Coyote Blog

From the Jerusalem Post via Radley Balko

When the severed head of a wolf wrapped in women's lingerie turned up near the city of Tabouk in northern Saudi Arabia this week, authorities knew they had another case of witchcraft on their hands, a capital offence in the ultra-conservative desert kingdom.

Agents of the country’s Anti-Witchcraft Unit were quickly dispatched and set about trying to break the spell that used the beast’s head.

Saudi Arabia takes witchcraft so seriously that it has banned the Harry Potter series by British writer J.K. Rowling, rife with tales of sorcery and magic. It set up the Anti-Witchcraft Unit in May 2009 and placed it under the Committee for the Promotion of Virtue and the Prevention of Vice (CPV), Saudi Arabia's religious police.

"In accordance with our Islamic tradition we believe that magic really exists," Abdullah Jaber, a political cartoonist at the Saudi daily Al-Jazirah, told The Media Line. "The fact that an official body, subordinate to the Saudi Ministry of Interior, has a unit to combat sorcery proves that the government recognizes this, like Muslims worldwide."

Actually, we have something similar here, we just call it "climate change" instead of witchcraft.

OK, I saw the Spiderman musical (still in pre-production) on Broadway last week.  I thought I would share some thoughts about the show.  Note that I like musicals and have been to a bunch but I am by no means an expert.

The show began with an unforced error, which seemed really dumb given the bad press the show has been getting (mixed reviews combined with some very high-profile accidents).  I showed up 20 minutes early and found a line for the Will Call (not ticket purchase, but simply ticket pickup) that went down the entire long block.  It took me 40 minutes just to pick up my tickets.  The show started late, but I still missed the first number, and a LOT of people were behind me.

The show was sold out on a Wednesday night.  I don't know if this is a measure of its popularity or the new Nascar, waiting for an accident aspect of the show.  A friend of mine said he went the week before and the show had three long halts  (there is a lot of technical stuff going on in the flying -- the stops feel exactly like when the ride stops at DisneyWorld).  We had only two very short ones.

The staging is amazing.  Actors fly all around the stage, and more impressively, soar and fight above the audience, frequently landing on the railings of the balconies.  The stage itself is well done - they do a nice job creating the illusion of great height when scenes take place on the top of buildings.

The dancing is fun, in a high energy way.  Often it is more tumbling and gymnastics than dancing, but entertaining.

The plot in the first half is solid - the classic spiderman origin myth -- if you have seen the recent movie you have got it.

For me, the wheels really came off the bus in the second half.  The villain is Arachne -- not some super villain with an appropriate name, but the actual Arachne from greek mythology that Athena turned into a spider.  Arachne is a combination scorned lover, unkillable super-villain, and source of redemption and has these sort of spider minions around her.  This whole plot angle did not work at all for me.

Why the problem?  Well, they killed off the first villain in the first act.  So, without even being a sequel, they created the sequel problem in the second Act -- how do you top the first villain?  And like many sequels, it became over the top and incoherent.

OK, and now for the final problem:  The music was entirely forgettable.  There were no musical themes that helped unify the show (as someone like Andrew Lloyd Weber does).  There were just a bunch of unrelated songs  (I suppose there could have been a reprise, but the music being reprised was so forgettable that I forgot it).  The music established the right moods -- dark or heroic or romantic, but it was just wallpaper behind the actors.

I would not have had trouble with it if Bono and Edge had, being new to musical theater, tried to do something really different and failed.  But they simply cranked out a bunch of utterly bland show tunes.  A couple were OK at the time, but I sure wasn't whistling them on the way out.  In contrast, I saw Chorus Line 30 years ago and still can sing bits of several songs.

Weird Fact: Dr. Normon Osborn (who in the show is not only Green Goblin but also the creator of the mutant spider that gives Spiderman his powers) looks exactly like Madam Hooch in the Harry Potter movies.  As Green Goblin he looks more like a green Gene Simmons.

Apparently, the 7th Harry Potter book will be split into two movies.  Great.  The second part will be killer, but the first will doom us to watching Harry run all over England camping. 

My whole family was nice enough to choose this weekend to be away, so I could read Harry Potter 7 in peace (yes, I know, I am getting old when I use a bachelor weekend to read a book).  I thought is was a well-done conclusion to the series.

On Friday at midnight, I went out to get a copy for my son, who was driving with friends to San Diego early Saturday morning.  The Borders near us was a zoo -- what looked like a 2-hour line, and I didn't even have the right armband to get into it.  Fortunately, the 24-hour grocery store 2 blocks away had plenty and no line, so I did not have to wait.  (My bet is that if I had gone back to the Borders and shouted that there were books with no waiting a few blocks away, only a few would leave -- it was an event, not just a line.  Somehow, I think the perceived value of the book went up having waited in line for it.)

Anyway, I just wanted to make a couple of observations about the Harry Potter books:

• You can complain all you want about JK Rowling's writing style or selective character development or whatever, but anyone who can have teenagers waiting in line at midnight to buy the last 800 pages of a nearly 5000 page narrative -- waiting in line to read! -- should have a spot reserved for her in the Poet's corner at Westminster Abbey.
• Name any other book that had such an even mix of adults and kids reading it over the weekend
• I am not big on the need for shared national experiences like certain conservatives or liberals are, but the Harry Potter books certainly constituted such a shared experience. 

OK, well, maybe not the apocalypse but I do have some trepidations about being a year away from having teenagers in the house.  The most recent reminder that those difficult years are coming soon was picking my almost 12-year-old son and his friends up from the most recent Harry Potter movie.  Rather than discussing plot points or cool special effects, they were arguing about which girl in the movie was the cutest.  Fleur had several fans though my son seems fixated on Hermione / Emma Watson.  Cho Chang, Harry's first romance in the books, did not seem to have any defenders in the car. 

I just finished Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince.

The first question my wife asked me was "how did it rank with the other books?"  This is very hard to answer, because it is very different from the first five.  Each of the first five was fairly self-contained.  There was a dominant story cycle that came to closure at the end.  Yes, there was still Valdemort running around out there, but that was kind of just like knowing that Blofeld and SPECTRE would still be a villain in the next Bond movie.  The best comparison I can make, for people of my generation who saw the original Star Wars movies as they came out, was that the first 5 Potter books were like the New Hope, while this book is Empire Strikes Back.  The only problem was that Empire Strikes Back stands out as perhaps the best Star Wars movie, and this definitely is not the best Harry Potter book.  In a real sense, book six is really part 1 of a two-part finale that presumably ends with book 7.  I was left with the same thought as at the end of the LOTR Two Towers movie:  OK, so when does the last one come out?

I found a couple of things about the book unsatisfying.  The mystery of who is the half-blood prince does not really drive the story as well as other mysteries, like say how the Sirius Black mystery or Chamber of Secrets mystery or the Tri-Wizard tournament drove other books.  This book is driven more by revelations about Harry and Valdemort, and by the time these play out the identity of the Half Blood Prince is kind of a letdown, or more precisely, irrelevant.  More unsatisfying to me was that this book is mostly about Harry.  While stuff is happening to all the traditional suspects, the mysteries are being solved by Harry alone, not by the traditional Harry-Ron-Hermione team.  Harry has always had to stand alone at the end of each book, but Ron and Hermione contributed to his getting there in the middle, and there is less of that here (Ron and Hermione, as well as everyone in the book seem distracted by their hormones). 

I guess I would say that a number of the traditional Harry Potter story elements were kind of half-hearted, even the Quiddich.  Rowling is obviously trapped by the need to get a lot of exposition done to bring the 7 book series to a close, and as a result the book never really gets moving until the final few chapters, and then all-too-much occurs in a few pages. 

This will never be considered the best book of the series, but the best spin I can put on it is that it was probably essential to start driving the series to a conclusion.

Update: Several folks have argued that I am missing the point, that quiddich and friends and school stuff are fading in the background as part of the wizarding world going to war and Harry coming of age to face his destiny.  This hypothesis about the ending is very interesting but only if you have read the book, it is FULL of spoilers.  If he is right, then it may be possible to look back and find this book more interesting in light of what we learn in book 7.  We'll see.  I still stand by my statement that the first 3/4 of the book is much less satisfying than the previous books.

2nd Update:  I guess predictably, various groups on opposite sides of the political spectrum and the Iraq war are claiming that Rowling is supporting them with this book.  Jeez, can we politicize everything?  Here is what are two clear tenants of the book:

1. There are times you have to actually fight evil, rather than just hope it goes away or is not really there
2. Governments can't really be trusted to do #1 responsibly

If my reading is correct, you can see why there is a bit in it for everyone.

Yesterday I read in Reason that apparently the new Pope has in the past shown support for the anti-Harry Potter crowd, which is gearing itself up in anticipation of the new Harry Potter book release tomorrow.  He apparently wrote:

It is good, that you enlighten people about Harry Potter, because those are
subtle seductions, which act unnoticed and by this deeply distort Christianity
in the soul, before it can grow properly.

Here is my whole take on the anti-Harry crowd:  Get a life.  From a values point of view, what is it about Harry that you wouldn't want your child to emulate?  And as for the magic stuff - OK, get ready for this - its...made up.  Yes, it is a fantasy, it is not real.  There is no danger of your child suddenly running off and casting spells.

And here is my take on the Potter books as a whole:  Awesome.  Forget that I personally have enjoyed reading every one of them.  Consider that my 11-year-old boy has been waiting for weeks, not for a computer game or movie to come out, but for a book.  Likely a loooonnnggg book.  And this weekend, no matter what the weather or what is on TV, he will be glued to a couch from dawn to dusk reading.  Do you remember being so excited about reading anything at 11, other than the new issue of Spiderman?

By the way, its your last chance to place a bet on which major character buys it in this book, though Dumbledore is the runaway favorite (the logic being that in the story archetype that Rowling seems to be following, the young hero must face the final battle without his mentor - so Dumbledore needs to go before the 7th and last book).

Update:  At noon, Boston time my son crossed over page 310.  I am not sure I read that fast.

Update #2:  OK, its about 4:00 Eastern on Saturday and he is done.  You can tell that we struggle to keep this kid in books (this week he has read Harry Potter, the DaVinci Code, and a Clive Cussler book).  I will try to get him to write a review for the blog.  I threatened that I would tie him up naked in the middle of his school's cafeteria if he gave me any spoilers, but I will say that he was very, very depressed at the end.

We are big Harry Potter fans in our house.  The world has been warned that another major character will buy it in the next book Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince (similar to Sirius Black's death in the last book).  Trust the Brits to have a betting line on it:

Via Instapundit:

THE NEXT HARRY POTTER BOOK, Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince, is finished, and will be out in July.