{wordpress} – Page 2 – { feuilleton }

The Marvellous

The marvellous is always beautiful. Anything marvellous is beautiful. In fact only the marvellous is beautiful.

George Melly (above) quoting André Breton’s declaration from the first Surrealist Manifesto, 1924

Two posts in one week—quelle surprise. This is partly because I’m trying to get WordPress to post updates to Twitter, something that hasn’t been possible for many years without going through the long-winded process of signing up as a Twitter developer. Anything that limits my involvement with Twitter’s burning café feels like a positive thing at the moment, so thoughts that I previously cast into the flames may find their expression here instead.

The two screengrabs are from recent re-viewings. George Melly’s short guide to Surrealism for the BBC’s Arena, and Jan Svankmajer’s equally short BBC profile have both been featured here in the past, but my recent purchase of a box of blu-rays from Svankmajer’s shop has prompted a journey back into the Surrealist praxis via whatever books and videos I have to hand. It’s been interesting looking again at René Passeron’s Encyclopedia of Surrealism (1975), a book which for many years was more interesting for the 24-page section devoted to the precursors of Surrealism, all the artist-eccentrics, architects, illustrators, Mannerists, and (especially) the Symbolists whose works I spent most of the 1980s pursuing. Today there are more threads to be followed in the Surrealist section of Passeron’s study so I’m looking forward to seeing where they lead. As for The Marvellous, the Svankmajer discs are this with and without the capital “M”. I recommend them.

Update: And the post didn’t announce itself at Twitter which isn’t so surprising; I’ll keep working at this behind the scenes. Social media is the anti-Marvellous.

Two thousand

Being post number 2,000 here at {feuilleton}. The page above is a sample from Monograms & Ciphers (1906) by AA Turbayne at the trusty Internet Archive.

I’ll take the opportunity here to apologise for the continuing flakiness of my web connection. The advantage of WordPress is independence from the shackles of Blogger and co. but this can leave you at the mercy of webhosts with inadequate or shoddy resources. I intend changing host at some point but have been far too busy of late to deal with the matter. As always, your patience is appreciated. Thanks.

Bruegel in winter

The Hunters in the Snow (1565).

Most of the snow here in Manchester melted over Christmas but it’s likely there’ll be more on the way given the unusually low temperatures. Whatever the complaints about the weather, the empty-handed hunters painted by Pieter Bruegel the Elder (c.1525–1569) had it worse. Of the two paintings, Winter Landscape with a Bird Trap is the lesser composition but seems slightly more optimistic.

Winter Landscape with a Bird Trap (1565).

I upgraded WordPress a few hours ago with the result that the latest version of the software no longer works with a couple of the plug-ins I was using. I try to keep WP plug-ins to a minimum but fell foul on this occasion so there’s now no tag cloud at the foot of the page until I work out a way to restore it by other means. If anything here seems awry or broken over the next couple of days, that’s the explanation.

Previously on { feuilleton }
• Winter panoramas
• Winter music
• Winter light
• La Tour by Schuiten & Peeters

Outage

Extended downtime over the past few days was caused by a major server calamity at the webhost end so my apologies to regular visitors. I keep backups of everything for precisely this reason—servers of all kinds can be subject to failure—but one of the problems with an increasingly sprawling site such as this (8,000+ files, 450 web pages, etc) is that restoring the thing from scratch can take some time. Reinstalling the database was the most difficult part but that’s been done without any loss. Normal service is now resumed. Thanks for your patience. And a belated Happy Bloomsday!

New things for February

More new work appeared recently although as usual this was something I completed a while ago. Einstein’s Getaway is a short album by Stranger Son of WB who play a kind of over-amped muscular harangue which you might call Post Rock if that wasn’t a very tired term by now. Mr Simon Reyonolds should give them a listen. Heavily rhythmic and bass-driven, this is as much Post Punk as anything, bringing to mind bands such as This Heat, The Pop Group and (in the vocal department especially) The Fall. I was responsible for the design of this release only, not the avocado suite backdrops, and you can see the rest of the layout here. This is one of the first releases on a new label, White Box, and I’ve already designed the next release in the catalogue.

Meanwhile, those of you addicted to mobile phones may like to know that {feuilleton} is now available via a mobile RSS feed. There’s a permalink at the top of the third column on this page although if you arrived here using a mobile network there’s a new WordPress plugin running which converts the site to a mobile feed automatically. I don’t browse the web with my phone very much since its capabilities are so limited it’s hardly worth bothering but this page does at least load the posts now without breaking. Not all of them work, however, since the images are far too big. WP creates thumbnails for each uploaded image so I imagine there’s some way of tweaking the feed to deliver thumbnails. iPhone users shouldn’t have any problem and the optimiser creates a feed just for them. Those of us who remain iPhone-less can experience a vicarious thrill here.