On Spike Lee

t.tara at 4:05 AM on 09/27/08:

With you there, brother. When I met Spike, I stammered and failed to make an impression but hopefully I make it up with the words. Anyways, the most underrated movie for me, always, is “Mo Better Blues.” It was pure accidental/prepared genius. From the colors, the story (I still get girls who can’t figure out if Indigo or Clarke was the b*tch), the music and the Brooklyn love – I, in my Detroit swagger, lost my mind. It was the first time I got lost in a movie. I’ll shout you out the review for St. Anna when I see it. Stay up!

MML at 4:32 AM on 09/27/08:

what’s good, t. tara? remember the spike’s joint store in fort greene? i met him out there at a book signing, i think the ‘making of malcolm x’ book was out. (believe me, i read every last one.) and word, ‘mo’ better blues’ is one of the great modern black romances, with ‘love jones’ and maybe HBO’s ‘disappearing acts’. as far as underrated, i’ve been known to defend ‘girl 6’!

shawn taylor at 6:40 PM on 09/30/08:

damn…spike’s joint store? south elliot? i lived within walking distance. spike was the brother (outside of hip-hop music) that let me know that art was a viable career. just saw st anna and i can’t wait to read your take.

MML at 7:00 PM on 09/30/08:

shawn, i heard ‘miracle at st. anna’ came in 9th in the box office, like a flop out the gate. i hope it builds. and in a (slightly) unrelated note, i hope john singleton gets some swagger back. he’s supposed to be doing something reuniting halle berry & billy bob thorton, but i’d be happy with a killer ‘luke cage’ flick.

shawn taylor at 7:42 AM on 10/01/08:

man…i don’t know if it is possible to do a killer luke cage flick. the possibility for coonery is so damn high. black panther, i can see; john stewart as green lantern, i can get behind—but between the old silver tiara “sweet christmas” era, and azzarellos’ super thug-nigga—you’d have to start from scratch. plus, singleton hasn’t had his magic for a bit. i guess (if it happens) we’ll see

ieishah at 10:33 PM on 10/02/08:

don’t get me started. i remember being a grad student in england and arguing passionately with my fellow ‘20th c american lit’ classmates that spike was not in fact, against interracial relationships in jungle fever . . . the intrusive, contrary soundtrack (that operatic climax of stevie’s livin for the city as samuel smokes himself out, the love song ‘how many times’ blaring as annabella sciorra’s racist family beats the shit out of her), how about the cat, straight out of a ’20’s silent comedy, stretching on the kitchen counter, the exaggerated old school ‘descent blackfolk-ness’ of ossie and ruby (the purify family??). . . satire, satire, satire . . . and no one got it. but i did. because i, too, love spike.

my tuscan friend, whose quoting of ‘get on the bus’ at our initial meeting is the only reason i gave him the time of day, is so excited.

Michael Gillespie at 7:23 PM on 10/04/08:

Keep defending Girl 6! When I taught a Spike Lee class last year, I had students read Suzi Lori Parks’ VENUS and think about Girl 6 as a co-authored text. Can’t say they really got it as well as I hoped but at least I tried. But really, what can you expect from a generation who don’t know shit about Prince other than a handful of songs?

tokunbo at 12:10 AM on 10/05/08:

when my mother at first heard about school daze, she dragged me the 100 miles to washington dc [we lived in small-town pennsylvania at the time] to see this movie. she showed it as one of the reasons she did NOT want me to go to a black college. my parents had gone to black colleges, and had had a lot of drama about being “too dark” to join in the reindeer games.

now, i haven’t followed spike’s movies with the intensity of people such as yourself, but if one has been on teevee, i don’t change the channel; i sit and watch it.

do the right thing affected me. jungle fever affected me. mo betta blues stirred up something for me — i think it’s because they all brought to mind a black america that i knew had existed, but in which i was not raised. when we weren’t living in africa or the caribbean, we were living in lily-white towns and i was sent to various boarding schools.

for me, school daze still does it, though. one of the reasons i liked washington was because i could be around other black fourth-generation college graduates.
but one of the reasons i hated washington was because very few of said fourth-generation college graduates were as dark as i was, and many of those that i did meet had trouble believing that my dark *ss had relatives practicing both law and medicine at the start of the 20th century.

school daze made me take a good look of the student bodies of black colleges before the “civil rights” era. i didn’t like what i saw, and understood what my parents were saying to me, which was sad.

now that i’m pushing 40, i stop and think about why my mother felt it was so important for me to see a movie with such situations in it — many of which went against the very religious upbringing in which she was trying to raise me.

it’s funny you talk about the showings in france. i’d always considered myself more french and/or puerto rican than anything else [very complicated background] but the awakening that i had in 1989, shortly after seeing school daze essentially told me that there was really no place for me in france. i didn’t regret giving up my french passport until i had children, however — and to this day i try not to speak french there; every time that i do out of absolute necessity, i’m instantly treated as an african who must be deported at once. blah.

madeleine at 8:37 PM on 10/10/08:

first off, yes, defend girl 6, I still love that movie: the fact that you never quite caught her name, effing genius…she was, who ever you wanted her to be…

and as for this new piece, I have loved ATCQ longer than I can remember. Thank you for posting the video, it feels very of the mac (computer) era: injected with a kind of do-it-yourself ethos but with better production values than on Midnight Mauraders…simple but not undeliberate.

Thus, I am brought to my question, how do you as a writer, MM, reconcile the fact that many of the people you write about, are people you know; who can pick up the phone, or shoot and email and say: “no, you got it all wrong.”

What are your strategies?

madeleine at 8:50 PM on 10/10/08:

oops, I just had a margarita with lunch (the economic crisis came home—to my house—to roost)…I read the Spike comments, but was thinking about ATCQ.

Whoops.

MML at 9:40 PM on 10/11/08:

no worries madeleine! (haha) y’know, i never really thought about that much, i gotta admit. i do remember showing erykah my review of “baduizm” in rolling stone, bumping into her at the brooklyn moon one night. she dissed the review for mentioning diana ross. (ha) i told her i’d written it and gave my little explanation, but i realized too that artists are sensitive about most criticism, it’s nothing personal. so i don’t have any “strategies” really, but that’s the closest i came to ever being called out. except for when kevin powell threatened to beat me up in the street, but that’s another story.

madeleine at 3:43 PM on 10/13/08:

yeah, I’ve had a few confrontations too…I always wanna be like: bad press id better than no press…ugh.

Here’s hoping things are better in France than they are stateside.

I have stopped watching/listening to the news.