(no subject)

[skywaterblue]

My dad had a drug test for a job at City Center; cross your fingers, it would help out ENORMOUSLY and make all the difference in the world, especially about our health insurance for my mom.

I lost my job. There were only eight days left, and I'm glad to see the backside of it because I knew I wasn't making my goal and so I spent the last week there constantly cringing in fear of the axe. Still don't get paid until the 24th - planning on using it for school. Can't believe this, but I owe CSN a 160 bucks, so I hope I made enough to cover this next semester.

Also, I'm running out of pens. I might put some of the earlier Boccaccio illustrations on Etsy, but I doubt anyone will buy them. :(

Because I lost the job, I have no idea when the internet will get turned back on at my house, and the neighbors seem to have gotten sick of us and locked the network down. I'm at the library right now.

I posted the first of two or three Amazon illustrations.

Here's some stuff I liked:

Now Let Us Praise Awesome Dinosaurs: this is like the story of dinosaurs from my dreams. It's about dinosaurs from Mars who move back to earth, an earth where dinosaurs do gutterpunk things like race cars and fight in youtube videos. Really, truly awesome dinosaurs.

This article on horse puppets in "Warhorse": anyone else think that puppetry for the stage is the place to be lately? This is really amazing.

I also saw Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince. Here are my thoughts:

Before I went, I read the Ebert review, which was fairly glowing for such a film. He's right on the money too - the highlight of this film for me, was the brief five minutes at the start of the film. It opens with Harry Potter, chosen one, in a tube cafe. He's reading the Wizard news, but the pictures don't move - indeed, the pictures hardly move at all in the background of this one. The waitress is a cute black girl, a little older than him, but clearly interested. She tells him she's getting off at eleven. Harry's totally going to go, except Dumbledore interupptus.

The problem with me, and Harry Potter is that: I WANT TO WATCH THAT MOVIE INSTEAD. The one where Harry Potter tells Dumbledore to fuck off, goes with the waitress and learns that her name is Amala, she's waitressing to pay her way through school, she wants to be a lawyer. They meet up and move into the flat together, with Amala's roommate who deals on the side until she gets busted and then he does a bad thing and magics her way out of it...

...except no, we have to go with Dumbledore to the Wizarding world, with its exceedingly dull middle-class British enclosed world and petty dictators. No one goes to a different school in Wizarding Britain, no one ever decides to fuck off and move to the States or South Africa or Australia (even though there surely are wizards there too, aren't there?)

Do American wizards cower in fear of Voldemort's name? Do the French or German wizards from the last film? If so, why? It doesn't seem like the ten upper-class British wizarding families who run with the Death Eaters have much scope?

And what of the muggles that do know about wizardry? Don't they ever get jealous and frustrated that people who can heal broken bones in hours with magic juice aren't say, sharing that shit? Because it certainly seems like no one goes hungry unless it's by choice in that world. The wizards of Hogwarts seem to spend their days devising new ways for small scale magics, but they don't operate cars. Do wizards care about global warming? Do they even know it's happening?

What I'm saying is that I never bought the Wizarding world in the books and I especially don't buy the threat of Voldemort. It's literally a gang of about a dozen people, dealing with the concerns about a small village. By including that scene at the top, it did nothing but remind me for the rest of the picture that we're expected to care about what happens with this ludicrous threat in this fake world.

Harry should leave them to rot and go into the wider world. Go West, young man.



Other than that, liked the movie at least as much as I like anything Harry Potter.

Comments

re: Harry Potter

[cleo]

Yes. This. Precisely this.

Re: Harry Potter

[skywaterblue]

Had to get it off my chest for the nth time. It's just that you're so painfully reminded that their world isn't real, when the real world scenes don't include the Dursleys but do include a bunch of depressed bankers inside the Gherkin.

http://skywaterblue.livejournal.com/931026.html#cutid1

[fashionbeast.livejournal.com]

There's a number of flaws in the Harry Potter story. They range in origin from Rowling not having a clue about the genre she was writing in, to essentially learning to write in front of an anonymous audience of millions.

Hogwarts itself is kind of an architectural/institutional Mary Sue, both exemplifying what she would want out of a school experience and exaggerating and demonizing everything she disliked about her own.

(It always bothered me that Slytherin House students were just inherently bratty and mean. There's never a Slytherin you meet who has anything resembling a positive characteristic and the students are all pretty much interchangeable in their nonsensical hatred of Harry Potter.)

(And there's still the matter of what exactly is the point of being a magic-user. Pretty much the two extremes seem to either be Murderous Asshole or Grad Student. There seems to be no practical function to this ability, and the whole isolation from Muggle society reeks of elitism.)

(Which leads into the core problem: They're children's books. It doesn't matter how many adults read them and praise them, they are children's books. Because as soon as you start treating them as Adult Literature, the indifference of the whole of the magical world to the senseless deaths of muggles becomes revolting.
If there's all this awesome healing magic and herbology that can grow back Harry's bones and undo whatever ridiculous magical Warner Bros.-style damage has befallen Ron, why don't the wizard accelerate cancer and AIDS research, if not just create a magical cure?
If there's all this awesome precognitive and magickinetic ability sitting around, then why didn't a wizard stop the 9/11 attacks?
If they can conceal whole magical neighborhoods in a sliver of space, then why not create free housing estates for the homeless?
If there's magic, why is there scarcity? Why are muggles dying and suffering when Dumbledore could waggle a finger, fix everything, and give everyone sweets?
These are not questions that need to be answered by Kid's Literature. I'm not saying it has to. But if we're going to call the Harry Potter books LITERATURE and treat it like a grown up, then it had better go get a job and sign up for selective service. [Metaphorically speaking.])

JK Rowling just can't get away from Hogwarts, not can she break free from the academic year, it seems. Even in the last book, where Harry more or less drops out, she still jams in a really boring camping trip to make sure the book still covers the span of time of a year at hogwarts.

I'm not even going to get into the logistical narrative problems of bringing the Dark Lord back in the MIDDLE of a series, because I will be here all night.

You should go write that story. Not fanfic, write that story with your own characters, so you can own it. I bet it'd sell.

Re: http://skywaterblue.livejournal.com/931026.html#cutid1

[skywaterblue.livejournal.com]

Well, I've known all this for a while. I mean, you wouldn't expect me to be reading a book and wondering why the wizards aren't off curing AIDS and ending global poverty?

The curious thing about Rowling's world is that I don't think we're ever even given a really good reason WHY the wizarding world doesn't associate itself with our own. Except that electromagnetic based power supplies don't seem to be able to work at Hogwarts. Which is odd because, frankly, cell phones are far more efficient than owls. (Although I suppose I'm neglecting the cost of some Nigerian guy mining for the silicon in the circuits.)

What fundamentally really bothers me about the world building is that you have a bunch of twelve-year olds at Hogwarts who grew up, not in Wizarding world, but in modern-day London. For fuck's sake, so did two of the protagonists!

So what I don't understand is this: obviously, the Wizarding world is archaic and backwards. We see this in Hermoine's futile campaign to help free LITERAL slaves, the house elves. Tom Riddle, the future Voldemort, is a half-blood himself who managed to recruit a bunch of rich pure-blood Wizards to do his class-based evil. So why is it that neither Harry or Hermione, having experience with the outside world, realize that the enclosed nature of their Wizarding world is MOSTLY TO BLAME FOR ALLOWING IT TO HAPPEN?

That book series should have ended with the magical world exposed and forced to integrate with the real world. But, sadly, Rowling becomes too wrapped up in her happy middle-class values to actually do it, and the books end with her pairing the characters off FOR LIFE and then putting their sprog on the train to Hogwarts as if that were a good thing.

I'd write the story that would fix it, but the problem is that Harry Potter has made Rowling a multi-millionaire, whereas if I were lucky I'd like, get paid. It seems cold fish to me.

[trollish.livejournal.com]

Just rename the characters and throw in a few reversals of situations. Maybe Perry(the protagonist) is actually the dark lord for trying to institute social change.

And more words like Sprog. That made me giggle.

[orbitaldiamonds.livejournal.com]

Um...where is your Etsy shop? I wouldn't mind taking a look to see what's there. :)