Transcript of an actual conversation that took place this morning while my lovely wife was trying to get ready to go to some heinous meeting.
Me: You know what I don't get?
My Lovely Wife: No. What.
Me: How the hell is it that Sylvester didn't know about Tina and Roxanne? I mean, Twan spends three years in jail, and Sylvester doesn't know why?
MLW: But even Twan didn't know that it was Roxanne who gave him up.
Me: But he knew who was in the car with him! I just think Sylvester should have...
MLW: Agh! Why the hell are we even talking about this?! I'm gonna be late!
Yes, for some reason she preferred maintaining gainful employment to staying home and hashing over all the twists and turns of R. Kelly's Trapped in the Closet. 
As for me, I've been thinking about it all day. We watched the whole thing over the course of a couple of days over at www.ifc.com, and I'm kinda obsessed.
But more than that, I'm impressed. I mean, this whole thing--I guess you'd call it an R&B recitative soap opera/music video--is kind of a creative tour de force. And it's hilarious besides. (Did he intend it to be hilarious? While I guess that was initially unclear, I think it's pretty clear after viewing chapters 13-22 that yeah, he gets that this is a comedy.)
R Kelly is, of course, a dirtbag, which I do have to say kind of complicates my reaction to his work. I guess people are complicated, and you have to take art on its own merits and not judge it based on whether the artist is a nice guy, or in this case, a guy with a penchant for videotaping sex acts with underage girls.
In any case, Trapped in the Closet is top-notch popular entertainment, and what's kind of thrilling about it is that it is unlike anything anybody else is doing right now. I mean, sure, there are soap operas and there are crime dramas and there are comedies and there are R&B songs, but Trapped in the Closet is the only thing I've ever seen that is all of those.
It's just so rare that you come across any work of art and go, "Well, nobody else is doing anything quite like this right now." I remember thinking that the first time I heard Run-DMC's "Rock Box", though of course now it's hard to believe that mixing rap and rock was ever novel or not crappy. Maybe in 20 years, R&B's equivalent of Linkin Park will be releasing shitty cliffhanger serial videos all the time. But right now it's still new and cool.
R Kelly's trial on child pornography charges starts next month. Unless he's got new episodes already in the can, it may be a while before we get any more chapters. I suppose it's possible that we may never find out the significance of Rufus having the package. But still, we can always walk around singing to ourselves, "The midget is the baby's daddy!" or, my personal favorite, "you must be crazier than a fish with titties."
