Jack Slomovits – { feuilleton }

Three today

Three Spheres II (1946) by MC Escher.

Celebrating the third { feuilleton } anniversary and post number 1,438. It’s become customary now to list the most popular posts of the past year so here we go again:

• The Underwater Sculpture Gallery. This has been surprisingly popular for several months now, despite pictures of the artworks in question having been featured on very popular sites such as Boing Boing. Typing “underwater” into Google’s image search provides the answer, revealing that one of the pictures from the post is on the first results page.

• The gay artists archive. This section has also leapt in popularity after the page was linked recently on StumbleUpon. It’s not a definitive archive by any means, plenty of other sites are attempting that already. These archive pages are only a convenience so that people following some of the lengthier visual categories can see at a glance what else is there. At its best this section may introduce people to more recent work which the historical sites omit.

• Barney Bubbles: artist and designer. No surprise that this is still popular two years on.

• Bare blade. Part of the new semi-serious Men with swords obsession. I think people like this guy’s bum more than anything. Can you blame them?

• Two guys kissing. Yes, Googlers, when you search for “Two guys kissing” you get this wonderfully sexy photo by Jack Slomovits. He’s great, buy his book.

Thanks for reading!

John x

Two today

Numeral by Erté. Via Fabulon.

In which { feuilleton } celebrates its second birthday. As always, it’s a surprise seeing what catches the attention of readers or random browsers. The five most popular posts from the past year were as follows:

• The art of ejaculation. I saw Cary Kwok’s work mentioned in a gay magazine so followed it up on the web, whereupon it occurred to me that the male moment of climax was rarely depicted visually outside the world of porn. Hence a necessarily small list of all the examples I could think of which was then linked on a couple of popular sex-related sites.

• Two guys kissing. My ungenerous reaction in May to the death of Jerry Falwell, using a splendidly erotic photo by Jack Slomovits. It’s mainly the title which attracts people, I think, some of the most popular search phrases bringing people here are “two guys kissing” or “two gays kissing”. One can only hope that the searchers aren’t disappointed.

• The art of Takato Yamamoto. I’m surprised this has been so popular considering the artist isn’t very well-known. If I was a publisher I’d be arranging reprints of his books for Europe and the US.

• Barney Bubbles: artist and designer. No surprise that this is still receiving attention seeing as it’s now linked on the Barney Bubbles Wikipedia page as well as a great many design blogs.

• Neville Brody and Fetish Records. In a similar vein, one of my earliest posts is still very popular as well, possibly because there isn’t a good selection of Brody’s early album art anywhere else.

And since I started making static archive pages for some categories (for my convenience as much as that of readers), the Gay artists archive has proved very popular even though it’s not been there for long. That’s either an indicator of the readership demographic or evidence that people are more curious than they often let on.

Thanks again for reading!

John x

Two guys kissing

I can’t resist the opportunity to acknowledge the demise today of one of America’s worst bigots with a picture of something he’d really, really hate. All your efforts were in vain, fat boy—tough.

Photography by the wonderful Jack Slomovits.

Update: Boing Boing posts the parody ad from Hustler that had Falwell claiming to have lost his virginity to his mother in an outhouse. Falwell sued Hustler editor Larry Flynt over that—and lost—in a long freedom of speech trial that went all the way to the Supreme Court.

Previously on { feuilleton }
• Gay for God