Look for Eleven Issue 7.4 on the streets early next week.
Dear Harry Potter: #^(& you. I have never read a page of your books, nor seen any of your movies, and I don’t plan on it. What gave you the right to unite and define our generation? My parents’ generation sang to the Beatles, who will forever be revered and admired as one of the greatest bands that ever walked this Earth. If they had been born a few years earlier, they would have been old enough for Woodstock. But what will I tell my kids? “Oh, you know, we had this, uh, little boy wizard with a lightning bolt on his forehead who rode broomsticks and died in the end” (yes, even I know that without having read the books). I can feel my kids burning an L into my forehead already with their judgmental eyes.
So, no, Harry Potter, I disapprove of you and your universal appeal. For all I know, if you hadn’t come along swishing your fancy wand, some new, mind-blowingly amazing musical act would have swept in and won over the world. It could have been the Beatles all over again; it could have been something I would actually be proud to tell my kids about. We could be singing along instead of lining up at midnight dressed in capes. So, Harry, please take everything – except Emma Watson, she stays – and work your disappearing hocus pocus sorcery. And while you’re at it, take Twilight with you too. Your schoolboy innocence and voodoo spells don’t work on me.
