“Spike Lee, wife take 'Giant Steps' to inspire kids - USA Today” plus 1 more

Spike Lee, wife take 'Giant Steps' to inspire kids - USA Today

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By Bob Minzesheimer, USA TODAY

NEW YORK — In the spacious living room of their Italian-palazzo-style townhouse on the east side of Manhattan— which they bought in 1998 from painter Jasper Johns— filmmaker Spike Lee and his wife and co-author, Tonya Lewis Lee, are trading banter about their latest picture book, Giant Steps to Change the World.

By Jennifer S. Altman for USA TODAY

Filmmaker Spike Lee and his wife, Tonya Lewis Lee, chose subjects for Giant Steps to Change the World who would inspire people of all ages.

By Jennifer S. Altman for USA TODAY

Filmmaker Spike Lee and his wife, Tonya Lewis Lee, chose subjects for Giant Steps to Change the World who would inspire people of all ages.

The book (Simon & Schuster, $16.99, for all ages) celebrates a dozen subjects, from Barack Obama to Mother Teresa, who, as the text tells readers, "made giant steps to make the world a better place/and left big shoes for you to fill."

At first, Tonya Lewis Lee, a former corporate lawyer and TV producer, does most of the talking, about how they — he's 53, she's 44 — chose subjects "who inspired us and would inspire readers, whether they're 2 or 4, or 24, or older."

But a friendly debate breaks out when the subject shifts to who was left out of the book. It does include a poet (Langston Hughes), a painter (Jean-Michel Basquiat) and one group entry (the Tuskegee Airmen). Nine of its 12 subjects are African Americans.

Spike Lee wanted to include more athletes. (He is nearly as well known for his devotion to the New York Knicks as for his films, which range from Do the Right Thing to the Katrina documentary If God Is Willing and Da Creek Don't Rise.)

The book includes two athletes: boxer Muhammad Ali, "who refused to pick up a gun against a fellow human being" (he refused to be conscripted into the military), and Olympian Jesse Owens, "who won the gold even though he had been relegated to second-class status by the very country he was representing."

Spike says his long list for the book included baseball's Willie Mays and boxing's Joe Louis. He begins to say, "If you look at the history of the United States ..."

His wife interrupts: "African Americans have done a lot more than play sports."

He persists: "But if you look at social change and what's happened in sports ..."

She's not convinced: "You need to look beyond the athletic fields."

"Who's contesting that?" he asks.

And so it goes, back and forth. Their son, Jackson, 13, home from school with a concussion suffered in an ice hockey game, barely looks up, as if he's accustomed to his parents' back and forth. (They also have a daughter, Satchel, 16.)

Asked if the book, which is illustrated with Sean Qualls' collages, aims for a balance, Spike Lee challenges the question: "What kind of balance?"

Tonya Lewis Lee is more diplomatic. "We're inspired by all kinds of people: Marva Collins, the Chicago teacher who started a school for kids who were thought to unteachable, and Albert Einstein, who had trouble learning to read. It's not about politics or race or ethnicity."

Do they fear that Obama's inclusion will turn off parents who don't like his politics?

"If you think he was born somewhere else, I don't care if you don't buy this book," Spike Lee says, alluding to those who question the president's birth certificate. He adds, "Forget about Obama, maybe you'd like Neil Armstrong," the astronaut who's also included.

The book is designed as a puzzle. It opens with two pages of quotations from the subjects, but readers have to match the quotes with the descriptions and collages that follow.

"We hope it's something kids do with their parents, who can look up more information about the people we write about," she says.

After 17 years of marriage, it's their third picture book, after Please, Baby, Please, about an inexhaustible toddler, and Please, Puppy, Please, about an uncontrollable pet. She writes the first drafts, then they pass the manuscript back and forth.

They won't say much about their next projects. She's working on a novel. He won't talk about movie prospects: "Don't want to jinx it."

But both recall the first books that made an impression on them.

Her earliest book, in Montclair, N.J., was Ezra Jack Keats' A Snowy Day, "with a brown girl who looked like me."

As an eighth-grader in Brooklyn, he read The Autobiography of Malcolm X: As Told to Alex Haley. "I don't remember the teacher who assigned it, but I'm grateful. To me, it was the history of America."

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Italian Shoes Still Shine, But Beware the Reverse Midas Touch - Wall Street Journal

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How's this for a growth strategy?

Beef up border controls, slap extra costs on importers, spurn your regional trade partners and urge your kids to take up manual labor.

That would be the takeaway from the Italian Industry Minister's speech Tuesday at the presentation of the annual Shoe Report in Parliament by ANCI, the association of Italian shoe makers.

Now, everybody loves Italian shoes. And they are a boon to their homeland, where cobblers have an unrivaled ability to contribute to Italy's trade surplus in goods.

The country's shoe surplus typically runs over €3 billion a year, almost as much as Italians themselves spend on shoes each year and a cool €40,000 for each of the 80,000 or so people who work in the sector, according to figures from ANCI. Some 88% of ANCI members say they see light at the end of the post-recession tunnel.

But why bask in the glory of success in the tough era of globalization when you can tinker with formulas in a bid to protect one's golden hen?

Enter politicians.

Raffaello Vignali, a center-right member of Parliament and special advisor on small-business affairs to the Industry Ministry, suggested that tougher labeling laws – locally dubbed the "Made in Italy" requirement – will help the sector flourish.

For one thing, more stringent provenance rules impose a cost on companies that would import into Europe, he noted. "So, we're pushing prices on to the foreign companies," he added, approvingly.

Labeling legislation is pending at the European Union level, but Vignali emphasized that "Made in Europe" had, in his view, no meaning.

Vignali even said that, given the majority of import flows from Asia come through the Rotterdam and Hamburg ports, it was a mistake to dismantle customs inspections facilities at Italy's northern borders with its partners in the Schengen accord. Such free movement of goods apparently makes it easier for noxious footwear to enter the country and jeopardize the health of locals.

While Vignali heaped praise on his co-nationals for their sartorial tastes – and typical clothing budgets in Italy are well above the EU average – he may be concerned about the fact that, measured in pairs rather than prices, shoe imports outstrip exports by more than 50%. Apparently some people do wear low-cost slippers when not in the piazza.

There's more on his agenda.

Echoing recent claims made by a slew of cabinet ministers in media tycoon Silvio Berlusconi's government, Vignali also highlighted "the fundamental importance of manual labor," saying that working with your hands has been "demonized as a form of slavery" even though Michelangelo and Leonardo da Vinci did it.

So did the builders of the parliamentary building itself, he noted. "They used their hands, not their brains," he said, before hastily adding that perhaps they had used some of their brains too.

So, to sum up: As Bank of Italy Governor Mario Draghi warns of protectionist risks, the Italian government rues the demise of customs inspection points on its EU borders; as EU leaders try to hammer out some form of fiscal solidarity, Italy is rude about foreign shoemakers; as G20 leaders piously urge coordination, Italy is thinking of ways to create a competitive disadvantage; and rather than improve its universities as places to joust for space in the knowledge economy, the government suggests its people go out and compete with their bare hands.

At least they'll be well-heeled while they try.

Kids Shoes

Tuesday, February 22, 2011