Some things
Jan. 16th, 2009 03:41 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
fingertroubleI glad I missed...like watching some of the spoofs of the terrible video of Separate Ways by Journey...thankfully they had little success here.
So had Devo, some you win, some you lose.
Reminds me of a band that was around a little later than did have some success here, Heart.
Usually even the shittest of bands have 1 song you kind of don't mind, or strangely like - ABBA has Dancing Queen*, Lily Allen has her new song, Level 42 has Language Of Love, Simply Red has Holding Back the Years (yup Bunny too tight to mention too) UB40 has...err...loads of limp covers of much better songs and One in Ten...
But there is NO excuse for Heart, nor Journey it seems. Absolutely no redeemable features - apart from laughing at this video:
Original doesn't allow for embedding, and this is funniest anyway. if the least accurate spoof - there are literally 1000s of Separate Ways spoofs on youTube - like this good yet anally similar one.
Oh and MILK was excellent - those who haven't seen it yet, do. Be prepared to cry though, it's very sad in the end (well it would be) yet hopeful...and doesn't play the usual 'evil' card even for Dan White - I got the most angry at the police footage - there is quite a lot of original footage interweaved well, and it's shocking...and yes the whole Prop 6 thing resonates with Prop 8, and Anita Bryant is still going in so many other people...but the feeling and the music was great, and very moving...even though the audience didn't really get the patriotic America the free, proud and great bits - well they wouldn't here unless they arejavascript:void(0); Rich text ex-pats, the only bit that lost me because it was calling on specific heartstrings we don't have, everything else worked - it got a spontaneous applause at the end.
John is in Brussels annoying the EEC so he couldn't come with me, which is a real shame because I wondered how much that counter-culture and activist culture mapped onto what it was like here? Certainly we had same things with gay teachers, famous 'phobic killings, suicides (people like Turing for example, as well as later) - even the Jeremy Thorpe attemped murder case which was closeted....I expect every country was similar and had their own battles - they don't all have Hollywood behind them, my only small criticism of the film is it does like other Gus videos try to make Harvey Milk to be an everyman national or global gay warrior, when I suspect he was a fairly local (ie US, or SF) phenomenon until the Randy Shilts book - even then I had never heard of him until I visited the Castro.
Important point at the end from Harvey/Sean about continuing - as I said before Harvey was special because he was first (in the US) but they made the point about carrying on the fight, which many did, and many were doing anyway who had never heard of him.
What bugs me when people ask 'Why hasn't there been another Harvey Milk' (or Martin Luther King, or Gandhi or any leader like that) is that there HAVE been many people like that - not one person who can be shot, many people at a smaller scale (and not being 'first' they tend not to get the press and get down to the work at hand). It seems history does get fatally attracted to the charismatic one, the leader type, but actually the gay rights fight continued and rightly didn't die with Harvey Milk...and it wouldn't as it was happening all over the world, and still continues. It's not just one person, and whenever it is, they tend to come to a sticky end as it's easy to snuff them out.
Harder to snuff out 1,000 activists but it makes for duller films. And just because they don't appear in the press or get films made about them doesn't mean they don't exist. Although people who mass unify differing sets of people are rarer, so if they get well known or something happens to them they are seen as special, but I'm sure there are many Harvey Milks out there, doing their thing.
I bagsy Sean for the Oscar.
* Interestingly 'The Queen and I' by the JAMMS came on coming back from the cinema - wearing my Auntie Viv punk shirt, coming back from a movie about SF, seemed the most ideal song ever (it mixes ABBA's Dancing Queen with Sex Pistols God Save the Queen and got their album pulled by ABBA and they had to burn it, well actually throw most of the copies over the side of the ferry)
So had Devo, some you win, some you lose.
Reminds me of a band that was around a little later than did have some success here, Heart.
Usually even the shittest of bands have 1 song you kind of don't mind, or strangely like - ABBA has Dancing Queen*, Lily Allen has her new song, Level 42 has Language Of Love, Simply Red has Holding Back the Years (yup Bunny too tight to mention too) UB40 has...err...loads of limp covers of much better songs and One in Ten...
But there is NO excuse for Heart, nor Journey it seems. Absolutely no redeemable features - apart from laughing at this video:
Original doesn't allow for embedding, and this is funniest anyway. if the least accurate spoof - there are literally 1000s of Separate Ways spoofs on youTube - like this good yet anally similar one.
Oh and MILK was excellent - those who haven't seen it yet, do. Be prepared to cry though, it's very sad in the end (well it would be) yet hopeful...and doesn't play the usual 'evil' card even for Dan White - I got the most angry at the police footage - there is quite a lot of original footage interweaved well, and it's shocking...and yes the whole Prop 6 thing resonates with Prop 8, and Anita Bryant is still going in so many other people...but the feeling and the music was great, and very moving...even though the audience didn't really get the patriotic America the free, proud and great bits - well they wouldn't here unless they arejavascript:void(0); Rich text ex-pats, the only bit that lost me because it was calling on specific heartstrings we don't have, everything else worked - it got a spontaneous applause at the end.
John is in Brussels annoying the EEC so he couldn't come with me, which is a real shame because I wondered how much that counter-culture and activist culture mapped onto what it was like here? Certainly we had same things with gay teachers, famous 'phobic killings, suicides (people like Turing for example, as well as later) - even the Jeremy Thorpe attemped murder case which was closeted....I expect every country was similar and had their own battles - they don't all have Hollywood behind them, my only small criticism of the film is it does like other Gus videos try to make Harvey Milk to be an everyman national or global gay warrior, when I suspect he was a fairly local (ie US, or SF) phenomenon until the Randy Shilts book - even then I had never heard of him until I visited the Castro.
Important point at the end from Harvey/Sean about continuing - as I said before Harvey was special because he was first (in the US) but they made the point about carrying on the fight, which many did, and many were doing anyway who had never heard of him.
What bugs me when people ask 'Why hasn't there been another Harvey Milk' (or Martin Luther King, or Gandhi or any leader like that) is that there HAVE been many people like that - not one person who can be shot, many people at a smaller scale (and not being 'first' they tend not to get the press and get down to the work at hand). It seems history does get fatally attracted to the charismatic one, the leader type, but actually the gay rights fight continued and rightly didn't die with Harvey Milk...and it wouldn't as it was happening all over the world, and still continues. It's not just one person, and whenever it is, they tend to come to a sticky end as it's easy to snuff them out.
Harder to snuff out 1,000 activists but it makes for duller films. And just because they don't appear in the press or get films made about them doesn't mean they don't exist. Although people who mass unify differing sets of people are rarer, so if they get well known or something happens to them they are seen as special, but I'm sure there are many Harvey Milks out there, doing their thing.
I bagsy Sean for the Oscar.
* Interestingly 'The Queen and I' by the JAMMS came on coming back from the cinema - wearing my Auntie Viv punk shirt, coming back from a movie about SF, seemed the most ideal song ever (it mixes ABBA's Dancing Queen with Sex Pistols God Save the Queen and got their album pulled by ABBA and they had to burn it, well actually throw most of the copies over the side of the ferry)