museums, Egyptian princesses, and femslash
While July has been a great month for me to watch movies and get some writing done (primarily after 11PM, for some reason), I can't just sit in front of the computer all day, and so I've made a pact with myself, that every day I'm going to do at least one thing that might be considered active. Today's activity is doing the laundry. Yesterday was the museum.
The Museum of Cultural History AKA Kulturen is a very practical place to go, because it's big enough that you get tired before you've seen it all, and by the time you get around to going there again they'll have some new stuff. So that was fun. Though why on earth they insist on having the temporary exhibitions in poorly lit labyrinth, I'll never know. My eyes were strained trying to read the text, I kept getting lost, and the exhibition on China had lots of Buddhas and demonic figurines and such that got REALLY FUCKING CREEPY after a while. I was pretty relieved when I reached the later bits with porcelaine and chairman Mao.
My favourite new part was without a doubt the bit about the university, specifically the temporary exhibition on the spex Uarda. A spex, for those of you unfamiliar with that particular part of Swedish culture, is a musical comedy created and played by university students, with songs that usually have new lyrics set to well-known melodies. This is the most common form of live performance in Lund, and quite often it's pretty funny. (For those of you who have seen Mamma Mia!, though it doesn't fit the criteria of actually being a spex, the atmosphere is remarkably similar.)
Anyway. Uarda was written 100 years ago, has been performed numerous times, and is the best-known spex to date (with Djingis Khan as a possible contender). It's about - among other things - the Egyptian princess who found the baby Moses. Since the play has been around for a century, the exhibition was an interesting example of entertainment history.
That's not why it rocked so muchly, though. In true spirit of spex humour, the exhibition makers had made long informative texts akin to the other museum texts, explaining both the plot of the play and the nature of the exhibited items. Just... well. In the description of the second act, I read the following (from memory, so probably not 100% correct): "Chil's soul is contested between Isis (nice) and Typhon (master of the underworld and thus really really mean). No surprise, Typhon gets the soul. Considering how Chil has been behaving so far, one might wonder why Isis even wants his soul, but never mind that." The TV (sadly broken) showing clips from the play had a sign saying "television set". There was a summary of the play for "Generation X-box" that - for the benefit of those who get bored reading long texts - gave quick and not very informative statements about the characters, for instance "Manasse is no longer Jewish" without explaining anything else about this Manasse. (In other parts of the exhibition, you could learn that Abdul-Hamid, the hero of the show, owes a mummy to the businessman Manasse, who in the earlier versions of the play was a Shylock-like character but is nowadays usually played more like a rogue market salesman.)
In absurdity, it didn't rank that much higher than how the exhibition on China skipped several hundred years of Chinese history to get to the part where they started exporting things to Sweden (because Sweden is always the most important thing!) but it was very tongue-in-cheek, and my heart melted instantly. :-)
***
On a completely different note, I joined a couple of multifannish femslash comms when I finished my Anne story, and actually searching out femslash instead of just reading what passed my way has given me some interesting new perspectives. I.e. I feel like a newbie again.
For one thing, wow, there are a lot of fandoms I'm not a part of. Which logically I knew, even a butterfly like me can't be part of everything, but suddenly those fandoms are showing up on my flist with a new regularity. The Devil Wears Prada has fic almost daily, which is more than you can say about Ugly Betty (though to my confuzzled mind it seems like it should be the other way around).
To make my head spin even more, the femslash for fandoms I do know often seem to feature unexpected pairings. I mean, apart from the canon pairings of any fandom, in my experience fics often tend to feature the obvious pairings like Buffy/Faith or Clark/Lex. The ones where you go, "Oh, they're really close/sparks are really flying. What if..."
And then there are all other pairings. Like, I don't know, Riley/Anya. Pairings between people who may or may not have met, and may or may not get along just fine, but aren't exactly BFF. And I love pairings like that, don't get me wrong, but somehow I never expected to see so many of them. The massive amounts of West Wing CJ/Abbey I've seen, for example, makes me wonder what exactly is going on in the three seasons I haven't seen yet, because up until season 4 they never seemed that close. (Not to mention that Abbey is married, and in love with her husband... and I can just imagine the political implications of the First Lady having a lesbian affair with the Press Secretary.)
All of a sudden, I'm back in the second wave of slash. I don't understand. I have the urge for fic to answer questions like "why" and "how". That hasn't happened in a long time.
To add to the culture confusion I feel, I'm a gen girl at heart. I looooove long or medium-sized fics with plots - even if it's a shipperfic. 5000 words is short, to me. 1000 words is extremely short. Anything below 500 words is barely a morsel.
And for some reason, a lot of these fics are very short indeed - single scene or PWP fics. Weirder still, when I think back on my own femslash stories, they too are short fics. Even my unwritten bunnies are shortfic. I have never in my life married femslash to plot (unless one counts the fully intentional subtext of "My Gift from God," and I don't). What's that all about? Is there something in femslash that prevents plots, or is there a lack of readers for longer stuff, or is it some kind of unconscious convention, or is plot a tool of masculinity...?
Spinning head, here.
Still, it's certainly an interesting experience. And if any of you have some long, plotty femslash fics to rec me, I'll be purring like a kitten.
The Museum of Cultural History AKA Kulturen is a very practical place to go, because it's big enough that you get tired before you've seen it all, and by the time you get around to going there again they'll have some new stuff. So that was fun. Though why on earth they insist on having the temporary exhibitions in poorly lit labyrinth, I'll never know. My eyes were strained trying to read the text, I kept getting lost, and the exhibition on China had lots of Buddhas and demonic figurines and such that got REALLY FUCKING CREEPY after a while. I was pretty relieved when I reached the later bits with porcelaine and chairman Mao.
My favourite new part was without a doubt the bit about the university, specifically the temporary exhibition on the spex Uarda. A spex, for those of you unfamiliar with that particular part of Swedish culture, is a musical comedy created and played by university students, with songs that usually have new lyrics set to well-known melodies. This is the most common form of live performance in Lund, and quite often it's pretty funny. (For those of you who have seen Mamma Mia!, though it doesn't fit the criteria of actually being a spex, the atmosphere is remarkably similar.)
Anyway. Uarda was written 100 years ago, has been performed numerous times, and is the best-known spex to date (with Djingis Khan as a possible contender). It's about - among other things - the Egyptian princess who found the baby Moses. Since the play has been around for a century, the exhibition was an interesting example of entertainment history.
That's not why it rocked so muchly, though. In true spirit of spex humour, the exhibition makers had made long informative texts akin to the other museum texts, explaining both the plot of the play and the nature of the exhibited items. Just... well. In the description of the second act, I read the following (from memory, so probably not 100% correct): "Chil's soul is contested between Isis (nice) and Typhon (master of the underworld and thus really really mean). No surprise, Typhon gets the soul. Considering how Chil has been behaving so far, one might wonder why Isis even wants his soul, but never mind that." The TV (sadly broken) showing clips from the play had a sign saying "television set". There was a summary of the play for "Generation X-box" that - for the benefit of those who get bored reading long texts - gave quick and not very informative statements about the characters, for instance "Manasse is no longer Jewish" without explaining anything else about this Manasse. (In other parts of the exhibition, you could learn that Abdul-Hamid, the hero of the show, owes a mummy to the businessman Manasse, who in the earlier versions of the play was a Shylock-like character but is nowadays usually played more like a rogue market salesman.)
In absurdity, it didn't rank that much higher than how the exhibition on China skipped several hundred years of Chinese history to get to the part where they started exporting things to Sweden (because Sweden is always the most important thing!) but it was very tongue-in-cheek, and my heart melted instantly. :-)
***
On a completely different note, I joined a couple of multifannish femslash comms when I finished my Anne story, and actually searching out femslash instead of just reading what passed my way has given me some interesting new perspectives. I.e. I feel like a newbie again.
For one thing, wow, there are a lot of fandoms I'm not a part of. Which logically I knew, even a butterfly like me can't be part of everything, but suddenly those fandoms are showing up on my flist with a new regularity. The Devil Wears Prada has fic almost daily, which is more than you can say about Ugly Betty (though to my confuzzled mind it seems like it should be the other way around).
To make my head spin even more, the femslash for fandoms I do know often seem to feature unexpected pairings. I mean, apart from the canon pairings of any fandom, in my experience fics often tend to feature the obvious pairings like Buffy/Faith or Clark/Lex. The ones where you go, "Oh, they're really close/sparks are really flying. What if..."
And then there are all other pairings. Like, I don't know, Riley/Anya. Pairings between people who may or may not have met, and may or may not get along just fine, but aren't exactly BFF. And I love pairings like that, don't get me wrong, but somehow I never expected to see so many of them. The massive amounts of West Wing CJ/Abbey I've seen, for example, makes me wonder what exactly is going on in the three seasons I haven't seen yet, because up until season 4 they never seemed that close. (Not to mention that Abbey is married, and in love with her husband... and I can just imagine the political implications of the First Lady having a lesbian affair with the Press Secretary.)
All of a sudden, I'm back in the second wave of slash. I don't understand. I have the urge for fic to answer questions like "why" and "how". That hasn't happened in a long time.
To add to the culture confusion I feel, I'm a gen girl at heart. I looooove long or medium-sized fics with plots - even if it's a shipperfic. 5000 words is short, to me. 1000 words is extremely short. Anything below 500 words is barely a morsel.
And for some reason, a lot of these fics are very short indeed - single scene or PWP fics. Weirder still, when I think back on my own femslash stories, they too are short fics. Even my unwritten bunnies are shortfic. I have never in my life married femslash to plot (unless one counts the fully intentional subtext of "My Gift from God," and I don't). What's that all about? Is there something in femslash that prevents plots, or is there a lack of readers for longer stuff, or is it some kind of unconscious convention, or is plot a tool of masculinity...?
Spinning head, here.
Still, it's certainly an interesting experience. And if any of you have some long, plotty femslash fics to rec me, I'll be purring like a kitten.