text:
One morning last June, Spike Lee arrived early at the Sony Pictures Studios, in Culver City, California, to record the score for his new feature, "Miracle at St. Anna," a Second World War film about the U.S. Army's 92nd Division, an all-black unit that battled the Nazis during the Italian campaign. Lee was joined in the studio's control room by his music-recording team, six men and one woman. A large window overlooked the cavernous soundstage where Judy Garland recorded "Over the Rainbow," in 1938, when the lot belonged to M-G-M. A ninety-five-piece orchestra that Lee had engaged had not yet arrived.
A month earlier, at a press conference at the Cannes Film Festival, Lee had sparked a very public feud with Clint Eastwood when he accused him of having omitted black soldiers from his two recent movies about Iwo Jima, "Flags of Our Fathers" and "Letters from Iwo Jima." (Historians estimate that between seven hundred and nine hundred black servicemen participated in the battle.) The spat had quickly escalated. Eastwood told the Guardian that he had left the black soldiers out because none had actually raised the flag, adding that "a guy like that should shut his face." Lee shot back, telling ABCNews.com that Eastwood sounded like "an angry old man," and that "the man is not my father and we're not on a plantation either."
Lee's remarks appeared online three days before he began recording the score for "Miracle." Lee sees the movie, the first by a major American director to treat the experience of black soldiers in the war, as redress not only for Eastwood's Iwo Jima pictures but for an all-white Hollywood vision of the Second World War which dates to the 1962 John Wayne movie "The Longest Day"—and before. "This is the same shit they were doing back in the forties, fifties, and sixties," Lee had told me a couple of weeks earlier, in New York. "Really, until Jim Brown was in the 'The Dirty Dozen,' in 1967. 'Home of the Brave' was a great film with a great African-American character in it. But if you look at the history of World War Two films we're invisible. We're omitted."
As the orchestra began to gather on the soundstage, Lee scribbled notes about the score on a yellow legal pad. He is five feet six, with a barrel chest and a pigeon-toed walk. His baleful, half-hooded eyes peered out from behind tortoiseshell frames. There was a diamond stud in his left earlobe. He is fifty-one, and when he briefly removed his Yankees cap a small bald spot was visible at the crown of his short Afro. He wore an orange T-shirt with a picture of Barack Obama and the word "REPRESENT," and new Air Jordan sneakers with pastel-blue stripes around the soles and gingham details. Lee is a Knicks fan, but he was wearing the sneakers in honor of the Lakers, who that evening were playing in Game Three of the N.B.A. finals. "Going to the game tonight," he said to Marvin Morris, the movie's music editor, a mountainous African-American man who sat beside him at the table. "I gotta come correct!"
It's been more than twenty years since Lee's début, the 1986 movie "She's Gotta Have It"—a breezy sex comedy about a liberated African-American woman and her three male suitors—and he remains Hollywood's most prominent black filmmaker. He has directed eighteen features, three of which ("Do the Right Thing," "Jungle Fever," and "Malcolm X") have earned him a reputation as a filmmaker obsessed with race. Releasing movies at an average of nearly one a year, Lee has maintained a pace matched, in this country, only by Woody Allen. Lee is the artistic director of N.Y.U.'s graduate film program, where he teaches a master class in directing. He also makes music videos and TV commercials (he has done spots for Converse, Jaguar, Taco Bell, and Ben & Jerry's, among others) and has made two superb documentaries: "4 Little Girls," about the 1963 bombing by the Ku Klux Klan of a black church in Alabama, and "When the Levees Broke," about the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina. He is able to accomplish so much in part because he often rises at 5 A.M. "You want to get a lot done, you gotta get up in the morning," he told me. The rest, he says, is "time management." But Lee's output also reflects the unusual fecundity of his imagination. "Spike was the idea man," Herb Eichelberger, who taught Lee in an undergraduate film course at Clark College (now Clark Atlanta University), in 1977, told me. "He was a good writer, and he would explore those ideas and turn those ideas and nurse those ideas and turn them into full-blown mini-epics."
Terence Blanchard, the score's composer, arrived in the control room, and Lee stood up to greet him. A heavyset African-American from New Orleans, Blanchard has known Lee for twenty years. He played trumpet on "She's Gotta Have It," "School Daze," and "Mo' Better Blues," and in 1991 Lee hired him to be the composer for "Jungle Fever." Blanchard has scored all but two of Lee's films since. Unlike most directors, Lee includes the composer in the process from the start, often before a script even exists—"from the inception of ideas," as he puts it. During shooting, Lee sends Blanchard the dailies, and once a rough cut is assembled Blanchard travels to New York, where he and Lee watch the film and discuss where to put music. Blanchard then creates musical sketches and themes, which he sends to Lee. "Once I O.K. that," Lee says, "Terence sits down and writes the music." Blanchard later told me that Lee is unusual for his love of highly melodic scores that can almost stand on their own in live performance. (Lee's emphasis on the music results in scores that often clash with the dialogue, making it difficult to hear the actors. "Of course you want people to understand the dialogue," he told me. "But the human brain is wonderful—with the correct score and the correct mix, the brain can multitask and hear the dialogue and the music at the same time.")
Before Lee and Blanchard could get to work, a Sony studio employee approached carrying a cardboard tube that contained a poster of "Miracle at St. Anna." He wanted the men to sign it, so that it could be mounted in the hallway next to posters for other movies whose scores had been recorded in the studio.
"Yeah, O.K.," Lee said, brusquely. He added, "We want the John Williams spot"—referring to the composer who writes the endlessly imitated music for Steven Spielberg's movies.
"You'll be right next to John Williams," the Sony man said, in a mollifying tone. "How's that?"
"We want the John Williams-Spielberg, you know?" Lee repeated.
"We'll take down the 'Memoirs of a Geisha,' and put yours—"
"Don't put us next to Judd Apapoe, whatever that guy is," Lee interrupted, referring to Judd Apatow, the director of the goofball comedies "Knocked Up" and "The 40-Year-Old Virgin." "We gotta be next to Spielberg and Williams!"
"You got it," the man said. He obtained the signatures, then scurried away like a soldier ducking enemy fire.
Blanchard opened a soundproof door and walked onto the soundstage, where he took his place at a podium facing the musicians. On a large screen at the back of the stage, a scene from the end of the film began to play: battle-weary black soldiers moved through the cobblestoned streets of Colognora, a tiny hill town in Tuscany near where the 92nd Division, also known as the Buffalo Soldiers (they took the name from the original Buffalo Soldiers, six all-black Army regiments from the late nineteenth century), fought in the Second World War. Nazi soldiers staged an ambush, and Lee captured the ensuing violence with a series of sweeping tracking shots and fast edits that are characteristic of his kinetic visual style. The orchestra played Blanchard's surging score—a passage heavy on brasses and piercing violins, but in a minor key and with a slow tempo that contrasted sharply with the battle onscreen. Where many filmmakers would have demanded a rousing score to complement the action, Blanchard and Lee had devised music that was unexpectedly elegiac, emphasizing the wasted lives. (In an earlier scene, Lee had paused to show a series of closeups of dead American soldiers lying in a river, their lifeless eyes reflecting the sky, blood flowing from their helmets.) As the battle scene unfolded, Lee got up from the console and hurried to the front of the control room, where he sat at a table that held a small monitor. He moved his face close to the screen as a G.I. spoke his dying words to a fellow-soldier. A trumpet played softly under the dialogue. When the scene ended, Lee leaped from his chair and shouted, "Woooo!"
Blanchard came back into the control room. "Was the brass big enough?" he asked.
"Hell, yeah," Lee said. He laughed, jumped up and down, and shouted, "God damn!"
The plot of "Miracle at St. Anna" revolves around a bond that forms between one of the Buffalo Soldiers and an orphaned nine-year-old Italian boy, and, in this respect, "Miracle" reflects Lee's opinion—as he expressed it to me—that love can transcend color. But the movie is not without racial provocations. It is based on a novel by James McBride, who adapted it for the screen, but Lee had McBride add a scene involving Axis Sally—Germany's version of Tokyo Rose—a woman born in Portland, Maine, who migrated to Germany before the war and, embracing the Nazi cause, broadcast anti-American propaganda over Radio Berlin. In the film, Axis Sally, played by the German actress Alexandra Maria Lara, is shown sitting at a table in front of a swastika, speaking into a microphone. Her words echo over loudspeakers mounted on trucks as the Buffalo Soldiers advance toward the Serchio River: "Welcome, Ninety-second Division, Buffalo Soldiers. We've been waiting for you. Do you know our German Wehrmacht has been here digging bunkers for six months? Waiting? Your white commanders won't tell you that, of course. Why? Because they don't care if you die. But the German people have nothing against the Negro. That's why I'm warning you now with all my heart and soul. Save yourself, Negro brothers. Why die for a nation that doesn't want you? A nation that treats you like a slave! Did I say slave? Yes I did!"
Lee had intercut the speech with reaction shots of the Buffalo Soldiers wincing and even weeping as they advanced. When the scene ended, he clapped his hands, cackled, and said, "Yee, yee, yee!"
Lee told me that he had exhaustively researched the history of the Buffalo Soldiers in the Second World War, but Axis Sally's speech does not derive from a particular broadcast. Lee said that he had come up with the idea for the speech and asked McBride to incorporate it into the scene. "I suggested to him what to write," Lee told me, adding that he liked the idea of putting accusations of racism in the mouth of a Nazi sympathizer. "Propaganda with some truth in it," Lee explained. "Very unsettling to the Buffalo Soldiers."
The effect was powerful, if not exactly subtle, but such gestures have got Lee into trouble in the past. He has justified his manipulations of reality on artistic grounds. For "Do the Right Thing," his cinematic anatomy of a race riot, which was shot in the summer of 1988 in the drug- and crime-riddled Bedford-Stuyvesant neighborhood of Brooklyn, Lee's crew spent weeks cleaning up a street of crack houses—painting façades, fixing broken stoops—before the filming began, and Lee makes no reference to drugs in the movie, a decision for which he was heavily criticized. Lee responded by saying, "This film is not about drugs," and by accusing those who challenged him of racial stereotyping. "Drugs is in every level of society today in America," he told reporters at a press conference at the time. "How many of you journalists saw 'Working Girl' or 'Rain Man' and questioned where are the drugs? Nobody!"
Such explanations have not satisfied some. "The fact that Spike Lee is a talented guy is inarguable," Stanley Crouch, the African-American cultural critic who has long been one of Lee's fiercest detractors, says. "But if you make movies as consistently inferior to the movies of a man like Woody Allen or Martin Scorsese and cry 'racism' or imply racism, when your movies are not as successful as theirs are—what is that? On a human level, his comprehension of other people is far more shallow than theirs is, and that's the basic problem that he's had from the beginning of his career, the fundamental shallowness that you get from a propagandist."
Scorsese, however, says that he admires Lee. "I always responded to his work as a fresh, original American voice in cinema—mainstream cinema," Scorsese told me. "From 'She's Gotta Have It' all the way up to 'Inside Man' "—Lee's 2006 film about a bank heist and his biggest commercial success to date. "I like the way he tells a story with pictures and sound, which is filmmaking. He actually pushes the medium in narrative storytelling. The way he uses the moving camera, the way he edits films, the use of music, the film stock that he uses—in particular, in one of the best American films, 'Malcolm X,' but also in the documentaries. When you look at the list of the work that he's done—films, commercials, documentaries—the nature of the voice that he is in the entertainment industry in America is quite unique."
"People think I'm this angry black man walking around in a constant state of rage," Lee complained to me when we first met, in New York last May. His annoyance at this perception is understandable; he can be funny and warm, and even his angriest movies are leavened with humor. Yet the persona he projects, imperious and impatient, can be intimidating. He had invited me to join him at the Jazz Standard to listen to Blanchard, who was playing trumpet with his small jazz combo. He sat through Blanchard's gig uttering only a few words to me, and gave me a stern glance when I tried to initiate conversation between numbers. Afterward, when some of Lee's fans gathered to ask for autographs, Lee responded to the smiling face of a white woman from Cincinnati with a glare so unwelcoming that she quickly retreated.
Ernest Dickerson, who has known Lee since they were classmates at N.Y.U. film school, in the early eighties, and who shot all of Lee's movies up to and including "Malcolm X," before becoming a director himself, said of Lee, "He's never suffered fools. You've got to bring your best game to him. He looks at everybody with 'O.K., what're you doing?' On 'Mo' Better Blues,' I had to fire most of my camera crew because mistakes were being made. And there's nothing worse than sitting next to Spike in dailies when the dailies have problems." Blanchard told me that Lee once became so incensed by the tardiness of a music copyist during the scoring of "Malcolm X" that he hurled a chair across the room and had the copyist fired.
Lee was born Shelton Jackson Lee, in Atlanta, Georgia, but his mother, Jacquelyn (who died in 1977, from cancer, when Lee was twenty), gave him the nickname Spike because, she later told him, he was "a tough baby." Lee is the eldest of six children (he has a half brother, Arnold, from his father's second marriage), and he has employed several of his siblings on his movie sets. His sister Joie, an actress, has had parts in many of his movies; his brother David is a unit still photographer; and his brother Cinqué is Lee's videographer, who tapes the behind-the-scenes action on the film sets. Joie and Cinqué co-wrote with Lee his 1994 movie "Crooklyn," a delicately nostalgic autobiographical account of growing up in Brooklyn, where the family moved when Lee was two years old.
Lee has called his family "very artistic." Jacquelyn was a high-school teacher of art and African-American literature, and Lee's father, Bill, played standup jazz bass but also recorded with Peter, Paul & Mary, Judy Collins, Bob Dylan, Theodore Bikel, Josh White, and Odetta. "My father would take us up to the Newport Jazz Festival," Lee told me. "Or, if he was playing at the Village Vanguard or the Bitter End, sometimes we could stay up late and go with him." For a time, Bill Lee was the sole breadwinner, but when electric bass became ubiquitous in popular music, in the mid-sixties, he refused to play it and stopped getting the lucrative studio work that had supported the family. His wife was obliged to return to teaching. "I like the artistic stance," Lee told me, with an exasperated laugh. "You have a family to support!" But he added, with admiration, "He's never played electric bass to date."
Lee's mother took the children to Broadway plays and to movies, but Lee maintains that he was not like many directors, who say that they knew from childhood that they wanted to make movies. "I loved sports," he says. "I knew I was never going to play professional sports, but I loved playing and I went to all the games I could afford to." When Lee was eight, the family moved to Cobble Hill, then an Italian-American neighborhood of Brooklyn. They were the first black family to do so, Lee says. "First couple of days, we got called 'nigger,' by some kids," he told me. "Once they saw that there wasn't a hundred other black families moving in behind us, like we're the only one, then it was O.K. and it was never an issue after that." Most of Lee's friends from the local public schools that he attended were white. (The family later moved to the middle-class black neighborhood of Fort Greene, to a brownstone where his father, now eighty, still lives.)
After Lee graduated from John Dewey High School, in 1975, he became the third generation in his family to attend Morehouse, the all-black college in Atlanta. In the summer of 1977, after his sophomore year, he returned to New York and searched, unsuccessfully, for a job. David Berkowitz, the "Son of Sam" serial killer, was terrorizing Manhattan with random shootings, and in July there was a citywide blackout, which lasted twenty-five hours and resulted in widespread looting, arson, and vandalism. Lee, carrying a Super-8 camera that he had been given the previous Christmas, went into the streets to film the chaos. "I just spent that whole summer shooting," he said.
When he returned to Morehouse for his junior year, he decided to major in mass communications. The program was based at Clark College, nearby, and included print journalism, radio, television, and film. "Once I decided I wanted to be a filmmaker, I really started growing up," Lee says. "I was really focussed." Eichelberger, his film professor, demanded that his students work fast, requiring them to shoot documentary films on Monday, Tuesday, and Wednesday; edit them on Thursday and Friday; and show them on Saturday and Sunday. Lee became particularly close with two other undergraduate film majors, Monty Ross and George Folkes. "They said, 'We really want to make some changes, ' " Herb Eichelberger recalled. " 'We're tired of these woe-is-me films, the black always being the underdog and never getting even to break even on the silver screen.' "
For Lee's senior project, Eichelberger encouraged him to edit the footage he had shot in the summer of 1977. Lee turned it into a short feature that he called "Last Hustle in Brooklyn." The film was a mock-documentary that included scenes of New Yorkers trapped in elevators during the blackout and of people looting stores, as well as scenes acted out by Lee's younger siblings. By then, Lee had applied to the top film schools in the country—the first of Eichelberger's students to do so—and had been accepted at N.Y.U. At the time, there were only a handful of African-American directors in Hollywood, including Sidney Poitier, Gordon Parks, who directed the "Shaft" movies, and Michael Shultz, who made hits for Richard Pryor. Before that, the most successful black filmmaker was Melvin Van Peebles, who directed the 1970 feature "Watermelon Man," a pointed comedy about a white man who wakes up black and experiences racism firsthand. A year later, Peebles wrote, directed, and starred in "Sweet Sweetback's Baadasssss Song," a precursor to the seventies blaxploitation pictures. But Peebles was never embraced by Hollywood and went on to direct only several more low-budget features. "When I told people at Morehouse I was going to film school to become a filmmaker," Lee says, "they said that I was crazy."
The N.Y.U. film program is one of the best in the country. (The director Ang Lee was in Lee's class, Jim Jarmusch was there at the same time, and Joel Coen had graduated from the undergraduate film program a year earlier.) During his first year at N.Y.U., Lee was shown a number of classic movies by his professors, including the 1915 film "The Birth of a Nation," by D. W. Griffith, who pioneered many cinematic techniques still in use today. But the film was notorious, even at the time of its release, for its endorsement of white supremacy and its glorification of the Ku Klux Klan. (Griffith adapted the film from a novel by Thomas Dixon called "The Clansman.") Lee felt that his professors put too much emphasis on Griffith's artistry and not enough on the film's racist message. "They taught that D. W. Griffith is the father of cinema," Lee told me. "They talk about all the 'innovations'—which he did. But they never really talked about the implications of 'Birth of a Nation,' never really talked about how that film was used as a recruiting tool for the K.K.K." For one of his freshman projects, Lee wrote and directed a twenty-minute movie called "The Answer," about an out-of-work African-American screenwriter who agrees to write a remake of "Birth of a Nation." The screenwriter ultimately decides that he cannot go through with the project and is attacked by Klan members, who burn a cross in front of his house.
Lee declined to show me any of his student films ("They're out of circulation!" he said), but among those who saw "The Answer" was Ernest Dickerson. Lee and Dickerson met on the first day of classes at N.Y.U. and were two of only five African-American students at the film school. Dickerson described to me how, at the end of "The Answer," Lee's screenwriter turns on his attackers. "There's a really powerful image at the end," he said. "Low angle, shooting up the stairs—as the guy is going downstairs, knife in hand, to do battle. It fades out. It was an amazing film."
"The Answer" was shown at a screening of student films, and some members of the faculty were incensed. Roberta Hodes, a retired N.Y.U. film professor who took part in the debate over Lee's film, says that some faculty members recommended that he not be invited back for the final two years of the program. After the first year, the school weeded out students who lacked promise. But talent was not an issue with "The Answer," Hodes says. "I just think it offended everyone," she told me. "I felt offended, too, I'm ashamed to say." (She added, "I don't think he was very much liked. He was very fresh—as we used to say in the olden days—and very aggressive.") Eleanor Hamerow, another retired N.Y.U. professor, and a former head of the film department, also saw "The Answer." She said that the problem was not the film's content but, rather, its overweening ambition. "In first year, we're trying to teach them the basics, and certainly the idea was to execute exercises, make small films, but within limits," Hamerow told me. "He was trying to solve a problem overnight—the social problem with the blacks and the whites. He undertook to fix the great filmmaker who made that movie, D. W. Griffith. He was going to teach him a lesson." Hamerow says that she was among those faculty members who voted to keep Lee in the program, so that he could "go on and learn more." Both Lee and Dickerson, however, are convinced that it was the film's content that riled the faculty. "I think they just took offense to the fact that he was calling the film industry on the carpet as having racist policies," Dickerson says. "It's almost like they had to grudgingly bring him back."
Dickerson and Lee frequently went to the movies together at N.Y.U. "The films that always impressed us—that we talked about—were films that burn you, so you don't forget them," Dickerson recalled. They counted Martin Scorsese, Akira Kurosawa, and Francis Ford Coppola among their favorite directors. Dickerson became Lee's cameraman, and shot Lee's final-year project, a forty-five-minute film, "Joe's Bed-Stuy Barbershop: We Cut Heads." A comic crime caper, the movie was a hit with the faculty—"It was so alive and had such real characters that you usually don't see that," Hodes said—and it went on to win a Student Academy Award.
After graduation, Lee took a job at a small film-distribution company in the city and worked on the script of "Messenger," a semi-autobiographical feature about a bike messenger, but he abandoned the project for lack of funds in 1984. That year, Jim Jarmusch released "Stranger Than Paradise," a critical and commercial success, by the standards of independent cinema. "Jim Jarmusch was our hero," Lee told me. "When you're in film school, you study Scorsese, all these people—but you don't know them. But when somebody you know, who you saw in class and saw in school, makes it? Then it's doable. So we were all, like, 'Yeah, we can do it now!' "
In 1985, Lee wrote the screenplay for "She's Gotta Have It," about Nola Darling and her three suitors. Shot on the streets of Brooklyn and featuring a star turn by Lee as Mars Blackmon, a bespectacled and geeky would-be lover, the movie not only defied prevailing stereotypes of the Reagan-era inner-city black movie but called to mind Woody Allen's early romantic comedies, "Annie Hall" and "Manhattan." To help finance the movie—which cost a hundred and seventy-five thousand dollars—he obtained a grant from the New York State Council on the Arts and seed money from his maternal grandmother, Zimmie, a frugal woman who "saved her Social Security checks," Lee says, and had helped to pay for his tuition at Morehouse and N.Y.U. Lee shot the film, with Dickerson as cameraman, in twelve days. Despite the tiny budget and abbreviated shooting schedule, everything about the movie suggested a refined sensibility—from Dickerson's lush black-and-white camerawork to the sudden explosion of color in a dance number. ("Spike's love of musicals really contributed to the dance sequence," Dickerson says. "A lot of people don't know that Spike is a big fan of Hollywood musicals. Big Vincente Minnelli fan.") Lee's jump-cut editing was inspired by Jean-Luc Godard's "Breathless." "That film, when I saw it in film school, it really showed to me that 'Who are these people to make up these rules and say you can't do something?' " Lee told me. "Godard's, like, 'Fuck that, man, I'm trying this stuff.' " Lee's very funny performance as Mars Blackmon—in an oversized gold medallion and chain, a fade haircut, and huge, puffy Air Jordans—was an unexpected success. "I never wanted to act," Lee says. "The only reason I was in 'She's Gotta Have It' is that we couldn't afford to pay anyone else."
"She's Gotta Have It" premièred at the San Francisco Film Festival and prompted a bidding war for the distribution rights. It opened in the summer of 1986, with what Lee calls a "marketing gimmick": for nearly a month, the movie could be seen at only one theatre in America, Cinema Studio, at Sixty-sixth and Broadway. "Every night it was sold out," Lee recalled. "And I would get there and hand out buttons. Me and my friends were selling 'She's Gotta Have It' T-shirts." When the film opened in wide release, it made about seven million dollars. The credits announced the film as "A Spike Lee Joint." Lee told me, "From very early on—not that I was that sophisticated, but, coming from the independent world, I knew that millions and millions of dollars were not going to be spent on the promotion and marketing of my film. So in a lot of ways I had to market myself and market the brand of Spike Lee."
In 1988, Nike paired Lee's Mars Blackmon character with Michael Jordan in a series of television advertisements directed by Lee. He eventually directed and co-starred with Jordan in eight Nike commercials, which played around the world during the late eighties and early nineties. "There was a time when more people knew me as that crazy guy in those Nike commercials than knew I was Spike Lee, the director," Lee says. "She's Gotta Have It" also earned him the label of "the black Woody Allen." Lee was not happy with the comparison. "How can you say anybody is the black anybody after one film?" he said to me. "Look, I'm going to be honest," he went on. "There were some similarities. Both New Yorkers, both from Brooklyn, both loved the Knicks, both kinda small in stature and wear glasses, so. . . . I can see it. But that black Woody Allen thing? I was saying right away, 'No.' I was just trying to establish my own identity. Spike Lee."
On the third day of recording the score for "Miracle at St. Anna," Lee arrived at the soundstage just before nine o'clock. He was wearing a T-shirt with the slogan "Defend Brooklyn!" and he was in an upbeat mood because the Lakers had won the night before. "Any day Boston loses is a great day!" he said. During a break in the session, Lee took Blanchard aside and told him a story in hushed tones, about an encounter he'd had with Jeffrey Katzenberg, Steven Spielberg, and Eddie Murphy at the Lakers game. "They were sitting together," Lee said. "I went to Spielberg, 'Steven, it's over with Clint Eastwood.' Steven laughed and said, 'I'll call Clint and tell him in the morning.' I said, 'It's over.' He said, 'Good.' "
Blanchard had known Lee too long to believe that he had uttered his final word on Eastwood—and told him so. "I don't see that shit happening," he said.
"No!" Lee insisted. "It's done!"
(Eastwood declined to comment for this article.)
As the day wore on, Lee became increasingly irritable, speaking little with his co-workers, and then only in brief, truculent commands. He stood, stretched his neck, and yawned. During a dinner break, when Blanchard and other members of the team sat in the control room talking and eating sushi and sashimi, Lee sat apart, his back to the room, reading the newspaper and picking at some cooked shrimp. He took a small sip from a glass of red wine. Blanchard tried to draw him into conversation, mentioning the comedy "Swingers." Lee said peremptorily, "I never saw it," and resumed reading.
A few minutes later, Lee received a call on his BlackBerry from his family in New York. Since 1994, he has been married to Tonya Lewis Lee, a former corporate lawyer who is now a writer and a television producer and the coauthor of "The Gotham Diaries," a novel about upper-class black women in Manhattan. The Lees have a daughter, Satchel, thirteen, and a son, Jackson, eleven. Ten years ago, they bought a ninety-six-hundred-square-foot town house on the Upper East Side that used to belong to the painter Jasper Johns and, before that, to Gypsy Rose Lee. "The Upper East Side is the last place I wanted to live," Lee told me. (The family has also lived in Brooklyn and, briefly, in SoHo.) "But we saw this house and said, 'We getting it!' The value has gone up four times since." The Lees also have a home on Martha's Vineyard, and their children attend private schools on the Upper East Side, a fact that seems to cause Lee some discomfort when he discloses it. He told me that he had always intended his kids to go, as he did, to public schools. (In a 1991 interview, he called private schools "too sheltered.") "But my wife put the kibosh on that," he said. Lee balks at being described as wealthy. "It's not rich rich," he told me. "Rich is Spielberg. Lucas. Gates. Steve Jobs. Jay-Z! Bruce Springsteen. I'm not complaining. But that's money. Will Smith. Tyler Perry. Oprah Winfrey—that's a ton of money. Compared to them, I'm on welfare!"
Jackson Lee was on the phone, telling his dad about a recent Little League game. Lee's bad mood disappeared as he paced up and down the control room and spoke loudly into the phone. "How'd you do?" he asked. "You slid under the tag? Everyone came and gave you a high five?" Lee asked several more questions about the game, then said, "Tomorrow is your last day of school. Tell Mommy to let you watch the game. Tell Mommy you wanna watch the Lakers kick the Celtics' butts!" Then Lee lowered his voice. "We have to talk about that grammar stuff when I get back," he said, before hanging up. "All right. I'm not mad at you. All right."
"He hurt his arm, so he can't pitch," Lee told Blanchard. "We took him to the Knicks' doctor. He has 'Little League elbow.' "
"Was he throwing curveballs?" Blanchard asked.
"No, he was throwing hard," Lee said. He sat and again became absorbed in his newspaper. But when the conversation turned to politics he looked up.
"With this election, we're gonna find out who's really liberal," Blanchard, an Obama supporter, was saying to the others. "You got people saying they're not going to vote for my man because he lacks experience. You know that's not it!"
"You know, Donna Brazile still hasn't declared herself?" Lee said, bitterly.
Frank Wolf, the sound mixer, said, "She's a superdelegate."
"That's what I'm talking about," Lee said.
"Who's going to be the Vice-Presidential pick?" Robin Burgess, the session coördinator and Blanchard's wife, asked.
"As long as it's not Hillary," Lee said.
"You know," Blanchard said in a wondering tone, "we got friends uptown who say they can't stand Michelle. I mean, what about McCain's wife?"
"Stepford wife," Lee muttered.
"I used to like Bill Clinton," Blanchard said.
Lee shook his head. "They showed their hand," he said.
Lee has always been intensely interested in electoral politics and believes that the cultural and financial status of African-Americans is dictated by the policies and attitudes of the politicians in power. He blames Ed Koch, the mayor of New York City from 1978 to 1989, for fostering a toxic racial climate. Lee was particularly outraged by two violent incidents in the mid-eighties involving the killing of unarmed blacks by white policemen, who were not convicted of any crime. In December, 1986, three black youths were assaulted by a mob of white men wielding a baseball bat and sticks in Howard Beach, an Italian-American neighborhood of Queens, where they had walked to a pizza parlor after their car broke down nearby. One youth was run over by a car as he fled his attackers. Three of the white assailants were convicted of manslaughter in the winter of 1987, but the city remained tense. Within weeks of the Howard Beach verdict, Lee began writing his third feature, a movie that brilliantly compressed race relations in New York—and, by extension, the nation—into a single day on a single city block.
He set "Do the Right Thing" on the hottest day of the summer in Bedford-Stuyvesant, a black neighborhood with a lone Italian-American outpost: Sal's Famous Pizzeria. Frictions between the pizzeria's white owners and its black customers build until Sal, played by Danny Aiello, demands that a black youth, Radio Raheem, turn off the boom box on which he constantly plays Public Enemy's "Fight the Power." Raheem refuses, Sal smashes the boom box with a bat, and the ensuing altercation results in the arrival of white police officers. They execute a restraint hold on Raheem and choke him to death. Soon after, Sal's delivery man, Mookie—played by Lee and until this point the only character who bridged the white and black worlds—throws a garbage can through the pizzeria's front window and sparks a riot. The movie ends with two quotations: a plea for nonviolence from Martin Luther King—"The old law of an eye for an eye leaves everybody blind"—followed by a quite different sentiment from Malcolm X: "I am not against using violence in self-defense. I don't even call it violence when it's self-defense, I call it intelligence."
When the movie débuted, at Cannes, in May, 1989, Lee was asked, at a packed press conference, why he ended it with Malcolm X rather than with King. "I think that in certain times both philosophies and approaches can be appropriate," he said. "But in this day and age, in the Year of Our Lord 1989, I'm leaning more towards the philosophies of Malcolm X." He added, "When you're being beat upside the head with a brick, I don't think that young black America is just going to turn their cheek and say, 'Thank you, Jesus, for hitting me upside the head with this brick.' " The film caused a furor when it opened. The Times convened a panel discussion that included Henry Louis Gates, Jr., and Betty Shabazz, Malcolm X's widow, to address "issues raised by the film." Stanley Crouch's scathing review in the Village Voice was titled "Do the Race Thing: Spike Lee's Afro-Fascist Chic," and accused Lee of immaturity and propagandizing for black nationalism. In fact, Lee is as hard on the film's black characters for their political apathy as he is on the pizzeria owner, Sal, who is scarcely a one-dimensional race baiter; "Do the Right Thing" is inarguably among the most thoughtful and unsentimental meditations on race relations committed to film. Scorsese calls it "a wonderful film, a tough picture that puts it right out there." The Times praised it as an "astounding political and moral drama."
"Do the Right Thing" changed the public perception of Lee. From the "black Woody Allen," he became a kind of Malcolm X of American cinema. "After 'Do the Right Thing,' it was 'He wants to throw garbage cans and burn down every pizzeria in America,' " Lee says. His subsequent films were controversial even when he did not intend them to be. "Mo' Better Blues," his next feature, was an attempt, inspired by his musician father, to defy stereotypes about black jazz artists as self-destructive drug addicts. But the movie included two venal Jewish club owners, Moe and Josh Flatbush (played by John Turturro and his younger brother, Nicholas), who exploit the film's black jazz musicians, played by Denzel Washington and Wesley Snipes. Lee says that he was shocked when critics characterized the portrayal of the club owners as anti-Semitic. According to Lee, his lawyer at the time, Arthur Klein, who has since died, told him, "This could really hurt your career. You better write an Op-Ed piece in the New York Times." Lee's piece, published in the summer of 1990 and titled "I Am Not an Anti-Semite," was combative. "I challenge anyone to tell me why I can't portray two club owners who happen to be Jewish and who exploit the black jazz musicians who work for them," Lee wrote. "All Jewish club owners are not like this, that's true, but these two are."
Lee is still angry about the accusations. "They're, like, 'So, Spike, are you saying that every single Jewish person is a crook?' " he told me. "Get the fuck out of here! That's crazy."
When Lee and Dickerson were in film school, they often discussed their ideal movie project. "For both of us, it was to try to do an adaptation of 'The Autobiography of Malcolm X,' " Dickerson says. Lee had first read the book in junior high school and later called it the "most important book I'll ever read," saying that it "changed the way I thought; it changed the way I acted." In 1990, Lee learned that the director Norman Jewison was going to make a movie about Malcolm X for the producer Marvin Worth, who had bought the rights to Malcolm's autobiography. Jewison had worked on the movie for almost a year, securing Denzel Washington for the lead role, digging up F.B.I. transcripts, and writing a script. Lee did not believe that a white director was up to the task—and said so in the press. Jewison told me, "I feel that he had pulled the race card, so I met with him." According to Jewison, at the meeting Lee said that a white director lacked "the deep understanding of the black psyche" necessary for the project. Jewison agreed to turn the movie over to Lee, who began filming in 1991.
The production was fraught with problems. "We were trying to make a better movie than Warner Bros. wanted," Dickerson, who was the cinematographer, says. "For the Egypt scenes, Warner Bros.'s attitude was 'We don't need to send you guys to Egypt, just go to South Jersey, shoot on the beach, get some place with some sand, and do matte paintings of the pyramids and everything.' And they wanted a two-hour movie. There's no way you can condense a man whose life was as complex as Malcolm's into two hours." Lee refused to compromise, and eventually went to prominent members of the black community for money to complete the film as he envisioned it. Bill Cosby, Oprah Winfrey, Michael Jackson, Prince, Janet Jackson, Tracy Chapman, Magic Johnson, and Michael Jordan all contributed money to the movie, which ran three hours and included a sequence shot on location in Egypt. The film documented Malcolm's early castigation of white people as "blue-eyed devils," but artfully traced the spiritual development that led him to achieve a broader sympathy, even for whites. "Malcolm X" was released in the fall of 1992 to mixed reviews and a disappointing box-office take of about ten million dollars in its first weekend.
Through the rest of the nineties and into this decade, box-office returns for Lee's films followed a steady downward trend. "Clockers," Lee's 1995 adaptation of Richard Price's novel about a young black drug dealer (played by Mekhi Phifer), took in slightly more than thirteen million dollars at the box office. "Girl 6," the closest Lee has come to making a light comedy since "She's Gotta Have It," took in less than five million. In 1998, he released "He Got Game," for which he wrote the screenplay—his first since "Jungle Fever." The movie was an affecting melodrama about a killer (Denzel Washington) who is offered a reduced sentence in exchange for persuading his estranged son, a high-school basketball star, to sign with "Big State University." It won praise, even from Stanley Crouch, but took in only about twenty million at the box office. "Summer of Sam," Lee's bravura re-creation of the dismal summer of 1977—a film that Scorsese calls "excellent," and which deserved to be a commercial success—also failed to become a hit. In 2000, he wrote "Bamboozled," a bitter satire about down-and-out African-American actors performing a hit TV show in blackface. The film lashed out indiscriminately at anyone whom Lee perceived to be exploiting black people—including the fashion designer Tommy Hilfiger (who appeared as a character called Timmi Hillnigger) and gangsta-rap groups. (An avowed fan of hip-hop, Lee has nevertheless criticized 50 Cent and other rappers for promoting violence in black communities. "I try not to listen to gangsta rap," he told me. "It's not helping.") Lee shot "Bamboozled" on a shoestring budget, with Sony digital handicams, often using up to ten cameras at a time to capture the action. The movie took in just over two million dollars. Lee's visibility as a feature-film director had shrunk dramatically. "It got to where people would come up to me and say, 'Hey, when's your next movie coming out?'—and I had one opening the next day," Lee recalled.
In 1997, Lee criticized Quentin Tarantino, for his use of the word "nigger" in his movies. "I want Quentin to know that all African Americans do not think that word is trendy or slick," Lee told Variety. Samuel L. Jackson, the star of Tarantino's "Jackie Brown," defended the director, telling reporters at the Berlin Film Festival that the movie was "a wonderful homage to black exploitation films. This is a good film, and Spike hasn't made one of those in a few years." (Jackson had appeared in "Do the Right Thing" and, in a stunning performance, played a crack addict in "Jungle Fever.") Lee responded by telling the Washington Post that Jackson's support for Tarantino was like a "house Negro defending massa"—one of his favorite taunts to African-Americans against whom he has a grudge. (Lee says that he was misquoted.) He is scathing on the subject of Robert L. Johnson, the African-American billionaire businessman and founder of Black Entertainment Television, who supported Hillary Clinton's candidacy over Barack Obama's. "Bob Johnson's relatives, in slavery, were in the house," Lee told me. "They were house Negroes. 'Massa, them niggers about to uprise! What we gonna do?' " (In an e-mail to me, Johnson wrote, "Spike Lee's juvenile ranting does not warrant my attention or a response.")
During this time, however, Lee also made an acclaimed documentary. In 1997, he released "4 Little Girls," about the 1963 bombing of a Baptist church in Birmingham, Alabama, by members of the Ku Klux Klan—an act that helped to galvanize the civil-rights movement. The film is notable for its emotional restraint; its outrage and grief are channelled through interviews with the dead girls' parents. It was nominated for an Oscar for best feature-length documentary. "There was something about the dignity of those people he encountered when he was making '4 Little Girls' that had a very deep impact on him, and in some way they seemed to help him grow up," Stanley Crouch told me. "When you got kids yourself and you're talking to the father of someone whose child was blown up by the kind of people who blew those kids up, and you see that this person is not ranting and raving in some kind of theatrical purported rage of the sort that you see in 'Do the Right Thing.' " (Lee is less restrained in comments that accompany the DVD for "4 Little Girls," in which he carps about losing the Oscar to "Into the Arms of Strangers," a documentary about the effort to rescue Jewish children from the Nazis. "When I found out that one of the films—one of the other five films nominated—was a film about the Holocaust, I knew we lost," he says.)
In 2006, Lee made "When the Levees Broke," a four-hour documentary for HBO about Hurricane Katrina and its aftermath. He did not visit New Orleans until almost three months after the storm—he was finishing post-production on "Inside Man"—but ultimately he made eight trips to the city over six months and shot more than a hundred interviews with survivors. The film catalogues the egregious federal response to the crisis, but its chief power is its record of the toll on the city's residents. (Lee filmed Blanchard tenderly escorting his elderly mother to her house in New Orleans months after the storm. She sobs when she sees that everything has been destroyed by the floodwaters.) Lee was criticized for including the testimony of some New Orleans residents who said that they had heard explosions before the levees gave way, thus lending credibility to conspiracy theorists who believe that the government dynamited the levees, drowning the city's impoverished Lower Ninth Ward in order to spare wealthy parts of town. Lee argued that it was his "duty" as a filmmaker to present these witnesses' statements, and pointed out that he included other possible explanations for what they had heard. The film also features an interview with the historian Douglas Brinkley, who calls the bombing an "urban myth." Even so, on the DVD's commentary track, Lee said, "Many African-Americans—and I include myself in this group—don't put anything past the United States government when it comes to black people."
The success of "Inside Man," in 2006, marked an upturn in his fortunes. "I got slipped the script," he told me. "It had been dormant at Imagine Entertainment, Ron Howard and Brian Grazer's company. I said I'd like to do this."
As Grazer recalled, "He said, 'I want to do this movie and I want to do it now, and I'll do it really well.' He was so committed that it was intoxicating." Grazer wasn't particularly troubled that Lee had recently been making small movies. "I'd hired directors—great directors—that weren't at the highest moment of their career," he told me. "What mattered to me was that in every movie, whether it was 'Bamboozled' or 'Malcolm X' or 'Do the Right Thing,' he always shot good scenes. He always had good taste." Grazer was more concerned about Lee's combativeness. "There are executives within the structural establishment that felt, 'Hey, we're not sure we wanna hire Spike Lee,' " Grazer said. "But I just felt he'd be perfect for our movie."
Lee was given a forty-five-million-dollar budget for the film, which was shot in downtown New York, with Clive Owen, Jodie Foster, and Denzel Washington in the lead roles. Lee made the movie look like a hundred-million-dollar Hollywood blockbuster, with his signature fluid camera moves, Blanchard's gorgeous score, and a twisty plot that was a clever deconstruction of the heist film: Owens's bank-robber character is not robbing the bank after all. Lee also wrote a few race-conscious passages into the script, including one in which a Sikh is taken hostage in the bank. Released by Owens, the turbaned character is set upon by the police, who panic, call him a "fuckin' Arab," and haul him away. Lee says that he knew the film was going to be a hit, but he didn't know how big. It grossed a hundred and seventy-six million dollars worldwide, a record for Lee, and he immediately began planning to shoot two pet projects—one about the life of James Brown, the other about the riots in Los Angeles sparked by the acquittals of the police officers who beat Rodney King.
"But I could not get the financing for those films," Lee says. "I deluded myself into thinking that I have a little more leeway after my biggest hit." Instead, Lee decided to try to put "Miracle at St. Anna" into production, but again was unable to secure funding from the Hollywood studios. Eventually, he raised the money from European sources. "RAI Cinema bought the rights for Italy. TF1 International is a French company—they bought the French rights and then sold them to the rest of the world," Lee said. "And Touchstone Pictures came on last, as American distributor."
Lee is philosophical about the difficulty he has had funding his latest projects. "The people who can get films made are Spielberg, Lucas, cats like that," he told me. "Whatever they want to do, they get made. Everybody else? It's a battle. Woody Allen has not made his last three or four films in England and his last one in Barcelona by choice. He had to go where the financing was." Even Scorsese, Lee says, has had to adapt to the realities of present-day Hollywood, casting Leonardo DiCaprio in lead roles in order to raise money. "If Leonardo's in it, it gets made," Lee said. He added, "The reality is that unless you're doing a comic-book superhero or some fourth or fifth sequel, it's hard to get stuff made, especially stuff that's different."
Scorsese told me that financial obstacles are not unusual for established directors with a personal vision, like Lee or Robert Altman, or Scorsese himself. "Sometimes these things go in cycles," Scorsese said. "Particularly if your films are more subjective, more personal points of view. After 'The King of Comedy,' I wound up going back to a low-budget independent cinema with 'After Hours,' then ratcheting it up just a little bit more with 'The Color of Money' and then going back to independent with 'The Last Temptation of Christ' and then finally getting back into a kind of a fighting shape with 'Goodfellas.' So in a way you have to go off and explore. Some people don't come back." He added, "It sort of separates the men from the boys, the ones who keep going. And he has kept going and he's not going to take no for an answer. Which is great."
In early August, Lee flew to Los Angeles, where he spent a few days overseeing the final color corrections on "Miracle at St. Anna." (It opens later this month.) When he returned to New York, on August 7th, we met in midtown, on Madison Avenue at Forty-eighth Street. Lee was wearing a white Ralph Lauren sweat jacket with the word "Beijing" across the back and the Olympics logo on the front. "Let's walk," he said, and started up Madison, moving at a good pace.
To walk with Lee in midtown Manhattan is to experience the metropolis reduced to a small town. Every species of New Yorker—from homeless people to businessmen in pin-striped suits—recognized and hailed him. Passing cabdrivers shouted, "Spike!" Bicyclists, pedestrians, people waiting at bus stops, elderly white ladies smiled and nodded hello. Lee acknowledged them all with an expressionless nod of the head, or a quickly raised right hand. Two white women smoking in front of a building managed to talk him into posing for a cell-phone photograph, and a nine-year-old African-American boy got Lee to sign a baseball-size rubber ball painted like a basketball. Lee wrote in careful letters, "To Paul, Love Spike Lee." At Fifty-seventh Street, Lee charged across a red light. As he approached the Niketown store, down the block, Lee noticed that a crowd of young men had collected on the sidewalk. "Sneakerheads," as Lee calls them, have been known to camp out in front of the stores for up to a week when the company introduces a new shoe. "Yo!" Lee shouted. "I got to find out what this is!" He hurried over.
The kids, some of whom had set up camp chairs, did a double take, then exclaimed in disbelief, "Spike!"
Lee shook their hands. "What's about to drop?" he asked.
"Tomorrow. Questlove's Nike Air," a white kid replied. Questlove is the drummer for the hip-hop band the Roots.
"Say, Spike—when is the new Spi'zike coming out?" another kid asked. Spi'zike is the name of a limited-edition sneaker—a mash-up of several early styles of Air Jordan—released by Nike in 2007 in honor of Lee's Mars Blackmon commercials. Lee told the kids that a new black-and-gold version was going to be out soon.
"The black-and-gold is out in Europe," one of the kids said.
"What?" Lee said. "No, it's not."
"I got a picture," the kid said, waving his BlackBerry. He showed Lee a photograph he had taken of the black-and-gold Spi'zike.
"Shit," Lee said. "I gotta make a call." He took out his BlackBerry and dialled the number of his contact at Nike. He got voice mail and hung up. "How long you been out here?" he asked the kids.
"Four days," the kids said.
Lee headed north and then west on Fifty-ninth Street until he got to Mickey Mantle's, a sports bar and restaurant. He stepped inside, declared the room "too noisy," and sat down at a small table on the sidewalk. Lee ordered a strawberry virgin daiquiri. A heavyset African-American teen-ager appeared beside the table, carrying a crumpled box of M&M's. The boy did not seem to recognize Lee. He asked Lee to buy some candy to "support our football team."
"How old are you?" Lee asked.
"Fifteen, sir."
"What's your name?"
"My name's Tashon."
"What's your last name?"
The kid told him.
"Where you living?" Lee said.
"Jersey City."
"How'd you get over here?
"The train, sir."
"PATH train?"
"Yes, sir."
Lee asked what grade the boy was going into, what his grades were like, if he planned to go to college ("I might go to Rutgers"), what position he played, and how tall he was. Eventually, he asked, "You on the straight and narrow?" to which the boy replied, "Yes." Lee pulled a five-dollar bill from his pocket. "All right," he said, "take it." The boy took it and left.
On the evening of Hillary Clinton's concession speech, Lee had sent me a two-word text message: "Changes everything." I now asked him what he meant. "Changes the whole dynamic," he said. "If we have a black President, maybe it will change people's psyche." Specifically, he meant African-Americans. He went on, "They don't have to be shuckin' and jivin'—doing the tap dance—to make a living. And I mean that 'tap dancing' figuratively, not literally, because no disrespect to the world's greatest tap dancer, Savion Glover." I asked Lee about the debate in the mainstream press over Obama's blackness. (Time had run a story in February, 2007, titled "Is Obama Black Enough?" and the question had since been taken up by CNN, CBS News, the Washington Post, and other news organizations.) He snorted.
"It's ignorance," he said. "Here's the thing. I'm not one of these people who're going to be defined by the ghetto mentality, that you have to have been shot, have numerous babies from many women, be ignorant, getting high all the time, walking around with pants hanging from your ass—and that's a black man? I'm not buying that. That's not my definition. Are there some black people like that? Yes. But if one speaks proper English, wears a shirt and a tie—"
Lee was suddenly distracted by someone across the street. In a booming voice, he yelled, "What's up, Nick?"
Stopped in traffic, in a silver S.U.V. with the driver's window down, was Nicholas Turturro, who played one of the Jewish jazz-club owners in "Mo' Better Blues" and has appeared in several of Lee's other films.
"Yo, buddy! Like the hat!" Turturro shouted, pointing at Lee's Yankees cap, which featured a pattern of winning pennants.
"What size you wear?" Lee bellowed.
"I got one already!"
"Got one? You gotta get one for your brother! Time is running out!"
Turturro drove off, and Lee resumed talking about Obama's run for President. "This thing is not by accident," he said. "I think this thing is ordained—it's providence. This is a sweeping movement. It's bigger than him, it's bigger than all of us. I think this is going to be such a pivotal moment in history that you can measure time by B.B., Before Barack, and A.B., After Barack. That's what I feel is going to happen." He went on, "There's ramifications all over the world. I mean, I know this is a Presidential election for the United States of America, but this thing is worldwide news. It's not like they rang every door in Berlin to say, 'Barack's going to be here,' for two hundred thousand people to show up. Two hundred thousand can come to see McCain but they're going to be protesting, and burning American flags and who knows what else?" He laughed. "If we were talking about two boxers, Muhammad Ali would say, 'He's too old, and he's too slow!' And he would say, 'I'm too young and too pretty and too fast.' " Lee clapped his hands.
In our earlier conversations, I had tried several times to get Lee to say whether he, routinely held up as an exemplar of the angry, activist black artist, felt out of step in the supposedly "post-racial" world embodied by Obama. He had dodged or ignored my questions. But he seemed to offer an oblique answer when I asked if he had thought about making a television commercial for Obama's campaign. After all, Obama and his wife had gone to see "Do the Right Thing" on their first date, in 1989, and then had discussed Mookie's act of throwing the garbage can through Sal's window.
"You gotta be asked to do that stuff," Lee said. "Look, if they need me, they know where I am. And in a lot of ways they might—" He paused. "You know, that shit could be used against them, too. 'Spike Lee, the man who said so-and-so and so-and-so. Now he's doing commercials for—' " He shrugged and smiled. "Sometimes you might be a liability," he said finally. "Just got to lay in the cut." ♦


text:
Before beginning this outline, let me first give you my conclusion. All prostate cancer patients should use alternative cancer therapies. In general, they should be used prior to beginning conventional treatment. When the prostate cancer patient is receiving conventional treatment, he should also incorporate alternative therapies in order to reduce the side effects of conventional treatment, improve the results, and possibly allow the patient to be able to discontinue the conventional treatments.
The prostate gland-that's prostate, not prostrate, is found only in males and is normally about the size of a walnut in men. It is located below the bladder and in front of the rectum. Urine formed in the kidneys passes to the bladder in tubelike structures called ureters. From the bladder, urine passes to the outside through another tubelike structure called the urethra. The urethra passes through the middle of the prostate and the part of the urethra located in the prostate is called the prostatic urethra. When a portion of the prostate enlarges, it may impinge upon the flow of urine. This condition when it is benign, that is not cancerous, is called BPH or benign prostatic hyperplasia. The other major conditions involving the prostate are prostatitis and prostate cancer, which will be the subject of this series.
Just how much of a problem is prostate cancer? It is a major health problem for many reasons. The American Cancer Society estimates that in the United States one in six men will eventually be diagnosed with prostate cancer--that's one in six men. In 1995 in the United States, 244,000 men will be diagnosed and 40,400 will die from the disease, making it the second leading cancer killer in men, behind lung cancer. More men will be diagnosed with prostate cancer than women with breast cancer, although the number of deaths of each will be about the same. Prostate cancer in men is quite analogous to breast cancer in women.
In spite of this high incidence, the problem is even greater because with prostate cancer, one must distinguish between clinical and microscopic cancer. Much of the prostate cancer that occurs in men is never diagnosed because many men with prostate cancer die of other causes, never knowing they ever had it. For example, a recent study involving careful pathological examinations of the prostate glands during the autopsies of men killed in accidents revealed some alarming figures. The incidence of microscopic prostate cancer was 80% in men between the ages 70 and 80 years old, 40% in men between 50 and 60 years old, 34% in men between 40 and 50 years old, and 27% in men between 30 and 40 years old. To me these statistics were truly amazing. Keep in mind, however, that these statistics refer to microscopic prostate cancer and not to clinical prostate cancer, which is diagnosed while the person is alive.
How Does a Doctor Diagnose Prostate Cancer?
Several years ago, the major way of diagnosing relatively early prostate cancer was through a digital rectal examination, in which the physician inserts a gloved finger into the rectum and feels a hard nodule on the prostate. A biopsy of the nodule would confirm the diagnosis. Sometimes the diagnosis would be made of advanced prostate cancer when the patient presented to the doctor with bone pain and further workup revealed that he had prostate cancer with spread to the bone or bone metastases already. Today, however, the diagnosis of prostate cancer is being made much earlier most of the time because of a simple blood test called the prostate specific antigen or PSA. Next week I'll discuss the pros and cons of the PSA, another procedure called the transrectal ultrasound of the prostate, the pros and cons of biopsy of the prostate and the staging and grading of prostate cancer.

subset: commoncrawl


text:
Landing in a crosswind can be terrifying, but just watch this video and see how much the wings of a Boeing 767 flex during severe turbulence. It's... disconcerting.
The video shows a 767 landing at Birmingham Airport in the UK this past week, during the recent storms that hit the country. Crosswinds reached 35 knots; wings flexed; pants were crapped. [YouTube]


text:
(Updated at 1:33 p.m.) WASHINGTON - The Justice Department has joined a lawsuit against disgraced cyclist Lance Armstrong that alleges the former, seven-time Tour de France champion concealed his use of performance-enhancing drugs and defrauded his longtime sponsor, the U.S. Postal Service, Armstrong's lawyers said Friday.
The suit the Justice Department is joining was filed in 2010 by former teammate Floyd Landis, who was stripped of his 2006 Tour de France title for doping.
Settlement discussions had been underway between the Justice Department and Armstrong's lawyers. A person familiar with the negotiations says the two sides are tens of millions of dollars apart on how much Armstrong should pay to settle the case. The person spoke on condition of anonymity because the source was not authorized to speak on the record about the private talks.
An Armstrong lawyer, Robert Luskin, said negotiations with the government failed because 'we disagree about whether the postal service was damaged.'
'The postal service's own studies show that the service benefited tremendously from its sponsorship - benefits totaling more than $100 million,' said Luskin
The Landis lawsuit was filed under seal, but it will be unsealed with the Justice Department decision to join, or in essence, take over the case.
Armstrong was the subject of a two-year federal grand jury investigation that the Justice Department dropped a year ago without an indictment.
Throughout his career, Armstrong always denied drug use, but he confessed to having done so in an interview last month.
In October, the U.S. Anti-Doping Agency released a report that included affidavits from 11 of Armstrong's former teammates. These affidavits detailed how the teammates were supplied with EPO by Armstrong and saw him inject, and how they were pressured to dope and bullied by Armstrong and Johan Bruyneel, the team manager. The cycling world's governing body then stripped Armstrong of the seven Tour de France titles he won from 1999 to 2005.
Last month, the head of USADA lobbied Attorney General Eric Holder for the Justice Department to join the lawsuit against Armstrong. USADA chief executive Travis Tygart has called the doping by Armstrong and the postal service teams a 'massive economic fraud.'
AUSTIN, Texas - The head of the U.S. Anti-Doping Agency lobbied Attorney General Eric Holder for the Justice Department to join a whistle-blower lawsuit against Lance Armstrong on the same day the cyclist confessed in an interview to performance-enhancing drug use.
USADA Chief Executive Travis Tygart wrote Holder on Jan. 14, urging him to join the civil case and telling Holder that 'fraud and other crimes were committed' by Armstrong and other members of his former U.S. Postal Service teams.
It was not clear if Holder responded, but the Justice Department has not yet announced it if will join the lawsuit filed by former Armstrong teammate Floyd Landis.
Landis, who was stripped of the 2006 Tour de France title for doping, accuses Armstrong of committing fraud against the Postal Service, which sponsored most of Armstrong's teams as the star rider used PEDs to win the Tour a record seven times.
Landis also was a key witness in a USADA investigation last year that exposed Armstrong's doping. He stands to collect a portion - potentially millions of dollars - of any possible financial penalties against Armstrong.
The letter is dated the same day Armstrong admitted his drug use to Oprah Winfrey in a television interview that was broadcast on Jan. 17 and Jan. 18. USADA officials had been urging him to speak under oath with its investigators if he hoped to have his lifetime ban reduced.
The letter was first reported Thursday by Velonews.com and The Associated Press independently obtained a copy from a person familiar with the case.
Armstrong and USADA officials talked on and off over a couple of months about the terms of the cyclist sitting down for a long interview to spill all he knows about doping in cycling, but Armstrong said Wednesday he would not cooperate.
A person familiar with discussions between the two sides, who spoke Thursday on condition of anonymity because they were private, said among the topics was how much protection USADA could provide Armstrong in the whistle-blower case and against possible criminal action. The cyclist and his attorneys ultimately were not satisfied with USADA's offer, the person said.
In commenting Wednesday on Armstrong's refusal to talk, Tygart said that, 'over the last few weeks he has led us to believe that he wanted to come in and assist USADA, but was worried of potential criminal and civil liability if he did so.'
In his letter to Holder, Tygart wrote that USADA 'uncovered one of the greatest frauds in the history of sport' but that his agency had reached the end of what it can do to punish Armstrong and other 'non-sports' people involved with his teams.
'Fraud and other crimes were committed,' Tygart wrote, telling Holder that the case involved drug trafficking, federal witness intimidation and that other federal agencies have gathered more information.
'USADA has already done the work in the sports case and won,' Tygart wrote.
Armstrong was the subject of a two-year federal grand jury investigation that was dropped a year ago without an indictment.
Tygart also told Holder that the Justice Department joining the case against Armstrong would be viewed favorably by the public and the media.
The letter noted the federal government recently went after Landis for defrauding donors to his defense fund back when he still denied doping to win the 2006 Tour de France.
Tygart called the doping by Armstrong and the Postal Service teams a 'massive economic fraud' that 'absolutely dwarfs anything Landis did.'


text:
The handbook of forensic psychology
John Wiley, Jan 15, 1999 - Psychology - 756 pages
Authored by leading scholars and practitioners, this completely revised edition of the bestselling text and reference work covers every component of this rapidly-expanding field, including polygraph ("lie detection") testing and forensic uses of hypnosis.
From inside the book
42 pages matching hypnosis in this book
Where's the rest of this book?
Results 1-3 of 42
What people are saying - Write a review
We haven't found any reviews in the usual places.
History of Forensic Psychology
Allen K Hess
Robert J Van Der Velde
23 other sections not shown
Common terms and phrases
abuse accuracy adults American Psychological Association Applied assessment attorney awards Behavioral Science Unit child child molesters child sexual abuse clients clinical clinicians cognitive committed competency conduct consultation correctional crime criminal justice custody dangerousness decision defendant defendant's determine diminished capacity disabilities divorce drug effects ethical evaluation event evidence examination expert witness eyewitness factors federal forensic psychology Human Behavior hypnosis hypnotic identify individual insanity defense interview involved issues Journal judge jury Law and Human law enforcement litigation Loftus memory ment MMPI parents parole patients person police polygraph test practice prediction prison problems procedures programs Psychiatry psychologist Psychopathy punitive damages Quinsey recidivism relationship relevant responsibility risk role rule scores sexual offenders social specific suggested Supreme Court testimony therapist tion treatment U.S. Supreme Court validity verdict victim violence York


text:
Export 2 results:[ Author] Title Type Year
Filters: Author is Kienholz, Christian [Clear All Filters]
"Derivation and analysis of a complete modern-date glacier inventory for Alaska and northwest Canada", Journal of Glaciology, vol. 61, p. 403, 2015.,
"Mass Balance Evolution of Black Rapids Glacier, Alaska, 1980–2100, and Its Implications for Surge Recurrence", Frontiers in Earth Science, vol. 5, p. 56, 2017.,


text:
It's the moment we've all been waiting for! Objet today announced the release and launch of our latest desktop 3D printer – the Objet30 Pro.
A little bit on the film then: As you can see, I've attempted here to 'break the mold' so to speak on the traditional 'corporate' style films that we tend to find in the 3D printing and rapid prototyping space. Instead, I wanted to present a more fun and creative side to 3D printing while at the same time highlighting the fantastic accuracy and material versatility of the printer. The concept here was that with the Objet30 Pro's seven materialsyou have the versatility to create virtually whatever you want – in fact, an entire 'world' of possibilities. We then proceed to create that 'world' for our 3D printed figure who I've lovingly called 'William'.
Now for the product details: The Objet30 Pro is positioned as the ultimate prototyping solution for designers, engineers and product managers working in industries such as consumer goods, consumer electronics, medical devices and design consultancies. The system combines the accuracy and versatility of a high-end Rapid Prototyping machine with a small desktop footprint that's easy to use and maintain. It's also the world's only desktop 3D printer to be able to 3D print in clear transparent, high temperature, rigid opaque and polypropylene-like materials.
Stay tuned – we've got more on the way in the coming days on the new Objet30 Pro!
In the meatime you can link to this film on our YouTube channel here – http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=COAu5ZtWUXg&feature=youtu.be


text:
GOP Poised to Control More State Legislatures
Party Gains Put More Policy Changes Into Play
Four years after Republicans grabbed their largest number of legislative seats since the Great Depression, the party is positioned to gain House and Senate majorities in more states, putting energy regulation, social issues and taxes in play even as Washington remains gridlocked.
Control of five state Senates would swing to the GOP with a gain of no more than three seats, and the party is targeting four additional state legislative chambers, believing the political environment favors Republicans this year. The party already...


text:
- Home
- News
- Sports
- Opinion
- Obituaries
- Features
- Special Sections
- Classifieds
- Public Notices
To the editor:
Annually for three to four months we share Sunset Beach island with vacationers, who do much for the economy and financial security of business owners and their employees. Yes, there is a downside; however, the good far outweighs the bad.
The town garbage ordinance clearly states garbage cans cannot be placed out before 2 p.m. the day prior to pickup and must be returned no later than 2 p.m. on the day after collection. Therefore, Councilwoman Karen Joseph, there may have been garbage cans outside occupied homes during your Saturday visit.
If you currently subscribe or have subscribed in the past to the The Brunswick Beacon, then simply find your account number on your mailing label and enter it below.
Click the question mark below to see where your account ID appears on your mailing label.
|ZIP Code:


text:
Kylie Shared 1st Picture of Baby & It Became Most Liked IG Picture EVER!
Kylie Jenner may have given everyone a brief glimpse of her newborn daughter, Stormi Webster, in that 11-minute video announcement, but the world of Instagram stormed her account on Tuesday (February 6) when she revealed the name of her baby girlalongside the first still of the kiddo, snatching the title for the most-liked Instagram post ever.
Previously belonging to Cristiano Ronaldo's post about his fourth child's birth, which was shared on November 12, 2017, the title has gone onto Jenner's viral shot, which has nabbed over 13,600,000 likes on the social media platform in under 24 hours. In the post, which shows the infant holding her mother's manicured thumb, the 20-year-old star decided to offer her fans with the name of her baby in the caption of the hot shot: "stormi webster 👼🏽."
On Super Bowl Sunday, Jenner brought the blogosphere to a halt when she revealed that she has indeed been pregnant these last few months and recently gave birth to a healthy girl last Thursday. In a heartwarming letter, the star shared the exciting news, letting fans know that she stayed quiet because she wanted to make sure that she experienced her pregnancy without any hiccups.
"Pregnancy has been the most beautiful, empowering, and life-changing experience I've had in my entire life and I'm actually going to miss it," Jenner said in an extensive message. "I appreciate my friends and especially my family for helping me make this special moment as private as we could. My beautiful and healthy baby girl arrived February 1st and I just couldn't wait to share this blessing. I've never felt love and happiness like this I could burst! Thank you for understanding."


text:
View large image
Buy Now
In stock
Usually dispatched within 24 hours
Transform lack-lustre locks with the Extreme Length Primer Treatment from Redken. Specially formulated with the brand's unique Interlock Protein Network to effectively prevent split ends and reduce breakage and biotin to strengthen hair from root to tip and deeply condition locks. The rinse-off treatment targets distressed hair and promotes growth to help you achieve healthy-looking, voluminous locks. The handy pump bottle makes application easier and reduces spillage. E.N.
Apply on damp hair from root to ends. Leave on 2-5 minutes. Rinse.
Express Delivery Available - If ordered before 11pm, delivered by courier next working day. More Info »
If ordered before 11pm, delivered by courier next working day. Applies to most delivery addresses within mainland UK.
Please check the stock availability notice on your item when placing your order. This item is:
In stock | Usually dispatched within 24 hours
Please remember to add postal time (2-3 working days) to obtain a complete estimate of delivery to your door.
You will receive an email to confirm when your item has been sent.
You can also check the status of your order and individual items by accessing My Account details and following the prompts.
Please allow 10 working days from dispatch of your order before notifying us of any late deliveries.
It may be advisable to check with your neighbours to see if a parcel has been left with them, check any outhouses you might have where it may be left if it cannot fit through your letterbox and contact your local sorting office to see if the item has been returned to the depot as undelivered and awaiting collection.
Please see our returns policy.
There are currently no reviews.
Redken Extreme Length Primer Rinse Off Treatment (150ml)
Select image


text:
Hi, just bought a Blade Fate Lady which I plan to use with my Core ESP bar. AFAIK the original Blade bar has 4 equal length lines, same as ESP.
My main concern is that ESP has front lines in Y (split couple meters from depower) while Blade bar has more V (lines split immediately after depower).
Should I expect any issues? Has anybody tried similar setup?


text:
7435 Village Center Drive
O'Fallon 63368-4768
Branch Phone
(636) 561-3385
Branch Hours
Monday - Thursday 9:00 am - 9:00 pm
Friday - Saturday 9:00 am - 6:00 pm
Sunday 1:00 - 5:00 pm
Free Wi-Fi available
Aaron Eller, Branch Manager - firstname.lastname@example.com
The Library Express at WingHaven is a smaller, bookstore-style library that makes it easy for you to find the newest and most popular items quickly and easily. Visit us to find a great selection of about 25,000 bestselling books, movies and music for the whole family! If it's convenience you want, place reserves from over a million items in the Library District collection, and you can pick them up the next day at our location. We opened in WingHaven in 2003 and recently expanded to nearly 5000 sq ft. Our branch has lots of comfortable seating, a self-service beverage area, public access computers and many other amenities. The staff at the Library Express at WingHaven really get to know their customers in our smaller library setting. When you visit, you will be visiting your library friends!


text:
About isthisthingon
Interesting read with a humorous flow that helps make an often tedious level of legal discovery interesting.
But that's not why I decided to finally comment on one of your posts. I read your work all the time and you've been a source of inspiration for me. Perhaps what baffles me most is the degree of baseless and angry opposition you face in most all of your articles.
They seem to be coming from reasonably intelligent people who should at least be aware that their blind opposition is transparently just that. This tactic works well on AM radio but looks silly and impotent here, imho. Obviously you're hitting on sensitive areas that people invested in existing power structures fiercely defend, perhaps resulting from financial ties or simply their egos. Keep the light on and eventually the roaches will scatter.
But again, thank you for all the hard work. You do an exceptional job challenging accepted beliefs and bringing clarity and understanding to areas where most of us simply remain asleep and trust our spoon fed truths.
I'd strongly recommend reading Free by Chris Anderson, not just because you would then understand what all this talk is about, but because it's very important to grasp. Free can be easily switched with the concept of too cheap to meter. And yet you might think, well at least *somebody* has to pay for all this stuff! True, but when these costs are diluted to a point where the value of the product or service is worth more when it is given away for free - like table salt - then it becomes a member of the "free" family. Keep charging per grain of salt, no matter how cheap you make it, and your competition giving it away will put you out of business: making good money selling food while giving away the free salt.
Sick evil bastard. Leveraging cleverness, you righteously perpetuate what's wrong in this world. That is the extent of your legacy, little lawyer. You sledgehammer your well crafted yet false assertions into the minds of those who simply seek acceptance. The RIAA had a wet dream and behold, you were born.
Dear illiterate poop bowl of hate and intolerance, Stop breathing. Furthermore, know that someone in this world sees the truth behind your fraudulent and opportunistic façade your fragile ego hides behind. You suck. Why am I so harsh on you? Because anything less scathing wouldn't even be read by a sociopath such as yourself. Quickly now, reduce my grammar to a dismissable straw man and quiet the storms of your sand castle self confidence. MTV is the ultimate achievement your current path has to offer. Wake up or shut up. Actually, just shut up. Shut up until you start behaving like the less unoriginal beast your parents worked so hard to produce. They deserve better so don't be such a poop stain. Now go clean your room.
Where kids? Where grand kids??
>Right or wrong, it is the law.
Regardless of how you "vote" on this, just because something is the law doesn't make it good in any way. The law needs more correction in most countries than it claims to provide to the people within.
IP extremists have one thing that matters to them most: their hopes of having their turn amassing large amounts of money riding on an artificially imposed mini-monopoly that this corrupt system of elitist laws would provide them.
The term "intellectual property" is ridiculous on all levels and is supported by two kinds of people:
1. Those who don't realize what it does to the world
2. Those who do but care more about personal gain than the welfare of others
>In the old deal the artist paid for fame with their music, and got to keep the profits from fame (touring and merchandise dollars) mostly to themselves.
Wrong. The record company "deal" hasn't changed and still involves surrendering the rights to your own creative works for a very small portion of the proceeds.
>Since the music is rapidly becoming un-monetizable,
You might want to brush up on your business basics. Truly the only real looser with Internet based music is the massive distribution companies who we no longer need. Think about it, their main purpose was to promote and distribute creative works. Why in the world should we continue to pay them for distributing anything that is instantly available in digital format? One reason - they are huge, powerful, already exist and plan to maintain their dominance - as any self respecting public company should.
Trust a public company to attempt to maximize their own profits. When technology renders a company useless, trust them to use legal and other means to continue to bring dollars in. We have to be the ones to wake up and realize a service no longer has any real value.
>a cart-before-the-horse problem
Fantastic point Jeffrey! Nice post - thanks :)
>i really hate when people use it as a derogatory term. its like they're just announcing they don't know what they're talking about.
Me too. Socialism is used interchangeably with communism, Marxism and fascism to mean something terrible that upstanding patriots should reject completely due to its inherently evil nature.
These are all different terms but nobody seems to understand this.
>"I haven't read the research yet"
And I'm not holding my breath for you to do so. After all, who wants the discomfort endured when challenging one's fixed beliefs? No self-respecting market fundamentalist would give the lint from their fur coat pocket to any endeavor that hints at challenging the elitist truths they ride so glutinously high on.
>"This myth (myth??) is usually spread (usually spread? Please itemize the other forms of said dissemination. Otherwise I call BS on "Mark" since you simply must be Ann Coulter) by those who work in academia or government or a private business that benefits from the work of others, usually without compensation."
Really? Wow. Is this based on a Fox "News" poll or something less credible such as your personal interpretation of said poll? Either way, your passion for factually sound research is admirable.
>"The problem with this theory is that it almost never looks at what is very difficult to see, which is the cost to society when the world's best minds stop sharing innovations"
The world's best minds *never* stop sharing their innovations. Only the snake oil hucksters do. Those who would stop sharing their innovations in the area of, for example, cancer research, simply because they couldn't maximize their selfish profit from said innovation - should keep their poisonous "inventions" to themselves. They should go ahead and live out their lives keeping all that greatness bottled up to appropriately maximize their legacy on this planet.
You, sir, are either one of these energy vacuums or are completely blind to the puppet strings operating your jaw.
>"it isn't trendy to acknowledge (or in popularity contests a winning tactic)"
Since when did human suffering become trendy? Take a moment to learn about how the IP umbrella keeps 3'rd world countries squarely in their hopeless place. Consider the millions of fallen souls that would still be alive were it not for pharmaceutical patents "protecting" the Pfizers of the world who demand ridiculous sums for their life saving AIDS treatments.
Yep I'm passionate about this and have come to an understanding about the issue. Once you know what's really going on you simply must reject the IP movement or in my experience you fall into two categories: the ignorant or the greedy. There's perhaps room for the cowards who are unable to challenge their neocon peers as well. But drinking from the fountain of comfort and support for your ignorance is as bad as pulling the trigger yourself, IMHO.
>Next time thing before you speak.
LOL - "thing" before YOU speak! Intellectual Property is literally a term with the attempt of grouping dissimilar forms of protection into one, simple, combination meal that Fox News Americans can actually wrap their entropied minds around.
Even the attempt to lump someone's musical art into the same bucket as a functional invention is what we've all missed somewhere along the way. Try reading this and use your thinker:
I'm sorry but claiming that since fashion has various levels of distinct segments it falls outside the reasonable realm of what justifies copy protection is extremely thin. In fact, it's really just another greed pie covered in meringue.
Copy protections are thinly veiled protectors of mini-monopolies, period. I've spent weeks on end with lawyers on both sides of the patent "infringement" game. It's a game for the rich and has nothing to do with protecting individuals from having their hard earned inventions "stolen" from them. Individuals lose to others with deeper pockets - almost always. Therefore it's another case of greed pie with the meringue of "protecting individuals."
Those that play deeply in this game know this truth. It's just that they wouldn't have an income if we all figured it out. They truly appreciate you parroting their smokescreen, especially since you're obviously an intelligent person.
I would venture to say you either are a good concerned person that drank their punch or truly one of them and probably quite afraid that the world is waking up to this ethical shell game that no longer has a place in the age of information.
And please ask me to back up my assertions. But careful what you wish for, unless you're ready to have a change of heart on the subject or outed as a capitalist shark if that's what you truly are.
Thank you Blaise! Your work inspired me to write about you at a blog that I contribute to on a daily basis called The Technology Cache (link at bottom if interested). I've been a fan of the FSF and dissolving the digital divide for quite some time. Although you've presented the business benefits of a "free" approach, I'm also interested in how the western concept of "intellectual property" does actual damage to less fortunate societies. As a lifelong software engineer who's now an open-source/free software advocate, I'm always researching to learn more about equitable ways to encourage a world of sharecropping where those who contribute are rewarded and those who rely on the artificial creation of scarcity find themselves forced to... actually contribute :) Here's the link just in case you're interested: http://www.perkiset.org/forum/freemem_garbage_collection/free_doesnt_mean_devalued-t2125.0.html;msg1 7512;topicseen#msg17512 Best regards, Adam
>Net neutrality in the end won't change anything.
Everything I've read from you makes sense except this comment. Are you forgetting the impending, tiered approach to broadband pricing that penalizes certain levels of use and even perhaps the subjective pricing of traffic based on content?
Funny thing is, to oppose net neutrality is to be a proponent of regulation. It's just that you support corporate and not government regulation. In this case the government plans to disallow discretionary based, corporate regulation of Internet traffic. Isn't that a good thing?
Well said ac.


text:
The engagement of "Captain L G Cruwys and Miss Abercrombie" was reported in The Times on 17th July 1917:
An engagement is announced between Captain L G Cruwys of Cruwys Morchard, Tiverton, Devon, and Margaret Campbell Speke, elder daughter of Colonel A H Abercrombie, late 21st Royal Scots Fusiliers, and Mrs Abercrombie.It must have been impossible to make proper plans for a wedding during the war. Consequently no formal invitations were sent out and an open invitation was published in The Times on 6th November 1917: "No invitations are being sent, but all friends will be welcome at the church".
The marriage is recorded in the registers of St David's Exeter on 19th November 1917. At the time of the marriage Lewis George Cruwys, 36, was a Captain in the Recruiting Office and was living at Cruwys Morchard. Interestingly Margaret C S Cruwys, then aged 23 and living in St. David's, Exeter, was working as Lewis's clerk. The witnesses were R G Cruwys (Lewis's brother, Robert Geoffrey Cruwys, who was by this time the Rector of Cruwys Morchard) and A… Abercrombie. The identity of the second witness is uncertain and the writing was indistinct, but it was probably either Margaret's mother or father. The service was conducted by the Reverend Bell-Salter.
Lewis joined the army after graduating from Exeter College, Oxford, serving with the 4th Volunteer Battalion of the Devonshire Regiment and spending some time out in India. He resigned his commission in 1907 but volunteered for service with his old regiment at the outbreak of World War I. It would appear that he did not serve overseas and instead spent most of the war in Devon. The London Gazette records his appointment as "Chief Registration Officer of an Area" on 12th December 1916. It was perhaps around this time that his future wife, the young Margaret Abercrombie, came to work for him.
Margaret Cruwys is fondly remembered by the parishioners of Cruwys Morchard. She was a true "gentlewoman" without any airs and graces. For many years she ran a small farm at the Manor House. She was not afraid of hard work and used to milk the cows herself. Margaret was always very involved in parish affairs. The annual Cruwys Morchard flower show was held on the Manor lawn, where the exhibits were displayed on the squire's best Crown Derby china. The parishioners inspected the items with much trepidation, hardly daring to breathe! The photograph above shows Margaret Cruwys outside the parish hall in Cruwys Morchard with some of the local boys. The photograph was taken in 1935 around the time of the Silver Jubilee celebrations for King George V.


text:
American Table Gets Love from Refinery29/
Thanks to one of our favorite fashion blogs Refinery29 for giving some love to American Table Cafe and Bar in their Best New NYC Restaurants 2012 round up.
If you haven't gotten the chance to try American Table's Pickled Tomato Soup with Grilled Cheese, BBQ Pork Sliders or Braised Short Ribs, stop by before or after a show at Alice Tully Hall or any time in you're in the Lincoln Center area. But make sure to save room for the Spiced Bread Pudding with Salted Caramel.