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Meme from feliciter
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feliciter
Comment and I'll give you a letter (if you want); then you have to list 10 things you love that begin with that letter. Afterwards, post this in your journal (if you want) and give out some letters of your own.
She handed me G, half of which could be supplied from a single fandom.
1) Gou Jian, natch, or rather, this Gou Jian and this Chen Daoming and this Woxinchangdan. Steal that scene, break those hearts, delight their ears and keep 'em guessing to the end. Also that younger Gou Jian frequently looks like the western conception of Mephistopheles. A good thing he lets his hair down in Wu.
2) Gardenias. Preferably the variety that grows in Japan whose scent knocks you out at a distance and whose petals are so smooth and thick as to be almost an embarrassment to touch.
3) Goujun, the Marshmallow King of the Peeps, intriguing, enticing and ultimately ungraspable. (cf Gou Jian above.) Have been perplexed by him for nigh on seven years now. How does one get from *here* (the original novel) to *there* (scaled white skin, red eyes, braid, sidelocks, stick up arse)? Have written him many times but never felt I've got the essence of him. Many others have written him but I've never felt they got the essence of him either. No one does him right but Minekura, which is frustrating. If only there was more of him.
4) Saiyuuki Gaiden. If only there was more of all of them.
5) Edward Gorey. An American who somehow perfected the Japanese mangaka illustration book technique of suggesting intensely perverse, strange, amorphous things that would probably not be nearly as perverse and strange if they were more defined. Gorey has his tongue sufficiently in his cheek that he manages to suggest quite resonant decadence (those sinister fur coats everyone wears in his faux Edwardian landscape, those equally sinister motoring goggles) without being unintentionally silly, which is the chronic pitfall of decadence.
6) Greek, ancient. Beautiful language, so elegant and flexible and flowing, especially after Latin. I was always stunned that the church fathers tried to argue delicate points of theology in Latin, a language that doesn't distinguish between 'a' and 'the' because it posesses neither. No wonder their theological disagreements could only be resolved by warfare. (The eastern Fathers tied themselves into theological knots too, in Greek, but they were different kinds of knots.) I just wish I remembered any of my Greek, but I started studying it too late to learn it by rote the way I did Latin, and too early to know how to study a language efficiently. I threw myself into the grammar basics but never followed up sufficiently with the slog-slog reading, which is what makes (dead) languages stick.
7) The Green Knowe series, odd and quirky and never doing what one expects children's books to do. I didn't know that LM Boston was over sixty when she wrote the first of them, but I find the information cheering.
8) Gagaku, the imperial court music of Japan. Has nothing of what a westerner calls harmony, is all shrill whistles and thumps, and has a perverse atavistic attraction I can't begin to define. Add the dance, bugaku, with people in beaked or animal-like masks, and you seem to be looking at something from primordial times.
9) Gingerbread men. I know they're gingerbread people but when I was a kid they were men and I stick to that. Applesauce and gingerbread men in my lunchbox in grade school was a huge treat; the applesauce was always room temperature, of course, and sometimes got out of its plastic container and slopped onto the gingerbread men (and melted their white piping- no fancy sugar faces in those days) but still. One can't find that kind of gingerbread any more, of course.
10) Yes, yes, yes, the rest of the bunch: Kou, Shou and En, also Erh and Shun and Ronand Hermione. Happy families. But am most particularly fond of rasetsunyo's sketch of Goukou, the responsible and intelligent older brother:
the full version of which is here.
feliciterComment and I'll give you a letter (if you want); then you have to list 10 things you love that begin with that letter. Afterwards, post this in your journal (if you want) and give out some letters of your own.
She handed me G, half of which could be supplied from a single fandom.
1) Gou Jian, natch, or rather, this Gou Jian and this Chen Daoming and this Woxinchangdan. Steal that scene, break those hearts, delight their ears and keep 'em guessing to the end. Also that younger Gou Jian frequently looks like the western conception of Mephistopheles. A good thing he lets his hair down in Wu.
2) Gardenias. Preferably the variety that grows in Japan whose scent knocks you out at a distance and whose petals are so smooth and thick as to be almost an embarrassment to touch.
3) Goujun, the Marshmallow King of the Peeps, intriguing, enticing and ultimately ungraspable. (cf Gou Jian above.) Have been perplexed by him for nigh on seven years now. How does one get from *here* (the original novel) to *there* (scaled white skin, red eyes, braid, sidelocks, stick up arse)? Have written him many times but never felt I've got the essence of him. Many others have written him but I've never felt they got the essence of him either. No one does him right but Minekura, which is frustrating. If only there was more of him.
4) Saiyuuki Gaiden. If only there was more of all of them.
5) Edward Gorey. An American who somehow perfected the Japanese mangaka illustration book technique of suggesting intensely perverse, strange, amorphous things that would probably not be nearly as perverse and strange if they were more defined. Gorey has his tongue sufficiently in his cheek that he manages to suggest quite resonant decadence (those sinister fur coats everyone wears in his faux Edwardian landscape, those equally sinister motoring goggles) without being unintentionally silly, which is the chronic pitfall of decadence.
6) Greek, ancient. Beautiful language, so elegant and flexible and flowing, especially after Latin. I was always stunned that the church fathers tried to argue delicate points of theology in Latin, a language that doesn't distinguish between 'a' and 'the' because it posesses neither. No wonder their theological disagreements could only be resolved by warfare. (The eastern Fathers tied themselves into theological knots too, in Greek, but they were different kinds of knots.) I just wish I remembered any of my Greek, but I started studying it too late to learn it by rote the way I did Latin, and too early to know how to study a language efficiently. I threw myself into the grammar basics but never followed up sufficiently with the slog-slog reading, which is what makes (dead) languages stick.
7) The Green Knowe series, odd and quirky and never doing what one expects children's books to do. I didn't know that LM Boston was over sixty when she wrote the first of them, but I find the information cheering.
8) Gagaku, the imperial court music of Japan. Has nothing of what a westerner calls harmony, is all shrill whistles and thumps, and has a perverse atavistic attraction I can't begin to define. Add the dance, bugaku, with people in beaked or animal-like masks, and you seem to be looking at something from primordial times.
9) Gingerbread men. I know they're gingerbread people but when I was a kid they were men and I stick to that. Applesauce and gingerbread men in my lunchbox in grade school was a huge treat; the applesauce was always room temperature, of course, and sometimes got out of its plastic container and slopped onto the gingerbread men (and melted their white piping- no fancy sugar faces in those days) but still. One can't find that kind of gingerbread any more, of course.
10) Yes, yes, yes, the rest of the bunch: Kou, Shou and En, also Erh and Shun and Ron
rasetsunyo's sketch of Goukou, the responsible and intelligent older brother: the full version of which is here.
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I think of that as Not!Chen Daoming. Should watch Hero again just to see if I recognize him, though I don't know if I can take those Vogue fashion shoots. Did you ever see Kou Laoxier? What's that like?
(He was in Snuff Bottle but I can't find an English page that says who he played. And can't remember enough of the film after twenty years to know who that was even if I did.)
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It was highly atypical in form and function, except for his precise enunciation. Unfortunately I have only seen him in Woxin, Jasmine Flower, a bit of that other drama with Hu Jun and Hero.
(Never watched that either, apologies.)
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No prob. Whoever he played, it was with a Qin hairstyle which, err, I think I'd rather not see again.
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Kou Laoxier is ... not for people who do not have the cultural baggage.
Which baggage would that be, specifically?
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Kou Laoxier, well, I guess it's not so much culture baggage as being very much an in joke, which you'll only get if you lived in Beijing in the eighties and early nineties and watched the comedy skits on TV, and also know about how these characters were portrayed not just traditionally, but also in the very popular Central Radio drama serialization. And Chen Daoming and Ge You playing off each other and playing against type. It's still mildly funny, but also slow and tedious otherwise
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One of the few years I braved the Toronto Film Festival and watched Chinese films only. So I saw Red Sorghum and Painted Faces and Rouge of the North and that. All of which were intensely depressing one way or the other. And I remember selectively, as in- nothing about the snuff-bottle maker or his daughter except vaguely that the guy wouldn't make snuff-bottles showing Kunichika pictures of the victorious Japanee from the Sino-Japanese war.
I wondered if Uncle Ming's moustache in Kou Laoxier was supposed to look as odd as it did to me.