I

Mike Tyson doesn’t seem full of it, but sometimes it seems full of him. Each persona gets taken to an extreme. Think Gollum in Lord of the Rings, if he moved up a few weight-classes; or Hamlet on protein shakes.

According to director James Toback, who has known Tyson since 1985, the former undisputed (and youngest) world heavyweight champion does indeed have multiple personalities, along with a photographic memory which allowed him access to high-sensory reflections in Toback’s new documentary, Tyson. (The Rumpus interview with the director can be found here.)

The film builds its portrait of Tyson by intercutting a new feature-length interview with classic footage of the champion. Straight out of rehab, with that twelve-step sense of vulnerability and analytical clarity (in the vein of Celebrity Rehab with Dr. Drew), the peak of Tyson’s self-knowledge is now. “It’s like a Greek tragedy,” he says.  “Only I’m the subject.”

The subtleties of Tyson may surprise the viewer, whether they know Mike’s timeline or just the more sensational moments, such as his ear-biting incident during a 1997 title bout with Evander Holyfield. This film is the single closest entity to contain the whole force of Tyson, whose strong spirit overflows even his impressive incarnation. It may reinforce what you know, but you will surely experience some nouvelle Tyson.

We explore his vulnerable moments: as a little boy in Brooklyn he kept pigeons on the roof and got bullied; as a teen, before his first amateur match, he slipped downstairs to shake off the pre-fight jitters and considered jumping on the subway train rattling by the building.

The ferocious moments unveil a man’s desperation of being backed into a corner, as Tyson, in a more lucid state, explains his fear of never again wanting to be disempowered and reduced to that helpless little boy. He feared being “dominated in the streets.” Or as Tyson put it another way, during his pre-fight press conference with Lewis in 2002, after a scuffle between entourages , yelling at the reporters he felt were antagonizing him: “I’ll eat your asshole alive, you bitch.  Nobody in this room can fuck with this man… You can’t last two minutes in my world… I’ll fuck you til you love me, faggot.” Onstage, there’s a grisly aura to Tyson’s freestyle slam poetry, charged with incarceration-infected alpha machismo, ironically homoerotic. No doubt he’s immersed in this persona… for that moment.

With a thematic twist worthy of Joseph Campbell, Tyson provides a progressive inversion of expectations. Cut to the post-fight. During an interview in the ring, a sweaty and battered Tyson gives Lewis full credit as a warrior athlete, and says they’ve been friends for a long time. Tyson attributes the scuffle they had at the press conference to the likeness of pigeons being fed, every creature for themselves when the breadcrumbs are at stake. In this moment, he conducts himself as a sportsman, classy in his defeat. These successive contradictions add to the overall portrait, ever shifting.  The bigger picture is elusive and in-your-face. Breadcrumbs, indeed.

We see a particularly sensitive moment when Tyson gets choked up while discussing Cus D’Amato, his former trainer, mentor, and unspoken father figure, who passed away in 1985. The camera stays on Tyson for a ten-count as he struggles to finish his sentence. Cus is the one who encouraged Tyson to scrap his teenage delinquency and focus on competition. Until this time, Tyson’s newfound killer instinct had mostly manifested in street crime and aggression; but now he could pour all of himself into the role of the boxer. Cus treated Tyson like family and helped instill confidence and a warrior-spirit in the kid.

Tyson got beat up during his first spar audition. The bloody-nosed teen was eager to demonstrate his toughness. He wanted to get out of the ghetto. Tyson’s transition to laser beam focus took time; he still reverted back to street crime (and today most of his childhood peers are in jail or dead). His first thought in the Catskills: “I could rob these white motherfuckers.” But Cus D’Amato extended trust and support, and Tyson knew there was something there worth more than any of the material objects in the room.

Tyson immersed himself in the sport, both in practice and history. At night, he watched old reels of the classic fights from the early days of boxing. He studied the fighters and memorized their moves. He knew the stats and held himself in this canon, both empowered and humbled by the knowledge that every streak must end.

Early training footage captures Tyson’s unlimited potential and natural athletic ability: speed, power, precision, and intensity. The fight clips are awesome – the kid was a predator. The explosive agility, the calm aggression – if he doesn’t finish you with this uppercut, how about this one, or this one? – bobbing and weaving, a pendulum of muscle and bone, ticking down the seconds.

The film offers a bonus commentary track within the feature, as Tyson voices moody interiority for some of the archive footage, ranging from insightful to inadvertently humorous. He talks about his pre-fight rituals, his mentality once he enters the ring, how he keeps eye contact from across the canvas, and once his opponent looks away he knows that he’s already broken the man’s spirit. During one of these psych-outs, with Tyson pacing and frowning, we learn that he was suffering from gonorrhea – burning the candle at both ends, so to speak.  Then he won the belt from Trevor Berbick and became the youngest heavyweight champ ever.

II

During a press interview upon the film’s premiere at the Cannes Film Festival in May 2008, Tyson said it was difficult to watch James Toback’s portrait of him: “I’ve always been objective and a hard critic of myself,” Tyson said, discussing his constant striving for perfection. “Even if someone thinks something is great, I see the non-perfection in it.” Properly channeled that attitude was a recipe for success, but these days it borders on tragic. His adamancies are still evasive; it’s hard to decipher what he means. Tyson didn’t appear to be embarrassed or regret discussing his less flattering moments, including the rape allegation, street violence, and so forth. Perhaps this perfection is a reference to the fight footage itself, or one of the archetypes he embodies in the film; only Tyson, if anyone, knows.

During this Cannes interview, Tyson said, “Always believe in yourself and keep fighting; never let people put you down and limit you; this is what makes life worth living and fighting for.” That’s a more inspiring moment, but otherwise, Tyson appeared more exhausted and uncomfortable doing media for the film, than he does in Tyson. That achievement of relative clarity and tranquility is clearly not the final word, though it feels like it. After the film premiere, a reporter asked in a toned-down, condescending way how Mike has been since the film – the unspoken question, “Have you gone crazy again yet?” Mike appeared defensive and, reminiscent of the Bob Dylan’s Don’t Look Back media conferences in 60s San Francisco, said, “How are YOU?”

Due to all the media attention and cameras, Tyson felt overwhelmed and intimidated at the Cannes Festival, though he put a lot of faith and trust into Toback’s vision. According to Tyson, he got called by Toback on his way to AA, and he thought the film would just become “some bootleg,” and he could make a few bucks.

Director Toback describes Tyson as “an American hero under dark circumstances.” Toback has been obsessed with boxing since he was four or five, and became a boxer himself in “misguided attempt to see if I could ever last with someone who was good for more than thirty seconds.” He said, “I found Mike to be light years more interesting than any of the others, more articulate, and symbolically more significant, because there is an iconographic status that Mike has achieved, and in fact, had almost from the beginning.” He spoke of Mike’s “speed, accuracy, craft, and power,” his “mystique,” and even more so than Muhammad Ali, consider Mike the “representative iconic figure of that profession.”

III

Tyson and Ali appeared together on the Arsenio Hall Show in 1989 with respect and admiration for one another. They both were sure that the other would win if they both fought in their prime. Ali said about the reputed bad boy, “He can be modest, humble, and nice.” The entire segment was touching and hilarious, and Arsenio fell back on the cough, laughing.

An ESPN special, Ringside Tyson, archives more of his early interview footage, his visions of grandeur meshed with a foresight of inevitable downfall. The special chronicles Tyson’s career to his first professional loss against Buster Douglas in Japan (Tyson’s personal life was in public turmoil at that time, under the spell of Don King, and his team so underestimated Buster Douglas that the corner team did not bring all their medical gear from the locker room). Douglas who had been deemed a manqué his whole career had dedicated that match to his recently deceased mother and he fought like a true champion for one night.

According to Teddy Atlas, who co-hosted the Ringside special, Tyson’s grand character flaw is his inability to deal with adversity. Tyson had learned how to charge through his opponents, and how to charge through life, but whenever he met anything that could stop him in his tracks, he didn’t know what to do.

Atlas, who grew up rough himself, as notated by the prominent knife scar on his face, recognized Tyson’s potential and also his instability, early on, but his concerns went largely ignored, and caused controversies in D’Amato’s camp in the 80s. Meanwhile Cus, elderly and ill, went on television and claimed he was only alive to that day because of Mike. After Cus’s death, and Mike’s exploitation by grand pimp, Don King, Mike’s professional and personal life began going down the tubes.

Here’s the Dynamite Kid, who can be seen in his early fights picking up his opponents after he knocked them out, asking if they’re ok, kissing them on the head, with real eager sportsmanship.

Years later, in 1997, Atlas made a broad accurate prediction that something would happen during the Tyson-Holyfield rematch. He saw the desperation and fear (which Cus had helped mold into Iron Mike, but now that the once unbeatable kid was feeling this again, full-circle it was simply dangerous). The way Tyson acted in the days preceding the fight, Atlas predicted there would be something dirty: “He’ll bite Holyfield. He’ll butt him. He’ll hit him low. He’ll do something if he don’t get him early with a lucky shot. I know this guy. He’s got this all set up in his mind. That’s the only way he can face it. That’s what this is all about.”

IV

Tyson has spoken about himself as a tragic hero, a powerful being that brought about his own doom. Others may consider him an antihero, with the flaws always outweighing the greatness (and these opinions have changed over the years). Or maybe he’s a villain seeking redemption.

Part heroic and admirable, part ruthless; both kind and nasty. Who is the man?

He’s at least two-headed. In a post-fight interview, after his very last bout, with Kevin McBride, Tyson said that he only fought for the money, and that his heart wasn’t in it anymore. There’s an honesty there, a cruel truth; he knows he’s finished, losing to “that caliber of fighter.”  Yet, a few seconds later, he also praised McBride and wished him the best. These manners may be a lip service afterthought, or a another persona, or just a façade, but Tyson seems to embrace this. He fills the role.

Tyson is larger than life, almost as if our conceptions of him can only comprehend so many angles; this town ain’t big enough for the entire Tyson, maybe; and with that said, he isn’t sure either. As he said in an early 80s interview, almost bragging: “No one knows Mike Tyson.”

Why the fascination in our pop mythology? What can Tyson teach us about ourselves?

Is it possible that Tyson, with however many heads he has, the trickster hydra, is only a reflection of us?  not just our vampiric obsession with celebrities, our fickle love and hate, sucking them dry, and composting them as retro novelties on VH1 and other media cameos; no, just us as everyday human beings, in the awkwardness, in the glory?

He is the supersized version of our strengths and weaknesses, our superpowers and mortal coil frailties, orbiting around issues of power and dominance. That EPIC inner-conflict, the 300 Spartan battle of the psyche. He embodies our contradictions and earnest hypocrisies. It’s all there.

Instead of backpedaling, Tyson goes kamikaze into the vanishing point. He is what we fear and what we want to be, our vicariousness, our voyeurism, our goal, our nightmare. He is the spark of friction between ambition and attrition. Tyson is the part of us that eats well and exercises; he’s the part that says screw it, what does it really matter, I’m gonna die anyway, I should just take it easy and have fun; he’s the part that says well that isn’t even possible without taking care of the body. The shaky borders of victory and self-defeat. The multitudes of the collective neuroses, ancient and modern. A caricature of the human mind and spirit, intertwined with Gordian knots and feedback loops.

But enough about us.

V

There are many ways to skin the words and actions of Tyson. In Toback’s Black and White, filmed about two years before the Lewis fiasco, Tyson does some improv with Robert Downey Jr, Brooke Shields, and others.  Downey’s character keeps bothering him at a gangster soiree, while Tyson explains that he’s trying to have a peaceful moment. He improvs to the effect, “I’m on parole c’mon,” and later tells Shields’ character, who is trying to film him, “I’m not an animal.” Of course, in a comedic moment, he slaps Downey Jr., all part of the improv. (Ironically, it was his admiration of Downey Jr that first brought Tyson to Toback’s film set where they met in 1985). Even here, in the scene not found in Toback’s Tyson, the man is an embodiment of contradiction… an intersection of a conundrum that is occasionally at equilibrium but sometimes wriggles as if it is going to explode.

Might there be a future industry in Tyson-chic?  Should the man have his own talk show? How about Tyson figurines with accessories and mood rings?

In Todd Philips’ new comedy, The Hangover, Tyson sings Phil Collins, carvinalesque, self-imposed inversion of iconography. Or, esoteric hysterics aside, it’s just funny. It’s a sight gag that tickles something about our culture. It gets the same laugh that his commentary about gonorrhea does.

The scene plays mostly uncomfortable, with a little funny. Tyson seems awkward and weathered. In one brief moment, with a John Lequizamo collegiate inflection, he says “NICE,” impressed by footage of the characters stealing a cop car during their Vegas shenanigans. The protagonists get caught up in all kinds of things, such as stealing Tyson’s tiger and mock-humping it in front of the surveillance camera. This clearly irritates him, but beyond sending one of the fellas out of the room he is remarkably patient. With a world weariness, Tyson says on the couch, “People do dumb shit when they’re fucked up,” and everyone onscreen and in the theater seems to agree.

**

top image of Tyson fighting by Christian Wiseman.

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- You take your disenfranchised son to Hawaii, lust his girl, and cock-block him at dinner (your treat). Your son goes off to self-medicate. You slither up to your crush and fail at sugar-daddery.

- You go rafting while your expensive Egyptian lizards get fed poisoned cockroaches. You cheat and get cheated on.

- You crash your car. You die. Your friend removes the joint from your pocket before the cops come and smokes it.

- You join a seven-degrees, Hellenistic chain of bisexual adultery. Then you watch music videos.

- You are a vampire in LA (whether genuine or a knockoff Nosferatu). You suffer the inconvenience of a friend dropping by and interrupting a bloodletting. He’s always imposing, that party animal.

- You wake in Japan and call room service to remove the children.  You pray these young prostitutes have vanished before you step out of the shower. You peak out of the bathroom, first anxious, then relieved.

- You are dazed on pills by the pool. You talk to your Alzheimer-ailed mom on the phone, while she tells you about the photographs from a New York Christmas when you were twelve.  She has been finding those photos every day for the past two weeks.  You barely remember the trip, except the sounds of broken glass and yelling.  You smoke a cigarette and keep this to yourself: “But the thing I remember the most, the thing I remember with a clarity that makes me cringe, is that there were no photographs taken on that trip.”

- This is your life: “Danny is on my bed and depressed because Ricky was picked up by a break-dancer at the Odyssey on the night of the Duran Duran look-alike contest and murdered. It seems that Biff, Ricky’s current lover, called Danny after getting my number from someone at the station and told him the news. I walk in and all Danny says is ‘Ricky’s dead. Throat slit. All of his blood drained from his body. Biff called.’”

**

Infused with guilty pleasure, this is a perfect beach read, watching these characters navigate their numb rampages and vacant glamour.

This is the literature that comes to mind during long holiday BBQ binges, in the sun, say after Bay to Breakers. It’s your buoy, staggering home under awnings all the way across San Francisco to avoid the sun, or so I’ve been told.  Not that these characters would do that – they’d go to the sleep in the gutter or flag a cab.

Interconnected, these tales extract the beauty and spirit of depravity, not because of the same ol’ sex drugs rock n roll, but because of that drive, that urgency: to confront, escape, live, die, relax, shake things up.

It’s not the staggering Burroughskowski circus… but a kindred soul, slumped in a lawn chair. These characters aren’t going to wake up on skid row, and they’re not worried about their next meal; but they do have to line up their next indulgence, these causalities of disoriented ambivalence. They must watch their backs, riding that gray area, somewhere between tanning and burning.

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With echoes of 9/11, the protagonist of Jim Knipfel’s novel flees the ubiquitous surveillance of a not-so-futuristic government.

Despite its demolition of pop-culture groupthink, Jim Knipfel’s Unplugging Philco fluctuates between satirical insights and longwinded detours.

Wally Philco is a second-rate Homer Simpson, a near-future everyman schlep, struggling to find his place in the world—or escape from it. He risks his life with a decision to ‘unplug’ from the government’s far-ranging surveillance system and gets recruited by an underground group that dwells in abandoned sections of the New York City subway system.

The novel’s opening sections are an intriguing shadow-puppet dance of narrative tension, but eventually Knipfel’s story shifts toward vague melodrama; the story picks up, revived by more interesting tidbits, then flat-lines again. Philco’s internal dread is duly belabored—but is there some deeper purpose to a three-page description of his office supplies, following a three-page anxiety attack over why he buys the same mediocre coffee? Is this a groggy homage to Office Space? Following a minute account of a subway wait and train ride, the story’s blips and bleeps and surveillance monitors start to feel more like bells and whistles. Allegedly noir, the narrative clanks wry understatement against neurotic hyperbole, making for a rather sluggish journey. The reader waits for a wink from the author, some between-the-lines justification, but it never comes.

At its best, Unplugging Philco unveils hip observations about totalitarian control of the population by hi-tech consumer tracking. In Philco’s world, there is no separation of market and state; the media are embedded in a government that manipulates technology and terrorism, a plausibly frightening scenario dealt with in the novel’s most engaging sections. A 1984-inspired monitoring system is upgraded here to something like Dystopia 2.0: imagine modern dictators buying out Google and Amazon, replace Big Brother with a shopping cart icon, then proceed to check out.

Jim Knipfel

It’s “a plan straight out of Machiavelli, Hitler, and The Outer Limits. Which doesn’t mean it’s a bad plan, mind you.” Government control is leveraged by fear and paranoia after that ol’ bait-and-switch: a terrorist attack, the footage playing on a 24/7 loop—accompanied, of course, by TV commercials—to remind pedestrians of the imminent danger. Consumerism and commie-scare tactics merge when doctored footage is produced with CGI effects to show additional attacks, the media’s marketing, production, and design departments working in sync. Citizens are harassed by smiley-faced robots about their semantic choices: damned if you do, damned if you don’t. See also: Kafka-esque bureaucracy, Catch-22.

One of the ruthless masterminds in Unplugging Philco wanted to be a lawyer, “but he wasn’t the best student, so he ended up suing his way through grade school. Sued the teachers, sued the schools. Sued the school board, even, demanding that he be allowed to move on. Then he sued his way through high school and college, then law school. Sued every one of his professors first year… Harvard opted to settle out of court and just gave him a damn degree. But after that he went straight into intelligence work.” It’s the kind of in-joke that’s clever and provocative for a sentence or two, but eventually grows tedious. It’s culture criticism with a sledgehammer, and Knipfel’s irony cuts both ways. After all, the novel’s first chapter can be found at Amazon.com, a site that utilizes more than a few of the profiling factors (your personal cache of ‘recently viewed items,’ recommendations, account details) that, in Wally’s world, have mutated to total surveillance and dictatorship. What all this technology still can’t determine is if readers would rather sate their post-9/11 palettes with a double-screening of Idiocracy and Zeitgeist the Movie.

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Prior to Russell Jones’s fatal cocaine overdose (and possible suicide) in November 2004, his hype man and best bud, Buddha Monk, joined him on drug binges and divvied up the doses to prevent him from OD-ing. By the end Jones, known as Ol’ Dirty Bastard, was fractured and burnt out on fame, questioning his own authenticity.

Jaime Lowe, author of Digging for Dirt: The Life and Death of ODB, witnessed Ol’ Dirty Bastard’s spirit-crushing “comeback” show in New York in 2003, at which the rapper appeared drugged and severely mentally ill. Buddha Monk did more than backup ODB’s vocals; he essentially performed the show himself, karaoke-style.

Grown out of an assignment for The Village Voice, Lowe’s biography explores the notion that ODB, one of the founders of the Wu-Tang Clan, suffered from untreated mental ailments, possibly schizophrenia. His wild man/trickster persona masked the need for diagnosis: “Rock stars acting crazy is like a banker counting money… These are the performers who define their product by drawing outside the lines… The job of the clown, after all, is to disguise tragedy with a real good juggling trick.” ODB’s delusional braggadocio, accounted in erratic speech patterns, was encouraged by his peers. They shrugged it off: “Ah that’s just Ol’ Dirty.”

In his prime, Ol’ Dirty Bastard was a rapper who appealed to people who didn’t even like hip hop. His voice and attitude were as much punk rock and soul as they were rap: “Each song is infused with urgency and hilarity and him. That’s why hip-hop misses ODB so goddamn much: he put all of himself into his work. So much so that there wasn’t much left over.”

As a boy, Jones was brought up with the teachings of the Five Percent Nation (a sect of the Nation of Islam that believes that “the black man is God”) and moved through various personas, absorbing the previous ones along the way. He began as Ason Unique, literal incarnate of God, then morphed into Ol’ Dirty Bastard and, later, more fractured characters (Osiris, Big Baby Jesus, Dirt McGirt, etc). In the end, he tired of his image and wanted someone else to take over the job.

Lowe recounts many amusing tales, such as ODB accidentally entering the Los Angeles studio where Pras (from the Fugees) was recording the soon-to-be hit single, “Ghetto Superstar,” for the Bullworth film soundtrack. ODB was due in NY that day – but his coastal confusion was serendipitous, and led to him adding vocals on the now-legendary track. His work with Mariah Carey, playing the charismatic buffoon to her squeaky clean persona and operatic range, is also duly noted.

Equally amusing, but more disturbing, is the account of stuntman and trained clown Steve-O’s official tribute to Ol’ Dirty, and Wu Tang protégé Raekwon’s livid response to it: Steve-O (of Jackass and Wildboyz) entered the stage naked with his penis between his legs and did a backflip. Raekwon demanded that Steve-O return to the stage and apologize, lest he face physical repercussions. Not everyone knew how to share ODB, dead or alive.

Like a thriller, Lowe’s narrative moves tensely toward its subject’s impending demise. A stint in jail after his second album appeared to have crushed the spirit and soul which had infused Jones’s music. On the run from the law for various minor offenses, he made a famous incognito cameo at a Wu-Tang show, dressed up in a yellow parka “like Kenny [from South Park],” but while giving out autographs at a fast food drive-in, the gathering crowd drew attention to him, leading to his capture.

Lowe provides smart and fair accounts, not beating around the bush when discussing the brutality of the Dannemora, NY prison where ODB was held. While she waited for a tour of the facilities, she overheard correction officers betting over how many stitches an inmate received after a knife attack; Lowe points out that such apathy to violence is encouraged and perhaps required to survive in prison, even for the employees.

Lowe recalls how she first got into the Wu-Tang Clan’s music to impress the boys in her high school. But her interest soon became genuine, enabling her to give astute analysis of the group’s appeal: “The foundation of Wu-Tang is in its lore, its urban mythology, its appropriation of kung fu, chess, Buddhism, Islam, bible studies, cartoons, comics, Staten Island; anything they came across was woven into an intricate web of culture and identification and a constructed community that bordered on cult. They made themselves a world when the projects didn’t provide. And they sold that world to this other world (a primarily suburban one) in rhymes.”

Her own career arc gets woven into Digging for Dirt, including her early days working on the O.J. Simpson story for Hard Copy. She includes a touching interview with attorney Robert Shapiro, who defended Simpson but also, less noted, defended ODB. The interview speaks to drug addiction and Shapiro’s views of it as a disease, not a crime. (Shapiro’s son overdosed in 2005.)

Occasionally Lowe’s biography bogs down in digression; but her interviews, analyses, and commentaries are always engaging and often bittersweet, as when she discusses the public’s fascination with celebrities and its accompanying schadenfreude: “There’s a small explicit thrill, envy almost, in watching public figures self-destruct, particularly when it involves sex, drugs, and creativity, because it represents what we want, what we wish we could do.”

Prior to his incarceration, Ol’ Dirty Bastard knew what he wanted – as a musician, marketer, and businessman. This account of his final days draws a painful picture of a very sick man who needed help but only found exploitation.

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Eminem’s memoir, The Way I Am, borrows its title from his 2000 single about the over-the-top trappings of fame, in which he vents: “I’m racin’, I’m pacin’, I stand and I sit/And I’m thankful for every fan that I get/But I can’t take a shit in the bathroom/Without someone standin’ by it.”

The book explores the rapper’s childhood and teenage years in Detroit, his underdog struggle as an emerging musician and young father, his rise to unexpected levels of success and fame, the methods and serendipity behind his songwriting process, and the reconciliation of his family and musical future. Recalling his early struggles, Eminem catalogues how he risked physical harm and ridicule to hone his craft and build his reputation; now, a decade later, he is essentially a recluse, staying out of the public eye because people react to his celebrity as if he were the “Loch Ness Monster.”

The Way I Am opens with a eulogy for Proof, best friend and rap partner, who was murdered in 2006. “He was the only reason I stopped getting my ass whipped. I’m not going to sugarcoat it—he was my ghetto pass. I don’t know if anybody realizes it; that’s why I’m saying it now. He didn’t give a fuck about being called an Uncle Tom for being down with me. He stuck up for me like we were literally brothers[…] He was a brilliant cat who saw things in me that I didn’t see yet, and I guess I was smart enough to understand that he was the dude who could somehow save my life.”

This satisfying opening chronicles Eminem’s practice fist fights with Proof; they partook in rhyming and improvisation exercises immediately after punching each other in the face, to stay sharp and on point. Here he lets his guard down, so to speak, but the promise of intimacy is not fulfilled elsewhere in the book. Marshall Mathers (a.k.a. Eminem, a.k.a. Slim Shady) briefly considers his role in Proof’s death, but drops the issue without providing any factual context or following his ponderings to any conclusions. Many other key biographical issues – drugs, his ex-wife, his mother, his father – are similarly alluded to without the full exploration we ravenous readers demand, making several chapters read like filler.

Concrete details and emotional explanations are slim pickings, as if the text were comprised of posthumous discoveries. But Mathers is still alive! Maybe the photo-rich coffee table packaging is responsible for disrupting the text (and for the $40 sticker); The Way I Am is a fickle memoir, rendered in broad strokes. The tone is conversational, like smoothed-over transcripts and journal entries, with much of his vernacular maintained (such as his shoplifted winter jacket having “mad pockets”).

The memoir ends with a meditation on mentoring the next generation of rappers and musicians, a discussion that echoes the intimacy of his relationship with Proof. Elsewhere, Eminem flashes occasional insights on fatherhood and fame, but always holding back or downplaying the authentic personal details, so that in the end, the memoir’s title comes to read not as a promise of accuracy and self-analysis but as an opaque copout, a shrug.

Eminem’s career-long expressiveness and provocation are both a gift and curse. His lyrics and interviews have always been so informative that we don’t learn much new information in The Way I Am, and readers may prefer his previous book, Angry Blonde, in which he discusses the origin of many of his songs.

The Way I Am includes a DVD, stuck in the back like the gum inside a pack of trading cards. In the “mini-documentary” it contains, Eminem talks about being a father before a rapper (he is the father or custodian of three adolescent girls). But it could have included new footage, some live clips, or shots of Eminem in his home studio, and the book itself might have included timelines or third-party accounts from the media to clarify still-vague accounts of events many readers will already know about.

On the other hand, Proof does manage to slap the camera man (usually Eminem) upside the head a handful of times, giving us a glimpse of the quick jab that taught Mathers how to fight.

This largely vague memoir is written “with” Sacha Jenkins (Ego Trip and Piecebook: The Secret Drawings of Graffiti Writers), and many sections relate to art and the creative process. But despite including photos of Eminem’s visual artwork, and a dozen or so original lyric sheets with annotations, readers don’t get much inside scoop. Discussions like the following analysis of Eminem’s “slant rhyming” are all too rare:

“[I’ve been praised for] putting together words that weren’t supposed to rhyme—where I flipped the way I was enunciating them. For example, ‘Look at the store clerk, he’s older than George Burns.’ ‘Store clerk’ and ‘George Burns’ don’t rhyme, technically… Some cats in the game have really picked up on that.”

Neil Strauss, who assisted Marilyn Manson with his disturbing memoir, The Long Hard Road out of Hell, might have been better equipped to coax readable content out of the rapper. Pain and hardship may be a valuable source of Eminem’s rage and energy as a performer, but in a memoir clogged with repression it just gets frustrating.

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