Yippee! Pottermania.

Today is Harry Potter day.



Myself, my gimp of a brother, and his nine-year-old kid are all going to see the Goblet of Fire at 6:35. I'm presently relaxing, smoking a little ganja, and having my first mellow time of it in a couple weeks. My brother had a really good day yesterday and it leads me to believe he'll heal faster than we'd feared. Yay!

I love Potter. But I didn't join the party late. I was a bookseller from about '97-00, and when Harry Potter & the Philosopher's Stone* was about to be released in North America, I got to read an "advance reader's" edition (given to booksellers so they can hype a book when it releases) before it even hit the shelves in this continent. I fucking loved it from the get-go. I sold hundreds of copies over the year or so and lamented the fact that my nephew was too young to read them. "What a thing," I thought, to be a kid at that right age when a phenomen of Harry's stature began... It would be like being 10 when the original Star Wars came out. I was four, but still remember that movie hitting the screens. Holy phenomenom.

It took me so long to convince my friends to read Harry. Then the New York Best-Seller's list happened, where it was number one for a year or something, convincing the NY Times they had to create a new Children's Top Ten list so the "adult" books could begin sliding in and out of first again -- a major tool used in promoting books to the masses.

Now that it had become so "commercial," some friends started calling Potter a mainstream sell-out. A lot of folks still feel that way, but I think it's ridiculous. The HP books are some of the most inventive, creative, and insightful books ever written for children. They are brilliantly conceived. The imagery is rich, entertaining, and wildly inventive.

And honestly, the universality of Harry and his adversities, the pain he experiences, the loneliness and loss, they're all topics that kids identify with. I think Rowling did a great job of making books that, while on amazingly fantastical topics, essentially appeal to almost everyone's inner thoughts. No, they're not profound, but they're damned good.

This movie will be great, and it's the first time I'll be seeing one of them in the theatre with my nephew. It'll be oodles of fun.

All the haters out there, man, really have to lighten up. It's a kids' book. It's fun. It's original. And the books, as always, kick ass on the movies, but they're just getting better and better as the series progresses. Book four is when it all starts coming down. But book six... whew, that's the literary equivalent of the Empire Strikes Back -- it just anchors the franchise. Amazing. I'm glad my nephew will be old enough to read all the books before the rest of the flicks come out. Kid's gonna get obsessed.

Not that it would be a bad thing.

*for those who never did hear about it, the stupid publishing giants thought the American public wasn't smart enough to know what a "Philosopher's Stone" was and they didn't want the American masses to be intimidated by the suggestion that it might be about "philosophy" or something. A number of the British words were Americanized in the publication of the first book. They stopped that stupidity with the second book when they realized how many Americans were pissed off at them dumbing the books down. Kudos to the American reading public for that. Fucking corporations, man...