Harry Potter 7 short review

Finished a couple of hours ago.

Summary judgement: She knocked that one out of the park. It pays off like the finale of the biggest fireworks show on earth and leaves the reader completely satisfied.

Harry Potter 7 Speculations & Spoilers

A large number of possible leaks and spoilers have gone up and down the Intertubes today in preparation for Saturday's release of Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows. Many of the big ones seem implausible given the narrative direction and texture of the first six books. If J.K. Rowling follows some sort of classic plot structure, there are three reasonale outcomes for the books, all of which follow from Harry defeating Voldemort:

1. Harry lives happily ever after. He goes on to become Hogwart's Headmaster, Minister of Magic or Quidditch world champion. Most likely, he marries Ginny Weasley, they have children who go off to Hogwarts and the cycle starts again.
2. Harry dies in the process of killing Voldemort or at the hands of someone else. I think this is unlikely to happen, especially due to JKR's large number of hints that this might happen; if she really wants closure, the worst way to go about it in this postmodern age is to kill the character off. (see also: Superman, Buffy Summers, Sherlock Holmes)
3. Harry lives, but somehow loses all of his powers, either because they're linked to Voldemort's, because he somehow "burns them out" or because he gets put into a situation where exposure to magic is deadly to him in the future. This is a fine classical ending, parallel to Prospero breaking his staff at the end of the Tempest.

Other predictions:

• Snape turns out to be good after all (come on, you have to have seen this one coming)
• Draco does something to redeem himself and/or gets saved by Harry
• It turns out that Dumbledore had been using Nicholas Flamel's Sorcerer's Stone to extend his own life until the end of Book 1, when his supply started to run short and he had just enough to "put his affairs in order"
• Who lives? The main three characters, McGonagle, the Weasleys, Luna, Neville.
• Who dies? Voldemort, one more baddie (Peter Pettigrew, maybe?), plus one of the remaining good guys (could be Harry, probably one of the Phoenix people, maybe Snape)

Strategy roundup

Possibly the best article on strategy in the global counterinsurgency effort to date. Some very sharp people are running around in the basement of the Pentagon. Sadly, they are way down in the basement until at least 2008.

The Heart is Deceitful

From the Washington Post:

If they ever make a movie of the life of Laura Albert -- and for reasons
we'll get to, that now seems unlikely -- the scene Wednesday in a Manhattan
courtroom would make a killer denouement...

For fans and onlookers, the unmasking of Albert, which happened in 2005,
was like finding out that John Updike is a robot. But it was a more serious
matter for the owner of Antidote Films, an indie-movie company in Manhattan,
which had acquired the film rights to "Sarah" back when everyone assumed that
LeRoy was flesh and blood.

A woman runs past me on Franklin St, wearing a black leather purse as headgear.
Is this the new fashion?

Diary of Indignities

Is what my memoirs should have been called but this man beat me to it.

Gutsy

Great song dedicated to YouTube and Shortbus guy Jay Brannan by the talented Matt Woolfrey.

The Origins of Minimalism

Short profile of Richard Serra, who had a "remarkably supportive mother".

In a chewy interview in the show’s catalogue with MOMA’s Kynaston McShine(who co-curated the show with Lynne Cooke, of the Dia Art Foundation), Serra tells of his mother’s first visit, in the sixties, to his loft on Greenwich Street. “It was barren, there was nothing in it but a mattress on the floor, I was living on maybe $75 a month. . . . She looked out the window at the Hudson River and said, Richard, this is marvelous.”

Update: More Serra
Update: Even more Serra
Update: Still more Serra

The Challengers

Our office did the Chicago Corporate Challenge...well, half of us did.

I think these pictures make us look like one of those third-rate superhero teams.

Nice flexing, Min.

Nice banana, Ethan.

The Profit Calculator

New York Magazine does a really good article on how various businesses from a yoga studio to Goldman Sachs make their money.

It shows further anecdotal support for the rule of thumb that an average, well run business is one that generates about 10% profit. High profit businesses are of two types: a) high risk, "winner take most" businesses where superstars rule (e.g., Goldman Sachs trading business, Nobu), or b) ones in early stage markets where risk and return are not yet well priced.

Hunt Slonem

Gawker reviews a NYT profile of Hunt Slonem:

At first blush, the article reads like an exquisite corpse.

"People come and go in the homes of the painter Hunt Slonem, both the quick and the dead... Lunch is Louisiana takeout: boudin sausage, pecan pie, a local desert called ooey gooey. The talk is of a portrait, just hung, of Catherine of Aragon... Then
Mr. Slonem's caretaker calls with word of an interloper: a voodoo head, or
something that looks like one, has been found in the third-floor ceiling earlier
in the week and tucked away in a kitchen cabinet. Mr. Slonem goes at once to
retrieve the head, a mud-colored walnut-size carving of a skull, with a tiny
straw hat and pointy appendages. Then he retreats to make a call."

As the intrepid reader continues, he realizes Slonem is completely insane—equal parts James Merrill, Liberace, Valentino, Lou Reed, Bert Sugar, Keith Haring, and Scarlett O'Hara. Also he owns five houses. Not only the Louisiana plantation that is the focus of the article but another one a hundred miles away. He also owns an 89-room New York studio, and it really is awesome.

Love the parrot.

My friend Lance is always telling me that if he decides to stay in Toledo, rather than running off to Dubai, he's going to become both a)filthy rich and b)completely bizzare. He's got some work cut out for him if he's going to move from the gifted amateur eccentric category into the professional leagues.

Yonge and Bloor

William Gibson, poet of cities (Chiba, New York Sprawl, Moscow, Naughties London) dreams of phantom Toronto:

It consisted largely, I found, of the most amiable sort of repurposed
semi-ruins. A vast Victorian colonial seashell of blackened brick, shot through
with big, grim grey bones of earnest civic Modernism. I marvelled that such an
odd place could have existed without my having heard of it. North of New
England, all this baroque, mad brick; sandstone gargoyles, red trams, the
Queen's portrait everywhere.

New-found friends, often as not, rented high-ceilinged rooms in crumbling townhouses, their slate rooflines fenced with rusting traceries of cast-iron, curlicues I'd only seen in Charles Addams cartoons. Everything painted a uniform dead green, like the face of a corpse in those same Addams cartoons. If you took a penknife and scraped a little of the green away, you discovered marvels: brown marble shot with paler veins, ornate bronze fixtures, carved oak. In the more stygian reaches of cellar, in such places, there were still to be found fully connected gaslight fixtures, forgotten, protruding from dank plaster like fairy pipes, each with a little flowered twist-key to stop the gas.

This was mid-town, walking distance in various directions from Yonge and Bloor.

In my twenties, it always seemed that my friends lived in exactly these sorts of townhouses around Columbus (German Village, Victorian Village, Grandview). Grand, decaying, repurposed, sublet. Ornamental stairways made for midnight conversations, grubby marble bathrooms with eccentric plumbing. They're the Great Lakes version of loft apartments.

I seem to remember going to a lot of parties at these houses, talking to strangers (friends of friends of friends). Girls in black kilts & cat eye glasses and dudes in rock band t-shirts & week-old shaves. Home-dyed hair and beastie boots. The smell of old vinyl and cardboard from childhood record collections. Cigarettes and multicolored candles in big ceramic ashtrays.

How many of those parties did I actually go to? How many more do I just remember because someone told me about them? That was my Bohemia.

Great use of flash on this site: http://www.commonrotation.com/index.htm

The Super Troopers atop Pride Mountain

...with a BIG bottle. Sadly empty before I ever laid hands on it.

The Super Troopers

(SOO-pah TROO-pahs)
Intrepid aerialists in midflight

Hansel and Gretel

...are aliive and well/And living in Berlin.

We're back on the air, people, without converting to the New Blogger (TM).

Photos from the Napa trip and the visit to the Surgical Museum coming shortly.

Perge Mondo, Ms. Pleasant, and Ms. Disarray

Drama in the Whole Foods checkout line.

Mach 20

If a sperm were the size of a whale, however...

Why, Thank You!

It is cold enough for me.

Walking to the bus stop is like entering a Jack London story. I hope the tinder works, or I'll have to gut a dog to warm my hands inside.

Also, my sewage line froze due to global climate change, so I am taking showers in an apartment down the hall. The water lines for the hot tub situated over my apartment froze as well, so I have a plastic tent suspended from my ceiling. It's all very chic in a postapocalyptic sort of way.

New Year Me