Snape is Hans Gruber. Nerd alert part two as yes, I went to get that certain book at midnight. I'm shooting something next week so again I probably won't be posting much this week but wanted to share my thoughts on this.

Friday night I decided to take my friend out to get the 7th Harry Potter book at midnight in my neighborhood. She's been with the books from the start, after all, and although I haven't I can understand at least her passion for the thing, given my own devotion to so many of my own little strange ephemeral loves, it makes sense to me. And she's also converted me to the series in a way I hadn't been before.



The other funny thing is what an age of immediacy we live in. I knew that if I didn't catch up and read this book now that it'd be completely ruined for me within a matter of days. And that's a bitch of a thing. There are a lot of videos on youtube of male teenagers driving aimlessly ruining the book for people in line all over the country. In our own line a couple of Gamestop employees had literally taped to the inside of their door the same - defining for me the shitty service and attitude of videogame store clerks. Given the number of nine year olds in our line of 400 plus people who had to pass by that I just sort of shudder with anger. I'm sure that some Potter fans are annoying. But that's so pathetic and shows such a lack of civility and it was done by people who were the same age as their ancestors who got carted off to wars and so forth. It's this very fear that makes our climate so hard to guage: everyone knows they must read the book quickly, some out of sheer excitment to know, others to protect ourselves from our memetic culture and how it's bred a certain dickheadedness. What a climate to receive a book in.

Here in Park Slope, Brooklyn there's a Barnes and Noble but I insisted on joining the line at Community Bookstore. There's a certain bit of unusual logic that dictates some of what I love most about New York... For years my father (who grew up in the isolated rural community of Cody, Wyoming) has lamented the loss of small town American life and the suburb I mostly grew up in Washington state has seen it's own character vanish into a thicket of chain stores. I never realized that moving to New York I'd find exactly what he means... This despite the best efforts of chain retailers to take over the area. Most everywhere in my neighborhood I go to family run businesses. And I insist on parting with book money as much as I can at Community Bookstore. It just has a life and a history and employees I know and like, the kind of odd ducks I worked in a library with as a teen, and a dog that likes to spread it's front paws open to be petted on the belly.

So they decided to have a Harry Potter party and they went all out handing out fireworks and so on and here's some photos, and it was a really lovely night and yes, seeing that many people line up to buy a book is a wonderful thing.











Here's some wonderful pictures of the Manhattan party at themodernage blog. Be warned, someone has posted massive spoilers for the book in the comments section there. My favorite has to be this Alan Rickman shoutout:



I'll write later this week my thoughts on the book, which is rather wonderfully brilliant and beyond a pop culture pheneomon something rather classic. It makes me miss living in England. It makes me think about the whole span of life and what we leave behind as we grow up. It makes me realize how important friends are. It makes me understand that the lives of those who came before us, despite all the mistakes made and flaws inherent in people, offer us a chance to realize that we are defined by choice. All that from a kid's book, but a really great one.