I’ve been up to my eyeballs in Ft. Greene, Brooklyn this week.  I am leading a tour of Ft. Greene for the first time tomorrow and I’ve been scrambling to get up to speed on 200 years of history and architecture in the past two weeks.  Sometimes I feel like I put more way more time into this job than its worth.  But I hate the feeling of giving a bad tour, so for the sake of my own sanity I always try to do the best I can each time out.  Its been a struggle to stay focused on this one.  Its a tour that I probably won’t be giving very often, and I’m having to psyche myself up for giving a damn about all the minutiae.

Studying for this tour was a good excuse to revisit Spike Lee’s She’s Gotta Have it, and I finally watched it again last night.  Much of the film was shot in and around Ft. Greene.  The flag for Spike’s 40 Acres and a Mule production company still hangs on the building where it was once headquartered.  It is a scheduled stop in our tour script, so I’ll say a word or two about it.  Here’s one of the most distinctive scenes of the film, shot next to the Prison Ship Martyr’s monument in Ft. Greene Park.

Next week its back to more academic fiction and the university.  I’ve got a couple of items in the queue I’ve been wanting to write about (including the dreadful news of Wal-Mart getting into the for-profit college industry).  Its been interesting learning about Ft. Greene, and its about time I finally led a Brooklyn tour, being a Brooklyn resident and all.  But I’ll be glad to be done with this so I can get it out of my head and get on to other things.