Seeing “Milk” where it all happened…

Smokler on December 21, 2008

Milk

So last night, my girlfriend and her best friend (in town from Eugene, OR) went to see Milk at the Castro Theatre, on the same street where Harvey Milk had his camera store,  in the same neighborhood where Milk built his base, became the first openly gay city official in American history and led the modern gay rights movement from Stonewall into political maturity.

We know how this story ends. On November 27, 1978, fellow San Francisco supervisor Dan White shot and killed Milk and Mayor George Moscone.
More than 30,000 San Franciscans turned out for the memorial service.
An an anniversary march seven years later, Milk’s friend Cleve Jones conceived of the AIDS Quilt, the largest community art project in human history.

Its an amazing life story, the basis for an equally amazing movie, funny, warm, beautifully acted and firm without being hysterical. I’m sure there’s already Oscar talk for Sean Penn in the title role and should be also for Josh Brolin, who plays Milk’s killer. The film’s 93% positive rating on Rotten Tomatoes is well deserved.

But something about seeing it where it all happened rung deep within me. We so rarely get that chance these days, often seeing movies on whatever technology is most convenient when the desire strikes. Seeing it in Milk’s old neighborhood, beneath the long shadow of Proposition 8 felts like someone grabbing my rib cage and shaking.

After the movie, my girlfriend and I stood across the street from the Castro, waiting in line for the ATM. I thought about what had happened in our city 30 years ago and the fight that continues today. I thought about what great things Mr. Milk accomplished in middle age not propelled by the indignance of youth and the terrible senselessness of his death.

And I cried. And cried and cried. I mostly felt dumb, weeping over an event that happened when I was in kindergarden, 20 years before I moved here. I felt as though I was co-oping the suffering of a community I didn’t belong to as my own.

But I cried anyway, hugging Cariwyl and just repeating "It didn’t have to happen this way."

I will never fully understand what it meant to be gay in 1978. But I do understand what kindness snuffed out by rage and misunderstanding feels like, like kicking over a flower pot or yelling at a kid on their birthday or just being cruel and violent when its so simple to be otherwise. That’s a loss we all feel as human beings, when we fail to rise to the better angels of our nature and instead give up and act like savages. 

It did happen this way. Some say Harvey Milk dying pushed gay rights into the national spotlight. That’s a fair interpretation. But I wish he were still here, reminding each of us, gay and friend of alike, to fight, not with our fists but with hope. To fight for the chance to be better than we think we can.

One Sentence Movie Reviews: “FLOW: For Love of Water”

Smokler on December 15, 2008

Flow

FLOW: For Love of Water (2008): "There has never been a more appropriate movie to drink a glass of water while watching and thank G-d you still could."

Notes: A documentary on fragile state of the world’s fresh water supply and how it will be as precious, politicized and killed for as oil is now. Some of this I knew already from reading the book Blue Gold which focuses on attempts by large water bottlers like Nestle and Vivendi to buy up water rights in communities around the world and charge the citizenry on a "per serving" basis to get access to their own rivers and lakes. But the footage of large dam construction, often funded by the World Bank, knocked me on my ear. Seems that the World Bank is a single largest funder of giant dam-building projects, many of which render hundreds and thousands of people homeless and put whole cities and towns underwater, in the name of getting water to those who need it.

Seems a compelling reason if that’s the only way to distribute water. But it isn’t. Organizations like Charity:Water can build a well to serve an entire community for around $4000. Innovative technology like playpumps create both playground equipment and aqua-self sustainability for nearly 2 million children.

My understanding is that getting poor communities the water they need via giant damn projects and privatization is like sending an army to give a kid a spanking. If wells are cheap, if citizens can manage them themselves, the problem seems to be political will and capital for thousands of small solutions not multi-large ones that steamroll the populations they claim to help.

Flow is produced by the Beastie Boys company Oscilloscope Laboratories which has its hands in a number of strong documentaries this year. I’ve already got Frontrunners  and Dear Zachary (both of which played at the San Francisco Film Festival in April) in my Netflix queue for when they hit the streets.

See this movie. It’s more than worth it.

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