Thursday Night in Fort Greene: Spike Lee hosts PRINCE We Love You Shockadelica Joint outside 40 Acres & A Mule Filmworks on South Elliott Place

(Video courtesy Blasttube NY)

(Video courtesy Edmond Nelson)
(Video courtesy TINO B)

Saturday Afternoon in Bed-Stuy: Spike Lee "Do The Right Thing" 25th Anniversary Block Party on Stuyvesant Avenue between Quincy Street and Lexington Avenue (Do The Right Thing Way)

(Video courtesy Stephen Ray) (Video courtesy Henry Downes)

(Video courtesy Radian Studios - The Art of Recording & Multimedia)

Thursday Evening in Downtown Brooklyn: Opening Reception for "We’ve Gotta Have It!: Art Inspired by Spike Lee" at Long Island University

We started off a beautiful evening by returning to our old haunt of Long Island University in downtown Brooklyn, where we taught from the winter of '75 to the summer of '78 and have only the fondest of memories for our early days in the academia racket.

Thanks to our friends at Afro-Punk, we got word about today's 6 p.m. opening reception at LIU's Salena Gallery for "We’ve Gotta Have It!: Art Inspired by Spike Lee," a showcase of

art from participants worldwide in honor of legendary filmmaker Spike Lee. Although Lee is known for his prolific moving images, his work has also influenced a multitude of visuals artists across genre, language and borders. This juried exhibit is an opportunity to showcase artwork and offer a public thank you for his inspiration.

It was the first event of this weekend's tribute to native son Spike Lee, "Where's Mars?: Brooklyn Honors Spike Lee," orchestrated by PlanIt Brooklyn (the filmmaker and his production company are not involved), and a great beginning. It drew a large and enthusiastic crowd, us among them, for a look at some really excellent art.

After getting off the G train at Fulton Street, we walked over to the familiar LIU campus (in all our time working there, we always drove from the other end of Flatbush Avenue and parked either at street meters or at the then-public lot north of Junior's), but when we saw this ghost sign as we walked on Rockwell Place, we couldn't recall rates that low. . .

Nelson George, in his wonderful memoir City Kid (our hold on the book from the Brooklyn Public Library finally brought it to us on Monday and we devoured it by Tuesday), knew Spike Lee before he was Spike Lee back in Fort Greene in the early 1980s. An investor in She's Gotta Have It, writes in his chapter on Spike:

In most successful public careers there are defining moments when that person enters the cultural consciousness. For Spike that was the 1986 Cannes Film Festival. He'd already sold She's to Island Films, after a successful screening at the San Francisco festival, so much of the pressure was off. He came into 19 Willoughby [Nelson's house] with six mock-ups of the poster, including the one that ended up in movie houses around the country. I threw in my two cents on which one I liked (the one he used!), and then gave Spike a couple of hundred dollars to spend in France on himself. It was probably the last time Spike Lee ever needed a loan.

By the time Spike came back from Europe, the game had changed forever. As "the black Woody Allen," he was a media sensation, and was smart enough to use that initial acclaim to build a massive career. Suddenly black nerds were chic. No longer were the only black Amerian role models athletes, musicians, hustlers, or activists. The bookish gal, the scholarly teen, the wannabe historian, the dedicated cinephile, while praised during black history month, had rarely been icons. Spike's visibility changed that. . .

We recall the incredible excitement we felt when we saw She's Gotta Have It at a suburban movie theater in Lauderhill, Florida. It was unlike any movie we'd ever seen, true to a part of Brooklyn and the African-American community we knew but had never been represented in mainstream films.

Obviously a whole generation grew up under Spike Lee's influence and some of the wonderful artists in this show (curated by an eminent panel) owe some debt to Spike for inspiration. Working in varied media and with different sensibilities, they nevertheless showed things in common in this show. It's easy to dismiss an exhibition like this one as a gimmick, but it's not. The work is good, and you should get down to LIU to see it.

Untitled by Jennifer Drinkwater

Our puny cell phone didn't get very good pics of these artworks, and many are unavailable on the web for obvious copyright reasons. And we couldn't post some that we really liked, like the one by Che Kothari (a favorite of ours, we appropriated one of his pic when we ran for Congress in Arizona) called k-os - Do The Right Thing - Love/Hate - Radio Raheem or an untitled photo by Alzo Slade or triple-threat-man Ka-Son Reeves' terrific Block Party painting or Sylvia Maier's haunting Portait of Spencer (Spencer Richards?). But we're posting a few others. . .

Our Story by Layla Sola


Martin Loves Coretta by Paul DEO


Crown Heights' Jen One

Mo Better by Ron Ackins


Joker Sambo by Nelson Caban

View Into A New World by Musa


A Prayer for Red-A Prayer for Malik by Marcus Anderson

We definitely enjoyed this show and are grateful to the artists, the curators Coup d'etat Arts & Raquel Wilson, the jurors, LIU and everyone behind it. And, like everyone, we're especially grateful for Spike.

You can catch We've Gotta Have It! till July 10 at Long Island University's Salena Gallery.

Tuesday Night at the Park Slope Barnes & Noble: Anthont LaSala & Seth Kushner’s "The Brooklynites"

This was posted to Richard Grayson's MySpace blog on Thursday, October 18, 2007:

Tuesday Night at the Park Slope Barnes & Noble: LaSala & Kushner’s "The Brooklynites" at OTBKB


At Only the Blog Knows Brooklyn, I have a report on Tuesday evening's presentation by Anthony LaSala and Seth Kushner on their book, The Brooklynites:

ON TUESDAY EVENING I attended a presentation at the Park Slope Barnes & Noble by Anthony LaSala and Seth Kushner about their excellent coffee-table book of photos and interviews, The Brooklynites. Casually dressed, they sat on either side of a screen on which they showed Seth's photos of Brooklyn residents from the book and discussed how they went about developing and executing their project and gave interesting tidbits about their subjects.

The first photo that the pair of Brooklyn natives (Seth has never left the borough for more than two weeks at a time; Anthony went away only for college) showed was of themselves back in high school in Bay Ridge in 1991.

When the two friends started their project to photograph the people of Brooklyn, they had a hard time. The neighborhood young women at the annual feast on 18th Avenue, thinking the guys were "perverts" trying to pick them up, were suspicious – as were many others.

Even Seymour, their local hardware store owner, was so dubious about what seemed to him a "not very successful" idea that he refused to be photographed – and would not agree to be until after a year had elapsed and the duo had already shot celebrities like Spike Lee (their first big "get," Spike led to others), Rosie Perez (who drove Anthony's car "with a very heavy foot" to the marqueta in Williamsburg where she posed), Jonathan Lethem (who also rounded up Brooklyn's other literary Jonathans, Safran Foer and Ames) and Marty Markowitz (photographed at his table at Junior's, where he posed with a slab of cheesecake that he would not eat – at least in front of them – but did take home).

Seth and Anthony said they gained of weight from all their travels around the borough: they got steaks at Peter Luger (whose chef is seen on the Williamsburg Bridge), pizza at Totonno's and DiFara's (Dominick DeMarco has his floured hands, as usual, taking his pie out of the oven), and cases of Fox's U-Bet syrup at the Brownsville factory where the crucial ingredient in eggcreams is still manufactured and which is permeated by the smell of chocolate.

They also got to go behind the scenes at Brooklyn's cultural and historic attractions. The pair got into the Brooklyn Museum on a Monday or Tuesday, when all of us natives know it's never open, to take a photo of director Arnold Lehman in the famed Egyptian room. They also went to Green-Wood Cemetery on a bright snowy day when it too was closed, to shoot director Ken Taylor – who told them it was often hard to convince pizzerias that, yes, the delivery should come to his home in a graveyard.

And that shot of Otis the sea lion and his keeper at the New York Aquarium also allowed Seth and Anthony access to places usually off-limits to the public. They even managed to get past the gate in Sea Gate, which Anthony said was unlike any other place in the city, when they shot gymnast Olga Karminski doing contortions on a ledge in front of the Sea Gate lighthouse.

Other photos we saw featured the Coney Island freak show's The Great Fredini, swallowing a sword on a street corner in Greenpoint; writer David Lefkowitz and his young son, who actually live on a Gowanus Canal houseboat; one of the young players for the Cyclones in Keyspan Park, with the Parachute Jump in the background; and singer Sufjan Stevens, photographed on the Brooklyn Bridge in one of the most artistic shots in the book (thanks to the wonderful geometric patterns of the bridge's cables).

They were most pleased to shoot Steve Buscemi on the block in East New York where he grew up; they were invited to his old apartment, which he hadn't been in since childhood and where he did his first acting for his mom and dad. But of course many of the portraits in the book are not of famous Brooklynites but of the regular people we pass on the street every day. In the book, all of them get to talk about what makes Brooklyn special to them. (When asked by Southerners to say something in Brooklynese, one wise guy photographed in the book said he told them, "Hand over your wallet.")

After the presentation, a lot of us lined up to get our copies of The Brooklynites signed by Seth and Anthony. I'm sending mine to my father who may have lived in other states for the past 30 years but who's still a Brooklynite at heart.