Four today

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Good things come in fours: the mighty Kraftwerk performing Numbers on the Minimum-Maximum DVD (2005).

Yes, the day between Darwin Day and St. Valentine’s Day is this blog’s birthday. I continue to be surprised that I’ve kept this going for so long since I never managed to keep a diary. Doing work that chains you to a computer is a help, although the past year was so busy that many entries were little more than picture posts. 2009 saw this site receiving more traffic than ever with the result that the server resources are now regularly overloaded for a couple of hours each day. I’ve been intending to move to a new webhost for a while but doing so is a time-consuming and technically complex business over which the current hectic workload continues to take priority.

The three most popular posts of the last twelve months were the following:

The gay artists archive. Always a popular page but now it’s the most popular destination by a long margin, helped by continual visits from Stumbleupon users.

Psychedelic Wonderland: the 2010 calendar. Links on Boing Boing, Trendhunter and elsewhere helped make this year’s calendar a big success. My thanks again to everyone who bought a copy, I’ll be doing a Through the Looking-Glass follow-up in September.

Alan Moore interview, 1988. Another Stumbleupon hit, this magazine interview was one of my earliest posts and it remains curiously popular, more so than the very long Watchmen round table discussion which followed.

As always, thanks for reading and for all your comments!

John x

Alexander McQueen, 1969–2010

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“He was a Brothers Grimm of fashion, enchanting and captivating the audience with the most incredibly beautiful clothes, only to make their stomachs lurch with the underlying menace that shot through his work. Because every show contained outfits designed to thrill, shock – and catch the eye of picture editors – many people never realised that much of McQueen’s work was, quite simply, heart-stoppingly gorgeous: exquisite tailoring, beautifully sculpted dresses and glorious print.”
Jess Cartner-Morley. (More.)

Butterfly-print dresses (how fitting for Darwin Day), Giger-style shoe designs, skull key chains… Yes, Alexander McQueen was something special.

Guardian obituary | Independent obituary

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Passage 12

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Ed Jansen writes again to notify me that the latest number of his web magazine, Passage, is now online, about which he says:

In Passage nr. 12 there are articles about a 17th century garden in The Hague, about the mysterious visit to The Hague by the Comte De Saint Germain. Was he really a enlightened man or a fraud? If you’re an occultist you’ll tend to believe the first, the historian thinks otherwise. Then there are the photos of the dancer and performer Hiroake Umeda. Strange movements underlined by light-effects. Living in a Capsule is a combination of the paintings by the Dutch artist Tjebbe Beekman and the work of J.G. Ballard. Lastly there is an article about Jan Bastiaans, the doctor who experimented with LSD to ‘free’ the victims of the concentration camps of the nightmares and repressed memories.

Once again the text content is in Dutch but that doesn’t exclude all visitors here. I hadn’t come across the work of Tjebbe Beekman before. His paintings of urban desolation are indeed a good match for one aspect of Ballard’s work, and they make an interesting contrast with Dick French’s earlier views of the author’s Drowned World.

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Trust by Tjebbe Beekman (2005).

Previously on { feuilleton }
Drowned Worlds
Passage 11
Passage 10

Betty Blythe

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Yesterday’s search for Betty Blythe pictures turned up this pair which I couldn’t resist posting, with Ms. Blythe posed against a peacock in the first and wearing a peacock-styled outfit in the second. As I’ve noted before, silent films are very often like Symbolist paintings come to life, and The Queen of Sheba (1921) would appear to be another of these which makes its loss all the more disappointing. The photo below is from a Flickr set whose user has her own Tumblr blog of silent movie stars.

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Previously on { feuilleton }
The Mask of Fu Manchu
Salomé posters
Ruth St Denis
The Feminine Sphinx
Lussuria, Invidia, Superbia
Alla Nazimova’s Salomé