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MMMM

Post number four thousand coincides with Roy Batty’s birthday, so happy birthday, Roy. Best not wish him many happy returns… It’s also David Bowie’s birthday and album release day but he’s receiving enough attention for that already.

WordPress always sends a statistics summary at the end of each year. The stats for 2015 looked like this:

The Louvre Museum has 8.5 million visitors per year. This blog was viewed about 900,000 times in 2015. If it were an exhibit at the Louvre Museum, it would take about 39 days for that many people to see it.

The busiest day of the year was January 18th with 3,460 views. The most popular post that day was The gay artists archive.

No surprise about the most popular section of the site which frequently gets double the traffic of any single post. Input to that section of the blog has fallen off over the past year but I do have a couple more posts lined up when I get a spare moment.

These are the posts that got the most views in 2015.

1 The art of NoBeast June 2007
2 The art of Takato Yamamoto June 2007
3 Phallic casts 2011
4 Compass roses August 2011
5 The art of Thomas Eakins, 1844–1916 March 2006

The phallic casts post had a huge spike of traffic on New Year’s Day for some reason. Some of the attention for these posts will be from Facebook but since I don’t have an account there—and Facebook also hides their referral details—you can’t be certain. As always, my thanks to everyone who takes the time to read and to comment.

Vintage Mishima

Penguin reprinted several volumes of Mishima in their Vintage line in 2010 with covers designed by Anna Crone. Seven of the covers are shown here although there are one or two more, not all of them available as large images. (Not for the first time I wonder why major publishers don’t make their new covers available at a decent size.) I’d have been wary of using Hokusai’s waves on a Mishima cover but colouring the water red makes it readable as a wave of blood.

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The Strange Case of Yukio Mishima

This is another of those excellent television documentaries that I have imprisoned on a video tape somewhere so it was good to find on YouTube. The Strange Case of Yukio Mishima (1985) was directed by Michael MacIntyre for the BBC’s Arena arts strand. This was the year that Paul Schrader’s Mishima: A Life in Four Chapters was released so the documentary had some topical value even though Schrader’s film isn’t mentioned at all (something that wouldn’t happen today). MacIntyre begins as Schrader does, however, with the events of the final day of Mishima’s life on November 25th, 1970, before rewinding to present a biographical portrait of the writer/actor/director. There’s more footage than I remembered of Mishima discussing his work (in English) while John Hurt reads from Mishima’s writings. Commentary is supplied by biographer Henry Scott Stokes, translator Donald Keene, photographer Eikoh Hosoe (creator of the famous Mishima beefcake poses), director Nagisa Oshima, and Mishima’s lover Akihiro Maruyama, an actor who the credits also describe as a “female impersonator”.

Previously on { feuilleton }
• Tamotsu Yato’s men with katanas
• Forbidden Colours
• Mishima’s Rite of Love and Death

Samarkande by EA Séguy

Another portfolio of pochoir prints by French artist EA Séguy, Samarkande dates from around 1914 (online sources aren’t certain). The portfolio contained 20 prints of which 10 are shown here; a few more may be seen on this page. Pochoir was a stencil process popular with French artists of this period. It’s often alluded to without explanation so it’s good to find this post by Ashley Jones which not only describes the process but also shows more of Séguy’s work.

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Vilmos Zsigmond, 1930–2016

McCabe & Mrs Miller (1971).

Watch enough films from the 1970s and you’ll eventually run across something photographed by Vilmos Zsigmond. And if you were watching on TV, video or even DVD there’s a good chance that his subtle grading of light and shade would have been spoiled or, in low-light scenes, reduced to murk. (TV used to be the worst for also cropping widescreen films.) Screengrabs on a web page don’t do his work any justice either but that can’t be helped. Happily, many of these films are now available in high-definition.

Images (1972).

Deliverance (1972).

The Long Goodbye (1973).

The Deer Hunter (1978).

Heaven’s Gate (1980).