This week I watched an exceptional series called "She's Gotta Have It" by Spike Lee. Fort Greene, Brooklyn is where it takes place and once can see similar issues to our community. This is just one of the reasons it makes it easy to fall in love with the work, along with the layers of messaging. I had to chuckle when I walked down Hawks Ave past the pilot shooting in the hood, thinking about how we are constantly facing the cross over of real life and non-reality or reality projected through media becoming more and more of a constant.
She's Gotta Have It, is a Spike Lee re-make of Spike Lee's early work of the same name -- going from a movie to a Netflix Series. There are so many issues discussed in the series like the the Free Female Black Form, sexual identity, racism, gentrification, art, street art campaign "My Name isn't...", classism, feminism and so on. Some of the magic moments come through in the poetic language used; the weaving of messages in Episode 1 that comes full circle in Episode 10 (summed up nicely in the confused Art Critic, Julius Kemper's line "I want to know who she is?"; the evolution and challenges of life/identity in the visuals of the street art campaign leading to Nola Darlings path to freedom, to name a few. One of my favourites is a line that repeats "you gotta get your shit together" delivered with wisdom from the place of a Grand Dame.
The bottom line is that "She's Gotta Have It" deals with empowerment and worth watching over and over again, in my opinion. For this weeks blog, I decided to take a page out of Spike Lee's series and how he plays with the Intro. Usually, it's something you skip once you start getting into a show but in this series Lee plays with the visuals of the community and the photos of the people there are not the same in every intro.
So here are some photos of the folks in this hood, some passing through, some returning to fond memories, while others are deeply rooted threads in the fabric (not going anywhere!!).
Photo credit: black and white of Mrs. Lau (the old chinese lady) by Esther Rausenberg Note: History of the Big House - May 16, 2016 (under heading of Big House) Octopus drone shot -- Oct. 16th 2017 by Eesmayl Santos-Brault