Update, August 26: Full interview is here.

Original post: It’s been a fascinating couple of days culminating in the premiere of Spike Lee’s new documentary last night, If God Is Willing And Da Creek Don’t Rise. Highlight for me personally was to interview Lee at his hotel, you can read snippets of the interview at Blogofneworleans.com, and there’s a great photograph on there by Cheryl Gerber, which Lee was generous enough to walk out onto Chartres Street for. Here’s just one question:

Someone you’ve been critical of in the past was Larry Bird. Now Mitch is the first white mayor of New Orleans since his father, Moon Landrieu left office in 1978. Is Mitch Landrieu the Larry Bird of New Orleans mayors?

He can’t shoot like Larry. Or I’ve never seen him. I don’t know if he even plays basketball. But look, I like Mitch, I like his sister, but as he says in the film, he’s got a hard job. Right now New Orleans is on pace to have 203 murders this year, which by use of the population makes it the murder capital of the United States of America. Think about this: Greater New Orleans has 700,000, New York has eight million people. Eight million. They’re going to have more murders than New York City here, and New York City has eight million people! That’s, you’re talking about like, Iraq odds, I mean, crazy.

The full interview will be in this week’s Gambit, and I’ll update this post with the link when it goes live. I was also Tweeting about last night’s premier like crazy, too — Lee was wearing a seersucker suit with his Nikes, and I got to stand within three feet of the Wendell Pierce and Phyllis Montana-Leblanc, who are probably among my two favorite actors of all time at this point:

The mayor was there, basketball player Chris Paul was there, everybody:

Good times.