peripathetic

Flâneur
Remembering my peripatetic post of the other day, I remembered I'd also bookmarked a site called Flâneur, so went and visited it to find that there's a poem set in Belfast there. Here it is. (The site, by the way, also has an excellent selection of photos in the 'artwork' category.)

Been looking at stuff about the Moulin Rouge, because last night at Josh's place we watched the eponymous film straight through (after watching The Good Girl beforehand, so it was a late night) and it piqued my interest. Firstly, I found a Toulouse-Lautrec poster for the club. The poster bills a woman called 'La Goulue' (in english, glutton) who was one of the club's stars and who was known for draining glass after glass, hence her nickname.

Toulouse-Lautrec really was a midget as he's portrayed in the film, and drank absinthe like a fish to fit into the bohemian life of Montmartre, as well as to cope with the hurt of people making fun of him because of his stature. He made lithographs, prints, and paintings of the nightlife, exemplified by his work for the Moulin Rouge. His actual portraits of people could be disarmingly frank, as this one of La Goulue shows. In the posters she's a dignified beauty; in the portrait she's a squinting woman who looks a bit too much up her own arse for comfort.