NAU Donates $30K to Spike Lee’s Checking Account
Promo poster for NAU's Spike Lee event.
Who was this Spike Lee guy, anyway?
I had no idea who this famous black film director was until NAU decided to hire him to speak on January 27th. The university was aflutter, and everyone was waiting in anticipation for his appearance, one the university reportedly spent $30 thousand to make happen. A Spike Lee film festival was scheduled for the weekend before his Wednesday night talk, but excessive snow on the library's roof canceled the screenings. One of my classes required me to view at least two of those screenings, so instead of watching "Do the Right Thing" (1989) and "She's Gotta Have It" (1986), I was forced into watching both parts (four acts) of "When the Levees Broke," (2006) the only Spike Lee film that was screened before his talk.
"When the Levees Broke" is a documentary about the catastrophe that was Hurricane Katrina relief and the way the lower class was treated in that situation. As a whole, I was impressed, angered, and inspired by it. I built my impression of Spike off that film, and admired his anti-class discrimination message. The film's massive length of 255 minutes, emotional interviews, and evocative images led me to conclude that Spike is an excellent filmmaker, and it got me excited for his talk.
Ardrey Auditorium appeared crowded as expected, and I found my way inside. The auditorium had plenty of open seats, so either a lot of people were running late or the sold-out audience didn't care enough to show up. (This is what happens when you give all students access to free tickets.) Nearby Cline Library was providing overflow seating with a live video feed. The pre-recorded announcement played asking the audience that no flash photography is allowed and to silence their cell phones and pagers; someone near me remarked how dated it was.
Three NAU faculty members gave introductions for Spike, one of whom was my Intro to African American Studies professor, Dr. Ricardo Guthrie. They each gave interesting snippets of who Spike Lee is, the work he's done, and the context of his visit on International Holocaust Remembrance Day. The audience was pumped.
The lights dimmed, Dr. Guthrie introduced Spike, and a short man with an orange baseball cap shadowing his eyes walked to the middle of the stage next to a stool. The audience cheered wildly, and once the clapping settled, Spike began his talk.
But it was only that: talk. Not a lecture or a speech. He greeted us by saying, "It's great to be here at... this university." A half-hour into it, and the structure of what Spike was saying resembled an old man mumbling about his hey-days. A few comments here about racism, a few comments there about how much struggling he endured as an aspiring filmmaker, and it was time for the Q and A section. That was it? Maybe the whole reason he's really here is so we can pick his brain for insight.
It might have been the way we asked the questions, but it was obvious Spike was not interested in us or what we had to ask. Many of the question-posers felt compelled to give a 2-3 minute personal biography to Spike before asking anything. One asshole even pitched his documentary after Spike explicitly asked us not to. Still, the answers he gave were half-assed and thoughtless. Two examples: A Hopi woman asked what Spike was thinking about doing in terms of a native American documentary, similar to "When the Levees Broke," on the plight of the natives and their mistreatment. Spike thought for a good 15 seconds and gave a blanket slavery comparison answer. It was painfully obvious that he didn't care as much about them as he did Katrina victims, but not everyone in the audience seemed to catch on to that.
I had the opportunity to ask him the fourth question of the night. "When Edward R. Murrow was still with us, he implied that television would become some sort of light box and dissipate our minds and our culture. Do you agree with that, or what are your thoughts on television today?" This was a valid question to ask this filmmaker because he mentioned during his mumbles that reality TV is "the plague." Spike's answer: "It's the content, not the medium." He then mentioned that he watched a show called The Wire and continues to watch SportsCenter and the news. Next question.
Did NAU opt not to pay the extra ten grand to get the premium Spike Lee package, where he actually gives a shit about his audience? Why did some in the audience revere him like a god and ask him for philosophical advice during the Q and A? And what prompted the standing ovation for the man with the eye-shrouding cap and bad attitude? Though he might be a great film director and well-known, Spike Lee is a selfish asshole who presented himself to be more like the people he condemned through "When the Levees Broke," the kind of people that consider themselves to be higher and others lower. Spike saw an opportunity for a quick buck and got away scott-free. Oh, and I recently learned more about film making from a YouTube movie reviewer than this famous director.
So, who did this Spike Lee guy think he was, anyway?
Ellen Spiro at NAU – Review
Documentary filmmaker Ellen Spiro spoke at NAU's Cline Library last week on Thursday, succeeding two screenings of her latest film, Body of War, a story about an Iraq veteran who returned home just one week after deployment with a bullet in his back that paralyzed him from the chest down.
Spiro spent the two hour talk letting clips of her other documentaries speak for themselves. The clips and her answers during the Q and A session revealed a lot about her as a person and a documentarian.
Films like Spiro's tend to serve as ways for people to observe other's lives without the social implications that come with actually getting involved with someone's life. The documentary maker plays that role. Spiro mentioned the phenomenon wherein the act of observing changes the observed, and it's pretty true. Spiro developed friendships with her subjects, and that obviously changes the way people behave. But that doesn't matter because, in documentaries, bias isn't a concern.
Spiro answered my question about bias and objectivity by explaining that there is a big difference between documentaries and journalism. Journalism is all about presenting both sides of an issue. "I never believed in objectivity," she said, and compared the number of sides to any story to the inside view of a kaleidoscope. Documentaries are insyead all about showing a particular point of view. I've always been under the impression that docs are all about telling a story objectively, but that's changed.
I enjoyed Spiro's position on television: "I don't watch TV anymore. It's so manipulative." That's just more evidence that the thinkers, doers, and creators in this world avoid television like the plague. Instead, Spiro said she likes to, "hang out on the fringes of society."
Overall, a great talk with a lot about documentaries and storytelling to consider.
Side note: I'm considering shaving my head during the summer to see what it looks like. I don't want to die not knowing what I'd look like bald.
Life Changing Music
This last month has had the tallest loops steepest drops ever recorded. Emotionally speaking, my world has never been shaken around so much. Can I sue for whiplash?
Music. It sets moods. I find that when I'm depressed, I'll listen to something like Sarah McLachlan's Afterglow or Delirium's song "Just a Dream." Maybe I want to rage... I have heavy dance beats mixed together by PJ Produkt called "Release." Nostalgic trip? Give me any Newsboys album or Intuition by DJ Encore. All of these push specific emotions through me. But no album has ever pulled emotions out like this one.
This Binary Universe by BT is by far my favorite album. I first fell in love with it a few years ago because of its unique blend of genres and style, and the fact that it put such vivid imagery into my mind without any lyrics whatsoever. Plus knowing that it's entirely generated through electronic synthesizing, C programming and circuit bending makes it mind blowing. But now I'm even more in love with it because, if I pay enough attention to it, it yanks me around and puts me back together again in a relatively neutral state of emotion. This album is the only known trigger for my emotional reset button.
All That Makes Us Human Continues
The album came with a DVD filled with the complete album set to abstract music videos, all of them very different from one another. I never understood any of them until recently.
The first track's video is a series of flashing lines, shapes, and colors that form a vague construct of gears and frames.
Interpretation: I see these as the representation of the perpetual construction and destruction of society, cultures, and individuals. Nothing is ever completed, only built upon and eroded over time.
Dynamic Symmetry
Thunder opens this song. The video shows a moonlit ocean with scattered stratus clouds. A giant flying mechanic thing flies over the barren waters, followed by several innocent white doves. The machine reveals its erie - and almost evil - long, curly tongue. One of the doves breaks from the group as it flies into the moonset. After breaking through thick fog, it reaches an island filled with strange creatures - some covered with eyes, others bouncing and waving seemingly involuntarily. This dove escaped an evil leader to find its own way to a community of unique, content, and happy individuals, none of them pretty as doves, who all have a home on a grassy island with a nice tree lit with paper lamps. A steamboat passes and churns galaxies from its exhaust fume.
Interpretation: Don't follow; be. The universe we're in is just unwanted gas by the wayside.
The Internal Locus
Film shards run overlaid against a blurred image of a robot. Living underground, this robot is building machine rabbits and projects them out of a tree stump into the living earth above, home to a tall, overall-wearing farmer. A fish manages to find its way into the robot's underground. As the farmer plants seeds, the robot takes the fish and tries to replicate a machine after it, but it can't distinguish between its head and body. So the robot makes a rabbit with a fish head. This fish-rabbit hates what its creator has done, so it leads the farmer to a power line. The farmer digs it up, breaks the line, and finds himself in the industrial underground. The robot flees as his factory crumbles. A vine starts to grow underground and overtake the pipes and boilers, while the machined rabbits continue to live above ground. The farmer explores the underground and makes friends with the robot.
Interpretation: Technology and nature do mix - beautifully. Progress and nature will follow.
1.618
An open desert with white sand and overcast skies opens the video. More barren desert-scapes. Then symmetrical frameworks. Then circles. Then curves and spirals. These look like faces and eyes in time. The majority of this video shows a bunch of intertwining tubes surrounded with spirals. Colors used could almost resemble the inside of a body. Another long spiral tunnel leads to an aperture-like opening, which reveals more solid spirals, and eventually a sunflower face. The video replicates and rotates to form golden rectangles from the video frames.
Interpretation: Everything comes from the golden spiral, golden rectangle, golden ratio. But the spirals themselves are made of even more intricate components...
See You On the Other Side
Analog static and flashes of light set to ambient music. A large jellyfish moving through space blips in and out of the screen. Waves form a tornado-esque entity of light in space, and the camera moves quickly through this nebula. Debris and gas form another golden object which breaks apart and distorts. Columns of ribboned fire. The analog scan lines continue to march up the screen.
Interpretation: Falling apart and being distorted is what makes us beautiful.
The Antikythera Mechanism
Another barren landscape, laden with snow and black rock, is traversed by a woman. The woman approaches a small cave, discovers a clear cube and, as she holds it, it falls apart slowly into smaller cubes and rectangles. The woman keeps wandering, but her vision is slowly distorted into bends and polygons. Cut to fast moving streaming metal in intricate shapes. As the music progresses into a tone apropos for a battle scene, the woman begins to try to find her way through snow covered forests, but the polygons continue to distort. Cut to intertwined moving shapes and curves more sinister than the others. Some resemble skyscrapers. The video ends with a still of the shapes frozen in time, then the cube morphing back into its original form.
Interpretation: Though confusing and possibly dangerous, the search for new is what makes life the experience that it is.
Good Morning Kaia
Video collage of BTs daughter, Kaia. Home videos, pictures, etc. A letter from BT to Kaia overlay the screen and reflect on frailty, humility, and love. "These are simple words from a simple man. I watched you arrive. I have watched you grow. I have watched you learn. I wept tears of joy. I will watch you understand. I will watch you empathize, and I will watch you create... For the stars conspire for you, and I will stand by your side. ALWAYS. ... We are bonded by more than blood. I will love you today, tomorrow, and even after my last breath."
The music, the visuals. They have made me cry the only cleansing tears I've shed. For this reason, This Binary Universe will be an album I will own and cherish for decades, if not the rest of my life. It's also the reason why I think I'll be all right after this dreadful fucking month.