(no subject)
Okay, so I cannot even begin to tell you how amazing the fic I received for yuletide is, and I am wholeheartedly reccing it for people who have watched the movie and not:
Masks Upon Masks (fandom: the movie Kick-Ass).
Relevant movie recap: Kick-Ass tells the story of a few teenagers with no special superpowers who decide to become superheroes, including an 11-year-old girl, Mindy, who was trained by her father to be a brutal, foul-mouthed, incredibly kick-ass heroine: Hit Girl. At the end of the film she retires the costume and enrolls in school, for the first time in her life facing the task of living a normal life as a regular girl.
The fic I got is about what happens to Mindy next: it's about her trying to settle into life as a normal girl, becoming a teenager and growing up, figuring out where Hit Girl ends and Mindy begins and whether the two can be separated. It's a beautiful coming of age story and exactly what I wanted to read after the movie, and god, this girl, I love her so much ♥.
I've started slowly going through the archive, though I've only read a handful of stories so far. I've also been reading the bandomstuffsit stories as they come -- so many good ones over the past few days! -- so my Firefox is a tabful of riches and I hardly know what to do with it. Hopefully I will be able to go trough them all.
I hope all you who celebrated Christmas on the 25th had a great Christmas! I went to Jerusalem on Christmas Eve, to see what the Old City was up to. In the past, I'd gone to Jaffa and Jerusalem and Nazareth to see how various churches celebrated and how the streets were decorated; this year, I considered going someplace new, but I still (...as always) had to finish up my Yuletide story, so I didn't want to go too far, and the Old City has a high concentration of churches so even if you miss/have no room in one church, you can make it to the ceremony in another one.
marina picked me up and we drove to Jerusalem, listening to a Christmas music mix I'd compiled from Glee, various music RPF people, and music people on my flist have uploaded over the past few days. I love Christmas music, but I feel guilty listening and enjoying and singing it in the context of the holiday, so this is like, the one day a year I let myself do it for fun.
For those of you who like visual references, this is a map of the path we made through the Old City.
We entered through the Jaffa Gate, named so because it used to be the gate connected to the road to Jaffa (there's a main street in Jaffa named "Jerusalem Road", which was the other end of that same road). I had a list of when various churches had gatherings that night, and I figured we could pop into any of them that we were able to and see how different churches were doing things and how different areas of the city were decorated. We ended up only seeing one mass, which was nice -- it's the most popular Xmas Eve mass in the Old City, and the only one that actually takes place at midnight.
Anyway. The city was very sparsely decorated, but every once in a while you'd see a prop or some lights. We mostly roamed through the Muslim and Jewish Quarters, though, with just a little bit of the Christian quarter, so maybe that was decorated more, though I doubt it. We missed walking through the Armenian quarter, which I believe is the most decorated traditionally, so again, there might have been some more there. Mostly, decorations constituted strings of lights and flags:
With, on occasion, a tree or a Santa next to an open restaurant or hotel:
Or lights hanging from windows:
And here is a random shot of an alley:
(Look, moon!)
During the day these alleys are all part of a bustling marketplace, so it was a little eerie seeing them so abandoned at night. The entire area was oddly empty; last time I was there on Xmas Eve it was full of people walking around, but this time there was hardly anyone there, and I found it slightly uncomfortable. I think it might be because it was a Friday night? I don't know.
Part of the Muristan Square in the Christian Quarter, which was the location of various structures (hospitals and churches and...) since about the Roman era. Next to it is the Lutheran Church of the Redeemer, the only Protestant church in the Old City, where we missed services but heard the bells toll.
We continued walking through the abandoned market till we reached the Austrian Hospice, which is beautiful by day and has a gorgeous chapel but that night services were closed for hostel guests only. So we turned back and headed for the Dormition which had actual midnight mass, going through the Jewish Quarter, which meant going through the Western Wall plaza.
The plaza was well lit and slightly populated with whom I assume were locals and tourists praying by night. I took some photos and a dude came up and said "no photos" and I double checked a sign which indeed forbade photography during Shabbat and I know I should be tolerant and treat it with the same respect as I would if I were visiting a church that forbade photography or a mosque that forbade photography but when I hear someone telling me I can't take photos because it's Shabbat (and I remember that woman who was fucking arrested last year for praying with tefillin in the Western Wall plaza) I just want to say "fuck it, give the fucking place away, I don't give a shit". Which, the difference between that and my normal stance is that normally it pains me to think about giving places like this away, but grrr fuck it I hate feeling so unwelcome in the fucking Jewish Quarter. Have I said grrrr yet? Grrr.
So yeah. I like the Jewish quarter a lot during the daylight, I think it's a beautiful and pretty cool place, but just. Going there on the weekend just makes me like it less and less and less. (Grrr.)
Aaaaaanyway. Interesting tidbit about the Wall: first, for anyone who didn't know, it's considered the holiest place for Jews in the whole wide world, the only remnant of the [Second] Temple that was destroyed in year 70. Second, if you look at this model of the Temple, the Western Wall is actually just a tiny little (tiny little) section of the outer (western part of the) wall that surrounded the area the Temple was located in. Third, and this is the interesting tidbit, you can see how the higher up the wall you look, the smaller the bricks are -- the result of being built in later and later eras. The original bottom of the wall, which is now underground (you can go down the tunnels to see it), has some enormous stones, including one epic 13-meter-long single stone at the base of the wall.
And here is the Wall again, at the bottom left. The black construction stairs crossing it are part of an archeological dig, IIRC. Behind it is the Dome of the Rock, located on the Temple Mount (=where the Temple used to be located, you know, 2000 years ago), from which Muhammad ascended to heaven, and the dome on the right is the Al-Aqsa Mosque, where Muhammad prayed before his night journey.
Dome of the Rock detail.
Aaaaaaaaaand back up the Jewish Quarter, which means climbing up a lot of stairs. My favorite place there is the Cardo:
This is probably because when I was in junior high we were on a school trip to the City and the tour guide asked "Does anyone know what "Cardo" means?" and, being a faithful watcher of ER, I was the one who raised my hand and said "Heart?" and she said "That's right; when the Romans built cities they named the central street the Cardo because it was the heart of the city," and thus it was cemented in my heart as the cool part of the City -- because I got it right.
Also cool: I am taking the photo from what is the current street level, which is slightly above the top of the collumns. Like make other places in Israel, Jerusalem is a layered city, and there's a lot of digging to be done to discover older-era architecture.
Okay so FINALLY we made it to the Dormition, which is a Benedictine Abbey located where Mary, mother-of, was supposed to have passed away. It was packed full and we had to squeeze in between the wall and some chairs, but we made it and stuck through until about halfway through the service the place had emptied enough that we could get seats.
It was a Catholic Mass, and significantly prettier (externally, visually, audibly) than other Christmas services I'd attended before. Which, you know, Catholicism; it makes sense. There was an organ and choir (that actually played two pieces I knew -- Handel's Judas Maccabeus and Silent Night in German, which reminded me of that story about the World War I Christmas Eve truce.) The priest and monks and nun were all in clean, seemingly festive garments; the priest had a beautiful, almost hypnotic voice, singing much of the texts into the chamber that had great acoustics; the church was decorated with a few trees and lights; there were lots of small ceremonies, from the procession in the beginning with candles and incense and up until the last communion and Eucharist. The service was extremely welcoming to Jewish-Israeli tourists, I felt; when visiting church services I often feel like an intruder who must stay still and try to be invisible. Here, his opening words were in Hebrew, thanking us for coming to participate in their celebration, in a friendly-neighbor way rather than a preaching one. I've been in services before where not a single word was spoken in Hebrew or English, so it was pretty great.
The Mass was really, really long -- it lasted till 2AM, which was a little stressful since I still had to submit a complete Yuletide fic by the 7AM deadline, and I can totally see how if I were a kid taken there every year I would love the first five minutes and then fall asleep for the rest.
And then in the middle I had this moment of kind of... distancing myself from the moment and appreciating the ceremony in a kind of... midwinter/solstice kind of way, trying to look at it as if we were a group of pagans thousands of years ago, gathering someplace warm in the dead of winter with snow (I imagined snow) outside, praying to the earth, decorating with lights, singing and chanting in a strange language. I've never gotten that feeling from Hanukkah, which is not celebrated communally, or from the other Christmas services I've been to, which were not as elaborate and ceremonial as this Catholic one. It was a pretty neat way of experiencing it, once I got in the mental ~zone.
The church; outside looking in.
We left when it ended; I would have gladly hung out later in Jerusalem searching for some hot chocolate or sahleb (or, I guess, salep, I am learning how to spell in English slowly but surely), but I still had a few hours of last minute writing ahead of me. Instead of walking back through the Old City, we returned to the car following the walls from outside, so here they are in questionable splendor:
I do like the way they're lit up at night; this is the ~500-year-old wall surrounding the Old City (the area marked in the map I linked to in the beginning), built by the Ottoman Empire Sultan Suleiman the Magnificent. The Old City that the walls encompass actually used to be the entire city of Jerusalem -- they even locked the gates at night -- until the middle of the 19th century, which was when the first neighborhoods were built outside the walls. Nowadays, of course, less than 150 years later, it is but a tiny section of the city. And I totally don't want to give away half of it or more just to hurt certain people who care about it. I don't. Because that would be truly horrible motivation for any kind of political opinion. Don't worry, I'll cool off about this soon, I just suddenly realized that this was in part where I was coming from in anger and wanted to remember it for posterity.
Anyhoo, I really do hope that however you celebrated or did not celebrate this weekend, you had a good time.
And now I shall return to a fic and then sleep. It's so weird having three different things in three different anonymous exchanges at the same time; I keep expecting some kind of action to happen like when you post a fic, but it's all low key and not everything's even been posted! It's really fun though, especially the exchanges where gifts are spaced out over a couple of days.
Which reminds me oh my god, soon I will have to start planning
purimgifts again /o\ Which, like, yay, but how so soooon? I'm always afraid people will be too burned out by the various December exchanges to sign up. On the other hand, I do enjoy the fact that it's relatively small; makes modding that much easier, though I've never modded anything bigger so I don't really know. In any case, Purim is thankfully late this year, which means sign ups can open up in mid-to-late January with people getting at least 5-6 weeks to write, which is frankly more than anyone needs for this exchange.
Okay. Going.
comments on Dreamwidth.
Masks Upon Masks (fandom: the movie Kick-Ass).
Relevant movie recap: Kick-Ass tells the story of a few teenagers with no special superpowers who decide to become superheroes, including an 11-year-old girl, Mindy, who was trained by her father to be a brutal, foul-mouthed, incredibly kick-ass heroine: Hit Girl. At the end of the film she retires the costume and enrolls in school, for the first time in her life facing the task of living a normal life as a regular girl.
The fic I got is about what happens to Mindy next: it's about her trying to settle into life as a normal girl, becoming a teenager and growing up, figuring out where Hit Girl ends and Mindy begins and whether the two can be separated. It's a beautiful coming of age story and exactly what I wanted to read after the movie, and god, this girl, I love her so much ♥.
I've started slowly going through the archive, though I've only read a handful of stories so far. I've also been reading the bandomstuffsit stories as they come -- so many good ones over the past few days! -- so my Firefox is a tabful of riches and I hardly know what to do with it. Hopefully I will be able to go trough them all.
I hope all you who celebrated Christmas on the 25th had a great Christmas! I went to Jerusalem on Christmas Eve, to see what the Old City was up to. In the past, I'd gone to Jaffa and Jerusalem and Nazareth to see how various churches celebrated and how the streets were decorated; this year, I considered going someplace new, but I still (...as always) had to finish up my Yuletide story, so I didn't want to go too far, and the Old City has a high concentration of churches so even if you miss/have no room in one church, you can make it to the ceremony in another one.
marina picked me up and we drove to Jerusalem, listening to a Christmas music mix I'd compiled from Glee, various music RPF people, and music people on my flist have uploaded over the past few days. I love Christmas music, but I feel guilty listening and enjoying and singing it in the context of the holiday, so this is like, the one day a year I let myself do it for fun.
For those of you who like visual references, this is a map of the path we made through the Old City.
We entered through the Jaffa Gate, named so because it used to be the gate connected to the road to Jaffa (there's a main street in Jaffa named "Jerusalem Road", which was the other end of that same road). I had a list of when various churches had gatherings that night, and I figured we could pop into any of them that we were able to and see how different churches were doing things and how different areas of the city were decorated. We ended up only seeing one mass, which was nice -- it's the most popular Xmas Eve mass in the Old City, and the only one that actually takes place at midnight.
Anyway. The city was very sparsely decorated, but every once in a while you'd see a prop or some lights. We mostly roamed through the Muslim and Jewish Quarters, though, with just a little bit of the Christian quarter, so maybe that was decorated more, though I doubt it. We missed walking through the Armenian quarter, which I believe is the most decorated traditionally, so again, there might have been some more there. Mostly, decorations constituted strings of lights and flags:
With, on occasion, a tree or a Santa next to an open restaurant or hotel:
Or lights hanging from windows:
And here is a random shot of an alley:
(Look, moon!)
During the day these alleys are all part of a bustling marketplace, so it was a little eerie seeing them so abandoned at night. The entire area was oddly empty; last time I was there on Xmas Eve it was full of people walking around, but this time there was hardly anyone there, and I found it slightly uncomfortable. I think it might be because it was a Friday night? I don't know.
Part of the Muristan Square in the Christian Quarter, which was the location of various structures (hospitals and churches and...) since about the Roman era. Next to it is the Lutheran Church of the Redeemer, the only Protestant church in the Old City, where we missed services but heard the bells toll.
We continued walking through the abandoned market till we reached the Austrian Hospice, which is beautiful by day and has a gorgeous chapel but that night services were closed for hostel guests only. So we turned back and headed for the Dormition which had actual midnight mass, going through the Jewish Quarter, which meant going through the Western Wall plaza.
The plaza was well lit and slightly populated with whom I assume were locals and tourists praying by night. I took some photos and a dude came up and said "no photos" and I double checked a sign which indeed forbade photography during Shabbat and I know I should be tolerant and treat it with the same respect as I would if I were visiting a church that forbade photography or a mosque that forbade photography but when I hear someone telling me I can't take photos because it's Shabbat (and I remember that woman who was fucking arrested last year for praying with tefillin in the Western Wall plaza) I just want to say "fuck it, give the fucking place away, I don't give a shit". Which, the difference between that and my normal stance is that normally it pains me to think about giving places like this away, but grrr fuck it I hate feeling so unwelcome in the fucking Jewish Quarter. Have I said grrrr yet? Grrr.
So yeah. I like the Jewish quarter a lot during the daylight, I think it's a beautiful and pretty cool place, but just. Going there on the weekend just makes me like it less and less and less. (Grrr.)
Aaaaaanyway. Interesting tidbit about the Wall: first, for anyone who didn't know, it's considered the holiest place for Jews in the whole wide world, the only remnant of the [Second] Temple that was destroyed in year 70. Second, if you look at this model of the Temple, the Western Wall is actually just a tiny little (tiny little) section of the outer (western part of the) wall that surrounded the area the Temple was located in. Third, and this is the interesting tidbit, you can see how the higher up the wall you look, the smaller the bricks are -- the result of being built in later and later eras. The original bottom of the wall, which is now underground (you can go down the tunnels to see it), has some enormous stones, including one epic 13-meter-long single stone at the base of the wall.
And here is the Wall again, at the bottom left. The black construction stairs crossing it are part of an archeological dig, IIRC. Behind it is the Dome of the Rock, located on the Temple Mount (=where the Temple used to be located, you know, 2000 years ago), from which Muhammad ascended to heaven, and the dome on the right is the Al-Aqsa Mosque, where Muhammad prayed before his night journey.
Dome of the Rock detail.
Aaaaaaaaaand back up the Jewish Quarter, which means climbing up a lot of stairs. My favorite place there is the Cardo:
This is probably because when I was in junior high we were on a school trip to the City and the tour guide asked "Does anyone know what "Cardo" means?" and, being a faithful watcher of ER, I was the one who raised my hand and said "Heart?" and she said "That's right; when the Romans built cities they named the central street the Cardo because it was the heart of the city," and thus it was cemented in my heart as the cool part of the City -- because I got it right.
Also cool: I am taking the photo from what is the current street level, which is slightly above the top of the collumns. Like make other places in Israel, Jerusalem is a layered city, and there's a lot of digging to be done to discover older-era architecture.
Okay so FINALLY we made it to the Dormition, which is a Benedictine Abbey located where Mary, mother-of, was supposed to have passed away. It was packed full and we had to squeeze in between the wall and some chairs, but we made it and stuck through until about halfway through the service the place had emptied enough that we could get seats.
It was a Catholic Mass, and significantly prettier (externally, visually, audibly) than other Christmas services I'd attended before. Which, you know, Catholicism; it makes sense. There was an organ and choir (that actually played two pieces I knew -- Handel's Judas Maccabeus and Silent Night in German, which reminded me of that story about the World War I Christmas Eve truce.) The priest and monks and nun were all in clean, seemingly festive garments; the priest had a beautiful, almost hypnotic voice, singing much of the texts into the chamber that had great acoustics; the church was decorated with a few trees and lights; there were lots of small ceremonies, from the procession in the beginning with candles and incense and up until the last communion and Eucharist. The service was extremely welcoming to Jewish-Israeli tourists, I felt; when visiting church services I often feel like an intruder who must stay still and try to be invisible. Here, his opening words were in Hebrew, thanking us for coming to participate in their celebration, in a friendly-neighbor way rather than a preaching one. I've been in services before where not a single word was spoken in Hebrew or English, so it was pretty great.
The Mass was really, really long -- it lasted till 2AM, which was a little stressful since I still had to submit a complete Yuletide fic by the 7AM deadline, and I can totally see how if I were a kid taken there every year I would love the first five minutes and then fall asleep for the rest.
And then in the middle I had this moment of kind of... distancing myself from the moment and appreciating the ceremony in a kind of... midwinter/solstice kind of way, trying to look at it as if we were a group of pagans thousands of years ago, gathering someplace warm in the dead of winter with snow (I imagined snow) outside, praying to the earth, decorating with lights, singing and chanting in a strange language. I've never gotten that feeling from Hanukkah, which is not celebrated communally, or from the other Christmas services I've been to, which were not as elaborate and ceremonial as this Catholic one. It was a pretty neat way of experiencing it, once I got in the mental ~zone.
The church; outside looking in.
We left when it ended; I would have gladly hung out later in Jerusalem searching for some hot chocolate or sahleb (or, I guess, salep, I am learning how to spell in English slowly but surely), but I still had a few hours of last minute writing ahead of me. Instead of walking back through the Old City, we returned to the car following the walls from outside, so here they are in questionable splendor:
I do like the way they're lit up at night; this is the ~500-year-old wall surrounding the Old City (the area marked in the map I linked to in the beginning), built by the Ottoman Empire Sultan Suleiman the Magnificent. The Old City that the walls encompass actually used to be the entire city of Jerusalem -- they even locked the gates at night -- until the middle of the 19th century, which was when the first neighborhoods were built outside the walls. Nowadays, of course, less than 150 years later, it is but a tiny section of the city. And I totally don't want to give away half of it or more just to hurt certain people who care about it. I don't. Because that would be truly horrible motivation for any kind of political opinion. Don't worry, I'll cool off about this soon, I just suddenly realized that this was in part where I was coming from in anger and wanted to remember it for posterity.
Anyhoo, I really do hope that however you celebrated or did not celebrate this weekend, you had a good time.
And now I shall return to a fic and then sleep. It's so weird having three different things in three different anonymous exchanges at the same time; I keep expecting some kind of action to happen like when you post a fic, but it's all low key and not everything's even been posted! It's really fun though, especially the exchanges where gifts are spaced out over a couple of days.
Which reminds me oh my god, soon I will have to start planning
purimgifts again /o\ Which, like, yay, but how so soooon? I'm always afraid people will be too burned out by the various December exchanges to sign up. On the other hand, I do enjoy the fact that it's relatively small; makes modding that much easier, though I've never modded anything bigger so I don't really know. In any case, Purim is thankfully late this year, which means sign ups can open up in mid-to-late January with people getting at least 5-6 weeks to write, which is frankly more than anyone needs for this exchange.
Okay. Going.
comments on Dreamwidth.