Harry Potter, Art Sale, and Kittehs!

I'm making greeting cards from photos of binks' DVD art and our trip to Sicily (including the steps, left, from Monreale--where my grandmother was born)
for bink's ART SALE

This Friday and Saturday, after Thanksgiving
November 26 & 27
10 a.m. to 5 p.m.
On the corner of 28th & Hennepin,
(where the DVD to ART show was)

If you're in town, come by and say hi--I'll be there.
____________

I went to see the new Harry Potter--HP & the Deathly Hallows, Part 1-- this weekend.
It was like one long fanvid, one that drains the color (from the picture and, by extension, life), dunks you in cold wet pain, and leaves you to twist in the wind of overwrought goth music (unnecessary adjective, I know), such as Evanescence.

If you enjoy this sort of thing, it's great!
Really--it's very well done.



It falls in the PWP (plot? What plot?) category, like porn. The porn isn't sex, it's emotional and physical torment.
It's more like illustrations to a story than a story itself:
you already have to know the story and care about the characters to get it. Which I imagine most people who go see it do.

Me? Well, I loved Snape's entrance, in full stride, cape billowing.

And there's a truly lovely moment when the frightened and abandoned Harry and Hermione dance to the radio together.
Did the director mean it as a nod to Harrison Ford and Kelly McGillis stealing a dance to the car radio in Witness (dir. Peter Weir)? It's that good!


But Snape's only in the first ten minutes of the movie--mostly it's two plus hours of Harry, Hermione, and Ron (Rupert Grint stole the show) undergoing gloom, fear, loss, near despair ...and torture.

It perfectly illustrates the culture's attitude toward sex and violence that under J. K. Rowling's orders, fan fiction sites are monitored to make sure they don't post pornographic stories because, Rowling says, these books are for children. But graphic torture of beloved characters onscreen is perfectly OK.

The movie is like a close brush with a soul-sucking dementor.
Even though I wasn't particularly moved by the end--it went on so long, it lost its power for me--still, it was depressing on a biological level. After I left the theater, as I walked home in the sleety rain across the Mississippi River, it crossed my mind to throw myself off the bridge. It just seemed like an appropriate response.

But things like this keep me going: INVISIBLE KITTEH!

Via Elle Est Belle

And now I must work. On top of my usual A-list procrastination skills I'd added dawdling, thinking the publisher had given me an extension, but it turns out the book designers need at least a rough ms to work from next month.
Eek! What I have now is a big messy pile of interesting stuff---I feel like the princess in the tower who must spin straw into gold...