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December 5th, 2009
08:53 pm
So 建国大业 may be a communist propaganda movie, but who cares when it has Uncle Ming lounging around in Nationalist uniform.
( pictures under the cut to save fl )
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December 2nd, 2009
08:25 pm
纵横 by 林错
I told J that I would talk about platonic forms in BL novels. However, I'm going to start out by talking about 纵横 , a Chinese GL novel I recently read. Set in a historical AU modeled loosely after the early Qing period (with the absence of the shaved foreheads, thankfully), this is the story of Lin Zong, daughter of emperor's younger brother. Born a girl, she was brought up as boy based on the advise of a Taoist priest, and granted all the attendant privileges and power. Though Lin Zong was for all intention and purpose treated as a prince though out her life, in the subtle and deadly game of court politics her sex was a wild card that everyone wanted to use, but no one seemed to know how to play. As she reached the age of majority, the emperor decreed a marriage between her and Yang Ran, the daughter of a prominent family, a move designed to test the loyalty of her father to the emperor, and reveal the hidden allegiances at court. Though the marriage began as a sham, Lin Zong and Yang Ran soon found themselves drawn to each other, even as the power struggle at court took on new urgency with the the failing health of the emperor and death of Lin Zong's father. Even as Lin Zong inherited her father's position as the most powerful of the imperial princes, she herself must play a subtle game to navigate the treacherous waters of court and realize her ambition to rule in her father's place.
( more wanking under the cut )
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November 26th, 2009
06:51 pm
Happy Thanksgiving! While Piglet is taking a nap I thought I'd post a couple of the new side dishes I made this year. I had to dispense with my usual complicated recipes this year, since Piglet is becoming a lot more mobile and insist on helping, but they still turned out quite well.
( Roasted acorn squash with maple syrup )
( Sauteed Sweet Potato with Sage brown butter )
( Simple Indian Rice Pilao )
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November 18th, 2009
06:22 pm
Ah, the flow...
So here we have Mao Weitao as Tang Bohu (唐伯虎）, also known as Tang Yin (唐寅), who is possibly the most well-known painter in Chinese history, and who was the painter responsible for the best known version of The Night Revels of Han Xizai extant today
Mao Weitao's portrayal of Tang Bohu is a bit of a departure from his popular persona. The Tang Bohu of popular imagination is mostly derived from charming romance of 三笑，(The Three Smiles), where the besotted young artist disguised himself as a manservant in order to win the affection and hand of the beautiful maid Autumn Fragrance. The character we see here, however, is that of the artist at his nadir, barred from imperial exam for rest of his life, forsaken by his wife and friends, drowning his despair in wine, until his artistic passion is rekindled by a metaphorical conversation with painted figure of his own creation.
You can see a better quality excerpt of the scene here on cctv as well.
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November 11th, 2009
07:38 am
Had a really fun weekend with flemmings, in spite of all things that conspired to ruin it, include NJ Transit/Amtrak, Piglet's sniffles, S's cold, and no babysitters. Saw a very in-depth exhibit of Qing dynasty painter Luo Ping at the Met, and Jung's Red Book at the Ruben, This is to say, ![[info]](http://l-stat.livejournal.com/img/userinfo.gif) flemmings and nojojojo saw it, while Piglet and I played hide and seek on Ruben's circular staircase.
On Sunday went to a fascinating performance of Night Banquest of Han Feizai(韩熙载夜宴图) by 汉唐乐府 (Han Tang Yue Fu), a Taiwanese group that is devoted to reviving and reconstructing an ancient style of music and dance that could be traced as far back as Tang dynasty.
( more on the opera under the cut )
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October 24th, 2009
09:43 pm
Sorry for the silence. Have been swamped at work with the UK push. In fact will be in London next week for the release. It's all feeling like that movie Groundhogs Day -- didn't I do exactly the same thing three years back? And next spring is the Asia release, which I also three years back. Arghh. Anyways, will be chattier after I come back.
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September 9th, 2009
08:25 pm
I showed Piglet some Yue Opera over the weekend. He loved it! There is hope for brainwashing him yet! He sat and watched an entire show with me, but he was not fooled by any of the actresses in male roles. He pointed at them and kept on saying, ayi, ayi, which is Chinese for auntie.
Recently I have been following a very entertaining competition on CCTV， kind of like American Idol, but with Yue opera. My favorite so far are 相丹芳, and 夏艺弈, both of whom made it into finals.
I also learned something rather interesting about the phrase 反串， which is usually translated in English as cross-dressing. But in fact in Chinese opera, it is not considered correct to use 反串 to refer to an an actress who specializes in a male-role. The correct term for that is 坤生. On the contrary, she is only cross-dressing if she plays a female role. So the phrase 反串 actually refers to her customary assigned gender, not her real sex. In the show there was an elimination round based on it, where the actresses who only played the male roles had to play female characters, and vice versa, to the hilarity of much of the audience.
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September 4th, 2009
07:05 am
Saw Ponyo over the weekend. Not his greatest effort, but still very charming. Of course the Disney dub was perhaps partly to blame. It's not that it's bad, but I find that when you give slightly off-beat Japanese characters all-American voices, they come across as quite demented. I guess it's wouldn't make sense to give them accented voices either, but one does hope for a voice that's slightly less tied down to here and now.
While I'm still on my opera kick, I discovered an academic treatise on Yue Opera: Women Playing Men: Yue Opera and Social Change in Twentieth-Century Shanghai. Despite the academic jargon it's a light and reasonably entertaining read. Her main thesis is that the rise of Yue opera is a reflection of the emergence of middle-class urban women in wartime Shanghai, which is patently obvious, but she included some rather interesting details, such as the rise of a large number of all female opera schools during that period. Also she mentioned a sub-genre of erotic plays which have completely disappeared from modern consciousness. It's also nice to read an in-depth discussion of the genre, since the Chinese opera fans are like the Japanese fans and are not given to wank.
However, she falls completely apart when it comes to an discussion of the aestheticism of Yue Opera. Words quite failed her, and all she could summon up are platitudes such as "pretty", "soft", "charming". She should have consulted Mao Weitao instead, who summoned up the aesthetics of the female scholar in one phrase - 魏晋风骨。 That is, the style of Wei and Jin dynasty. In particular, it refers to the aesthetics and philosophy of the Seven Sages of the Bamboo Grove, which bakaneko had mentioned. But I suppose that would be another book altogether.
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August 2nd, 2009
08:59 pm
The problem with not posting regularly and frequently is that I accumulate so much to say that I end up forgetting them all, and now I have nothing to say. The minimal frequency is every few days, I think, and without access from work I guess I'll post to pitas.com first. Maybe I should also check if I can post from my cell, but as I have commented to nojojojo before, the cellphone keyboard gives me nightmares.
Saw HP6. Very tedious. But it did make me want to read SnapeXDraco. My problem is that I generally fall for the most obvious and cliched dynamics, but I want quality and imagination in my fanfics, and writers with quality and imagination don't write cliched dynamics in general. So I thought that I might give the Chinese writers a try. No luck at all, though I did learn that the Chinese writers are overwhelmingly Draco X Harry. It's strange that though generally Chinese BL coincide with my taste better than slash, with the Chinese fandoms based on Western sources the preferred pairing tends to be the flip of mine.
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July 4th, 2009
01:21 pm
When Mao Weitao's new Yue opera Kong Yiji, based on a collection of Lu Xun's short stories, premiered in 1999, it had something to offend everyone in China's literary and theatrical establishments. The academics were offended by its departure from the rthodox readings of Lu Xun's writings. Those in the theater thought that Yue opera has no business taking on such weighty and serious themes, the purists sniffed at the curious new mixed gender cast with men playing men as well as women playing both women and men, and the theater critics despised the narrative's departure from the officially sanctioned socialist realism. But most livid were the fans, who simply could not accept that the romantic scholar of their dreams shaved her head to play the crippled and pathetic Kong Yiji.
( Some excerpts from the opera behind the link )
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May 30th, 2009
03:36 pm
Even though The Butterfly Lovers is usually considered the great love story of China, and noted for its unmistakable homoerotic subtext, I have always find its various incarnations on stage and screen less than compelling. Its most popular form is perhaps the Yueju Opera version, where both of the lovers are played by women. One would expect the opera to be full of many delicate layers subtext but the traditional performance is the most wholesome thing possible -- Liang Shanpo and Zhang Yingtai might as well be any pair of bonny country lad and lass who face disapproval of the family. I have often wondered why. Is it because of the limitations of a traditional art form? But the traditional scholars are masters of subtext, and the traditional operas are no stranger to these topics. Is it because of Yueju's lowly origins as a street performance in the country villages? The Butterfly Lovers's script is not written in elegant verse by a playwright, like the Tale of Western Chamber or Peony Pavilion, but put together by singers with little formal education, and consist of mostly charming ditties in a colloquial style. Or is it something that generally plagues all female performance art forms, including Takarazuku Revue?
( Mao Weitao's new production of Liang Zhu, on the other hand... )
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March 24th, 2009
08:41 am
I only learned about the Tianyige(天一阁） book collection recently. Yet its story is so extraordinary that I wonder that it is so little known among book lovers of the world. Tianyige book collection is the largest and oldest private book collection extant in China today. The name derives from the pattern of 河图 that I spoke of in the last post. 天一生水， which roughly translates as "water arises from the first position of heaven". Elegant the name may be, it simply expressed the founder's desire to prevent the worst nightmare of every book collector - fire. It was founded toward the end of Ming dynasty, and is over 400 years old. The oldest book in its collection dates back 1000 years. One might think that in a country like China a private book collection 400 years old is not very extraordinary. But in fact book collections seldom outlive the original collector, and in China, where there are sweeping cleansings of censored books with every coronation and every new dynasty, the survival of Tianyige with its many banned books for 400 years through two dynasties and multiple governments is nothing short of miraculous.
( eventually, this will be another Yue opera post )
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March 14th, 2009
11:35 am
A few days ago I dreamt about Lavondyss, a strangely muted dream, much like my impression of the book. A number of us were gathered in the front hall of a mansion, a warm summer evening, but the mood turned dreary as a group of horsemen rode toward us. They're here to catch the five elements, someone said. And we all watched with a detached sense of horror as one of the horseman throw out a long hook and captured one of the ladies next to us, who simply turned and floated away with the horseman as if in a trance.
I think the elements appeared in the dream because I have been reading about 河图 and 洛书， two of the most ancient and mysterious patterns in Chinese history. In mythology 河图 appeared on the back of a dragon-horse, and represents the creation of the elements and the movement of the 28 heavenly bodies. The four heavenly beasts, 朱雀，玄武，青龙，白虎, also derive from this pattern, as do the five elements. In combination with 洛书 they form the predecessor of the famous Taoist pattern of bagua
There was disagreement about its age and origin, but now archeological evidence dates 河图 back at least 6500 years, well back in the dawn of the Chinese civilization. For some reason these patterns give me the fantods. I suppose one of the disadvantage of having a long and continuous civilization is that it's almost impossible to be able to tease out the ancient beliefs -- they are always disguised and distorted through the ages. But with these two pattern one is suddenly face to face with these beliefs, without the distortion of the intervening centuries, and one finds that they are both sophisticate and alien, and almost completely incomprehensible.
A more detailed explanation of the patterns can be found on here
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March 3rd, 2009
07:45 am
I used to periodically whine to flemmings that the great Chinese collective unconscious is a bureaucracy. After all, other countries' quest stories are about great kings and knights. China's great quest story, the Journey to the West, is essentially about trying to get around the bureaucracy of Western Paradise. And even hell has all the accoutrement of a bureaucratic administration, including guards that takes bribes.
But if I'm not being so flip I might say that the great Chinese collective unconscious actually is 江湖, that poetically named place which serves as the setting for all the wuxia novels. A Chinese author once said that all Chinese writers have a wuxia story to tell. I instinctively felt it was true, and this is why. The characters in the wuxia novels are not just limited the kungfu masters that appear in Americanized movies, but draws from every facet of history and tradition. Some of them, the unpredictable medicine man for one, perhaps comes from older traditions which have been subsumed. But even more than the characters are the reference to old knowledge which have been forgotten -- the frequent appearance of patterns from Book of Change which are half understood.
All of this blabbing is to say, if one day I can get Piglet's Chinese skill level to where he can read Jin Yong, I will be content. It's not that far-fetched, I think. I was able to read him pretty much by third grade, and I wasn't even very good in Chinese class. I'll let you know how it works out about in about ten year. ^_^
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February 27th, 2009
07:25 am
rasetsunyo associates me with
1. Chinese BL
2. Aestheticism
3. Piglet
4. Delicious recipes
5. Uncle Ming
( natter natter natter )
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February 15th, 2009
11:01 am
My obsession with Yue opera continues...
I have had 陆游和唐婉 on replay on my computer for the last few days. In particular three songs, two of which are based on actual poems by the poet, which I linked below with the libretto. As far as I know, this opera, based on the ill-fated love story of the Song dynasty poet Lu You and his wife, Tang Wan, is a new opera written specifically for Mao Weitao (at least I have never seen anyone else daring to take on this role which she has made so much her own). And it is a particularly good example of the modern evolution of the art form -- it is still a tragic love story, like the butterfly lovers, but all the old folk elements that used to hover outside the edge of vision has been stripped away. What has be added are internal conflicts of the traditional scholar, the paradox of his existence -- on one hand the traditions of Confucian learning and morality, on the other hand the iconoclast urges of the artist and intellectual. And all of this expressed in the most refined and artful ways.
( long post with links below )
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February 14th, 2009
10:40 am
I have been reading Lavondyss, and watching Yue Opera, frequently at the same time. It's disorienting, to say the least. Lavondyss is all id, primitives drives and unconscious. Even its symbols are unformed longings rather than symbols as a modern person understands it. On the other hand Yue opera seems all ego, the scholars and beauties that inhabit its stage completely cerebral and seemingly free of any influence of the id. They don't come from the same world, but putting them side by side they do not even seem to come from the same planet.
( more random blah blah... )
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February 7th, 2009
09:51 pm
Speaking of Rong Lan from Peony Pavilion, I was just reminded of another actress who specialized in male roles. Mao Wei Tao specialized in male roles in Yue Opera, a regional opera originating from the area of what was once the kingdom of Yue and Wu. Traditionally all roles in Yue Opera are played by women, though nowadays there are male singers as well. But it's hard to imagine any man playing the traditional scholar with as much grace and elegance as she does. Back when I was a fan oh seven eight years ago her dvd was like contraband outside of Hangzhou, so gradually I lost interest. But today it just occurred to me that of course all her stuff would be on tudou after all these year. ^__^ So a couple of my favorite:
As Qin Ke, the ill-fated assassin of the First emperor. She created a great stir at the time by replacing Qin Ke's traditional prop of the sword with a fan, but I think she uses it to great effect.
As Lu You, the great Song Dynasty poet Ignore the weird little disco beat if you can. I can't find the same song with a less cheesy accompaniment
and of course the famous Butterfly lovers.
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February 5th, 2009
07:34 am - Meme: Top 10 fictional crushes
Meme: Top 10 fictional crushes
Gacked from supacat and flemmings, in an (probably futile) attempt to keep this a fangirl blog.
( In more or less chronological order )
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February 2nd, 2009
12:44 pm
At this rate this blog is going to become a cooking blog. Not that there's anything wrong with it, but this was supposed to be a bl fangirl blog, after all. >_<
I made dal makhani yesterday. Generally I don't try to make things that are easily available in restaurants, but dal makhani is usually loaded with cream and butter and too rich for me to eat more than a few mouthful. So I tried out a couple recipes on the web, and as it turns out unlike many restaurant dishes it's easy and hassle-free to put together at home, and just as good, if not better. It's also lighter, so you can eat a lot more of it.
( Dal Makhani )
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