Valentine's Milk

My valentine's flowers. Mark also got me an amazing tweedy waistcoat from Cue that I can't wait to wear to work on Monday!

Battled our way through the rain on Saturday to see a band called The Devoted Few perform at the Apple Store on George Street. I hadn't heard them before, but I was quite impressed. They weren't playing as a full band, just doing an acoustic set of slower songs, but the songs sounded good and the singer has a really good voice.

Following this, we went to see Milk at the cinema. I'd been looking forward to seeing this for a few weeks, and it didn't disappoint. It's a biopic of Harvey Milk, the first openly gay man to be elected to public office in California, and on a wider scale, it's about the gay rights movement in during the 1960s and 70s.



In my opinion, Gus Van Sant makes better films when he doesn't go too 'art house'. His last couple of films, Last Days and Elephant were a little too self-indulgent in my opinion, although Elephant at least was actually a critical success. Milk is a return to a more conventional narrative. Although it has a similar feel in parts to those other films, it is held together better by the story being told. And Sean Penn is brilliant in it. And I must admit I do love Diego Luna a little bit...it's the accent? I might learn spanish...

It seems crazy that all the events depicted in the film happened so recently. It's distressing that as recently as the 1970s, people genuinely believed that allowing homosexuals civil rights was akin to granting civil rights to criminals. What is more distressing is the number of people still existing now, in 2009, who still believe this. The idea that a 'family unit' (I detest that phrase) made up of anything other than a man, woman and their own, biological children could lead to the downfall of civilized society is laughable. I have met gay couples with far more conventional home lives than Mark and I will probably ever manage and it is disturbing that just 30 years ago their lifestyle itself would have been illegal, and indeed still is in many parts of the world.

*inflammatory view on evolution alert !!!* One day we will all have mid-brown coloured skin, bisexual with the ability to reproduce a-sexually, physically a bit withered with poor eye-sight and hearing. [And if science keeps advancing, an average life-expectancy of about 768 years.] There will be no more need for war, and global warming will have made it too hot so we will all work from 'home' which will consist of specially built cool-boxes.

We are all the same and we are all doomed and everything is transient so in the meantime let's all love each other!