The Daily Campus

Issue date: 3/28/08 Section: Focus

Media Credit: Shaun Levy Spike Lee told his audience about his childhood dreams of being a professional baseball player at his lecture Saturday.

Words centered on politics and youth emanated from the voice of writer and director Spike Lee Saturday evening at the Jorgensen Center for the Performing Arts.

Lee was the keynote speaker for "The Harlem Renaissance Revisited: Politics, Arts & Letters," a conference hosted by the Institute of African American Studies in the College of Liberal Arts and Sciences.

A rather large audience came to hear the words of the well-known director.

"It's Spike Lee, he's probably one of the most famous, influential guys to come to UConn this year," said Joe Williams, a 2nd-semester exploratory major.

Lee walked on the stage dressed down in jeans and a Yankees baseball cap hung low over his glasses. After quickly bringing up that the UConn men were bounced out of the NCAA tournament early on, he moved on to talk about the current political campaign.

Lee spoke conversationally as he discussed the importance of youth in the current campaign. Other major issues discussed were the state of the economy and the war.

"We are in our fifth year of war. A war we were tricked into," said Lee.

Obama's recent speech on race relations was another topic of dialogue that Lee seemed to feel very strongly about. He said that, in this country, we need to talk about race and the only way that will happen is by starting with a dialogue.

Lee then moved on to discuss how he became a filmmaker, but mentioned that wasn't his first career choice.

"I wanted to be an athlete. It's okay you can all laugh," Lee joked. His original plans were to play second base for the New York Mets.

His baseball dreams did not come to fruition; instead he went to Morehouse College and began school as a C+ student.

"I was totally unmotivated and just B.S.-ing," said Lee about his early college experience.

It was not until a professor encouraged Lee to use some raw footage that he had taken over the summer to create a short film, did Lee realize he would become a filmmaker. The film he created was called "Last Hustle in Brooklyn" and chronicled the summer of 1977, what Lee said was one of the hottest summers on record. This was the summer of the blackout in New York and the first summer of disco.

Continued...

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