Lost Marvels of Revolution-Era Russian Theater
Some excellent detective work by Ghoul Next Door has uncovered the origins of this 101-year-old photo. The stunning image was brought to our attention by guest blogger Angeliska, who writes, “I’ve become totally obsessed with this carte de visite depicting Maria Germanova of the Moscow Arts Theatre, costumed for her role [as the fairy] in Blue Bird. She is my perfect style icon, now and forever.”
Unfortunately, the photographs of the actors are all that remain of this 1908 premiere of Maeterlinck’s Blue Bird, produced by Stanislavsky. A descriptive play-by-play of the performance can be found in the 1920 book The Russian Theater Under the Revolution by Oliver Sayler (thanks, Google book search!), but all other images of this art noveau-inspired production have been lost to time, despite Sayler’s valiant attempts to preserve more for posterity....
Also, Top 10 Most Preternaturally Beautiful Men
READERSHIP ADVISORY: The following post contains very subjective opinion, frivolity, and the shameless sexual objectification of highly respectable people. In other words, we are about to go totally alt-Cosmo on your ass. You have been warned.
There is no excellent beauty that hath not some strangeness in the proportion. – Sir Francis Bacon
Preternatural means out of the ordinary course of nature; exceptional or abnormal. That which appears outside or beyond the natural. Extremity – an ordinary phenomenon taken beyond the natural.
Huh. I kinda' find myself agreeing with Sir Francis Bacon. Mmmm... bacon.
Bug-eyed, white-haired, rubbery-lipped Klaus Kinski was by all accounts (especially his own) an insatiable fuck machine. Open his infamously filthy memoirs to any random page and gasp at the depravity. He also happened to be gibbering batshit insane. It has been observed that sociopaths are often very charismatic. Certainly, when Kinski wasn’t foaming at the mouth, he could charm the knickers off any lady in the room. Fans of exploitation cinema adore him as the punishing playboy in Jess Franco’s masterpiece, Venus In Furs. His tumultuous partnership with filmmaker Werner Herzog yielded two of the most compelling antiheroes of all time: Aguirre and Nosferatu. Indeed, even in the most paltry cameo roles, Kinski oozed a certain fetid yet undeniable charm.
And he's only #10.
Hmmm... you know, I find all of the men they selected very attractive. Adrien Brody! Nick Cave! David Bowie!
He almost couldn’t have #1 because it’s just too easy, but we had no choice. David Bowie simply is inhuman. And inhumanly hot. Over several decades of stardom, he’s ripened into complete perfection. Between his masterfully crafted alien image, the beak, the mismatched eyes, the feline smile he is The Ultimate Preternatural Hotness.
I feel like I just woke up gay...