick, and untouchable; Tamborine exposes the cracks beneath that facade. Their self-presentations are acts of reclaiming narrative control, refusing to be defined by scandal or gossip.

    6. Implied Growth, Not Moral Perfection

    Neither Tyson nor Rock claims sainthood. Tyson admits to being monstrous, but shows he understands why. Rock owns his flaws without sugarcoating them. In both cases, the growth is implied, not lectured—there’s wisdom without self-righteousness, revelation without begging for applause.

    7. Performance as Redemption

    For both, the stage becomes a sacred space of self-redemption—not through tears, but through art. Tyson’s monologue is a strange mix of theater, stand-up, and testimony. Rock’s set is part confessional, part sermon, part satire. The performance itself becomes a redemptive act—a way to give back rather than take, to turn personal pain into a public offering.

  • From Wreckage to Branding: The Art of Curating Your Chaos

    From Wreckage to Branding: The Art of Curating Your Chaos

    In the Amazon Prime documentary Group Therapy, Neil Patrick Harris plays a surprisingly restrained version of himself as moderator while six comedians—Tig Notaro, Nicole Byer, Mike Birbiglia, London Hughes, Atsuko Okatsuka, and Gary Gulman—dissect the raw material of their lives. The big reveal? That material doesn’t go from trauma to stage in one dramatic leap. No, it must be fermented, filtered, and fashioned into something more useful than pain: a persona.

    Mike Birbiglia delivers the central thesis of the show, and I’ll paraphrase with a bit more bite: You can’t stagger onto stage mid-breakdown and expect catharsis to double as comedy. That’s not a gift—it’s a demand. You’re taking from the audience, not offering them anything. The real craft lies in the slow, deliberate process of transforming suffering into something elegant, pointed, and—yes—entertaining. That means the comic must achieve emotional distance from the wreckage, construct a precise point of view, and build a persona strong enough to carry the weight without buckling. In other words, the chaos must be curated. Unlike therapy, where you’re still bleeding onto the couch, stand-up demands a version of you that knows how to make the bloodstains rhyme.

    This process is a perfect metaphor for what college students must do, whether they realize it or not. They’re not just acquiring credentials—they’re building selves. And that takes more than GPAs and LinkedIn bios. It requires language, history, personal narrative, and a working origin myth that turns their emotional baggage into emotional architecture. And yes, it sounds crass, but the result is a kind of “self-brand”—an identity with coherence, voice, and purpose, forged from pain but presented with polish.

    We see this high-wire act pulled off masterfully in Mike Tyson: Undisputed Truth and Chris Rock: Tamborine. Both men dive headfirst into their demons—not to wallow, but to narrate. They show us the bruises and the blueprint. Their stories aren’t cries for help; they’re lessons in how to survive the spectacle, reclaim the mic, and turn personal damage into public insight. And that’s the point I want to bring to my freshman composition class: that the most powerful voice you’ll ever write in is the one you’ve built—not from scratch, but from salvage.

  • Poets, Fighters, and Masks: The Double Consciousness of Black Icons in Dear Mama and Undisputed Truth (College Essay Prompt)

    Poets, Fighters, and Masks: The Double Consciousness of Black Icons in Dear Mama and Undisputed Truth (College Essay Prompt)

    In an era where public identity is both weapon and performance, Dear Mama: The Saga of Afeni and Tupac Shakur and Mike Tyson: Undisputed Truth offer two emotionally complex portraits of famous Black men grappling with fame, pain, and representation. Both Tupac Shakur and Mike Tyson came from worlds shaped by violence, systemic injustice, and abandonment—yet both rose to immense prominence as cultural icons in vastly different arenas: Tupac through music and poetry, Tyson through boxing. Each embodied a kind of mythic power in the public eye while privately battling internal chaos and trauma that fame only magnified.

    This essay invites you to use W.E.B. Du Bois’s concept of double consciousness—the internal conflict experienced by marginalized people who must constantly see themselves through both their own eyes and the eyes of a dominant culture—as a critical lens to compare the lives of Tupac and Tyson. How did Tupac reconcile being both a revolutionary poet and a commodified celebrity? How did Tyson navigate the tension between being a feared athlete and a deeply wounded man searching for peace? How do these documentaries frame the burden of living two lives—one personal, the other performative—for public consumption?

    Your essay should address the internal and external conflicts that arise from these dual roles. You must analyze how each figure attempted to control or narrate his own story and how the public either misunderstood, consumed, or manipulated those narratives. Finally, reflect on what their stories reveal about American culture’s contradictory relationship to Black masculinity, fame, pain, and authenticity.

    Three Sample Thesis Statements with Mapping Components

    1.
     Thesis:
     Tupac Shakur and Mike Tyson both struggled with double consciousness as they became symbols of strength and survival for Black America while being distorted by mainstream media; through Dear Mama and Undisputed Truth, we see how art and performance became survival mechanisms that masked, revealed, and complicated their personal pain.
    Mapping:
     This essay will examine how both men used performance to control their narrative, how external media distorted their identities, and how their internal contradictions reflect Du Bois’s theory of double consciousness.

    2.
     Thesis:
     While Tupac balanced poetry and political rebellion with his celebrity image, and Tyson staged a raw confession to reclaim his story, both men illustrate the psychological toll of being consumed by a public that wants trauma packaged as entertainment.
    Mapping:
     The essay will compare their narrative strategies, explore the impact of fame on personal identity, and analyze the cultural expectations placed on Black male icons.

    3.
     Thesis:
     Through the lens of double consciousness, Dear Mama and Undisputed Truth reveal Tupac and Tyson as men fractured by the impossible demand to be both real and marketable—radical voices for the oppressed who also had to perform palatable versions of Black masculinity to survive.
    Mapping:
     This essay will analyze the tension between authenticity and image, the role of confession in reclaiming identity, and the societal pressures that shaped both men’s downfall and public myth.

    Suggested Essay Outline

    I. Introduction

    • Introduce Du Bois’s concept of double consciousness.
    • Briefly introduce Tupac and Tyson as cultural icons.
    • State your thesis.

    II. Defining Double Consciousness

    • Explain Du Bois’s theory in plain terms.
    • Apply it broadly to the lives of marginalized public figures.

    III. Tupac Shakur in Dear Mama

    • Discuss Tupac’s upbringing, activism, and artistic ambition.
    • Examine his dual identity: revolutionary poet vs. entertainment product.
    • Explore internal conflicts (mother’s legacy, criminal persona, artistry).
    • Analyze media portrayal and public misunderstanding.

    IV. Mike Tyson in Undisputed Truth

    • Analyze Tyson’s performance as confessional theater.
    • Explore his dual role: unstoppable fighter vs. traumatized child.
    • Look at the tension between public image and private suffering.
    • Examine how Tyson uses storytelling to rewrite his legacy.

    V. Performance as Survival

    • Compare how both men used performance—spoken word, music, monologue—as a way to wrest back control of their image.
    • Analyze the emotional and psychological toll of constantly performing multiple selves.

    VI. The Public’s Role

    • Discuss how American culture both exalts and devours these men.
    • Reflect on the voyeurism, consumption, and moral hypocrisy of audiences.

    VII. Conclusion

    • Reaffirm the relevance of Du Bois’s theory.
    • Reflect on what these stories reveal about identity, fame, and survival in America.

    Great—here’s a short, powerful excerpt from W.E.B. Du Bois’s The Souls of Black Folk (1903) that pairs well with the essay prompt. This passage introduces the concept of double consciousness, which students can use as a theoretical lens in their analysis of Dear Mama and Undisputed Truth:

    Reading Excerpt from W.E.B. Du Bois, The Souls of Black Folk

    (Chapter 1: “Of Our Spiritual Strivings”)

    “It is a peculiar sensation, this double-consciousness, this sense of always looking at one’s self through the eyes of others, of measuring one’s soul by the tape of a world that looks on in amused contempt and pity. One ever feels his two-ness,—an American, a Negro; two souls, two thoughts, two unreconciled strivings; two warring ideals in one dark body, whose dogged strength alone keeps it from being torn asunder.”

    Suggested Use for the Classroom:

    Have students read and annotate this passage before watching or analyzing Dear Mama and Undisputed Truth. Encourage them to highlight keywords: “two-ness,” “looking at one’s self through the eyes of others,” and “warring ideals.” Ask:

    • How do Tupac and Tyson live out this “two-ness” in different ways?
    • Where do you see them attempting to reconcile (or exploit) their competing identities?
    • How does the public respond to these attempts—and what does that say about the audience’s role?

    Here’s a short writing activity and guided questions designed to help students engage with the Du Bois excerpt before drafting their full essay. This activity works well as a warm-up discussion, in-class writing task, or homework assignment.

    Pre-Essay Writing Activity: Understanding Du Bois’s Double Consciousness

    Objective:

    To help students internalize Du Bois’s theory of double consciousness and apply it to their understanding of Tupac Shakur and Mike Tyson before writing their comparative essay.

    Part 1: Close Reading (5–7 minutes)

    Have students read this excerpt from W.E.B. Du Bois aloud (either in pairs or as a class):

    “It is a peculiar sensation, this double-consciousness, this sense of always looking at one’s self through the eyes of others, of measuring one’s soul by the tape of a world that looks on in amused contempt and pity. One ever feels his two-ness,—an American, a Negro; two souls, two thoughts, two unreconciled strivings; two warring ideals in one dark body, whose dogged strength alone keeps it from being torn asunder.”

    Ask students to underline or highlight 2–3 phrases that resonate or confuse them. Discuss them briefly.

    Part 2: Short Reflective Writing (10 minutes)

    Prompt:
     In 200–300 words, respond to the following:

    What does Du Bois mean by “double-consciousness”? Have you ever experienced a version of this “two-ness”—where you felt split between how you see yourself and how others see you? If not, can you imagine what that would feel like in the public eye, as a famous artist or athlete? Based on what you know of Tupac Shakur or Mike Tyson, which of them seems to struggle more with this “double-consciousness,” and why?

    Encourage students to write freely, using specific language from the Du Bois passage if possible.

    Part 3: Guided Discussion Questions

    Use these to deepen discussion or as a pre-writing brainstorm:

    1. How does Du Bois describe the psychological effects of double-consciousness?
    2. In what ways is double-consciousness visible in Tupac’s lyrics, interviews, or actions in Dear Mama?
    3. How does Mike Tyson express this “two-ness” in Undisputed Truth?
    4. What roles do race, class, trauma, and fame play in shaping their dual identities?
    5. Does either man ever fully reconcile his two selves—or are they always at war?
    6. What does it cost them—psychologically or socially—to live with this internal conflict?

  • Crying at the Sink: The Dishwashing Grammy Awards

    Crying at the Sink: The Dishwashing Grammy Awards

    Don’t ask me why, but there’s something about doing dishes after dinner that turns me into a soft-focus emotional wreck. Somewhere between the soap suds and the rinse cycle, I cue up Rickie Lee Jones’s “Living It Up”—one of my all-time favorite songs—and without fail, it punctures the heart like a stiletto dipped in nostalgia. Tonight, it brought on another weepy micro-moment, which means it’s time to officially give it The Most Likely to Make Me Cry from Too Much Beauty Award.

    This of course sent me spiraling into my own kitchen-sink Grammy ceremony, where I began handing out awards like a deranged emotional sommelier.

    • Todd Rundgren’s “Can We Still Be Friends” wins The Song That Makes You Recommit to Being a Half-Decent Human Being Award. It’s the sonic equivalent of an awkward apology after ruining Thanksgiving.
    • The Isley Brothers’ “Living for the Love of You” earns The Track Most Likely to Be Playing in Heaven When You Arrive Award—assuming heaven has good speakers and excellent taste.
    • Yes’s “And You and I” takes home The Sounds-Like-It-Was-Composed-by-Angels-on-a-Mountain-Top Award. I don’t know what dimension that song came from, but it wasn’t this one.
    • John Mayer’s “No Such Thing” is given The Makes You Happy to Be a Living, Breathing Fool Award. It’s that rare pop song that makes you want to fist-pump your own mediocrity.
    • The Sundays’ “You’re Not the Only One I Know” walks away with The Makes Sadness So Gorgeous You Forget to Be Upset Award. It’s a musical sigh pressed between lace and rain.

    I could keep going—my brain has a whole red carpet lined up—but I’ve got another episode of Sirens on Netflix to cry through. Turns out the best part of my day is a cross between dish soap, beautiful songs, and low-level existential unraveling. What a life.

  • Trapped in the AI Age’s Metaphysical Tug-of-War

    Trapped in the AI Age’s Metaphysical Tug-of-War

    I’m typing this to the sound of Beethoven—1,868 MP3s of compressed genius streamed through the algorithmic convenience of a playlist. It’s a 41-hour-and-8-minute monument to compromise: a simulacrum of sonic excellence that can’t hold a candle to the warmth of an LP. But convenience wins. Always.

    I make Faustian bargains like this daily. Thirty-minute meals instead of slow-cooked transcendence. Athleisure instead of tailoring. A Honda instead of high horsepower. The good-enough over the sublime. Not because I’m lazy—because I’m functional. Efficient. Optimized.

    And now, writing.

    For a year, my students and I have been feeding prompts into ChatGPT like a pagan tribe tossing goats into the volcano—hoping for inspiration, maybe salvation. Sometimes it works. The AI outlines, brainstorms, even polishes. But the more we rely on it, the more I feel the need to write without it—just to remember what my own voice sounds like. Just as the vinyl snob craves the imperfections of real analog music or the home cook insists on peeling garlic by hand, I need to suffer through the process.

    We’re caught in a metaphysical tug-of-war. We crave convenience but revere authenticity. We binge AI-generated sludge by day, then go weep over a hand-made pie crust YouTube video at night. We want our lives frictionless, but our souls textured. It’s the new sacred vs. profane: What do we reserve for real, and what do we surrender to the machine?

    I can’t say where this goes. Maybe real food will be phased out, like Blockbuster or bookstores. Maybe we’ll subsist on GLP-1 drugs, AI-tailored nutrient paste, and the joyless certainty of perfect lab metrics.

    As for entertainment, I’m marginally more hopeful. Chris Rock, Sarah Silverman—these are voices, not products. AI can churn out sitcoms, but it can’t bleed. It can’t bomb. It can’t riff on childhood trauma with perfect timing. Humans know the difference between a story and a story-shaped thing.

    Still, writing is in trouble. Reading, too. AI erodes attention spans like waves on sandstone. Books? Optional. Original thought? Delegated. The more AI floods the language, the more we’ll acclimate to its sterile rhythm. And the more we acclimate, the less we’ll even remember what a real voice sounds like.

    Yes, there will always be the artisan holdouts—those who cook, write, read, and listen with intention. But they’ll be outliers. A boutique species. The rest of us will be lean, medicated, managed. Data-optimized units of productivity.

    And yet, there will be stories. There will always be stories. Because stories aren’t just culture—they’re our survival instinct dressed up as entertainment. When everything else is outsourced, commodified, and flattened, we’ll still need someone to stand up and tell us who we are.