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Dugald Stewart Walker’s Rainbow Gold

Kubla Khan by Samuel Taylor Coleridge.

The illustrations of Dugald Stewart Walker (1883–1937) have been featured here on several occasions but this is a book of his that I’d missed until now. The Internet Archive has a huge trove of illustrated editions but the illustrators aren’t always credited on the website pages so you either have to rely on chance discovery or search for books by their titles.

Rainbow Gold: Poems Old and New Selected for Boys and Girls (1922) is a collection compiled by Sara Teasdale that was illustrated throughout by Walker’s full-page drawings and many smaller vignettes. Not all of the poems are given the full-page treatment so some of the omissions are disappointing. I’d liked to have seen what he could do for Yeats’s The Song of Wandering Aengus, for example.

There’s a Virgil Finlay-like quality to a few of these illustrations that I hadn’t noticed in Walker’s art before: the stars in the Israfel drawing, the same kinds of tiny nested circles that Finlay favoured, and dots stippled in white that must have been applied with paint rather than ink. Finlay would have been the right age to have been given (or shown) Walker’s drawings when he was a child which makes me wonder if they exerted a minor influence.

“When the hounds of spring” by Algernon Charles Swinburne.

The Lady of Shalott by Alfred Tennyson.

Continue reading “Dugald Stewart Walker’s Rainbow Gold”

Weekend links 576

Cover art by Bob Haberfield, 1976.

• I’ve been reliably informed that Australian artist Bob Haberfield died recently but I can’t point to an online confirmation of this so you’ll have to take my word for it. “Science” and “sorcery” might describe the two poles of Haberfield’s career while he was working as a cover artist. His paintings made a big impression on British readers of fantasy and science fiction in the 1970s, especially if you were interested in Michael Moorcock’s books when they appeared en masse as Mayflower paperbacks covered in Haberfield’s art. Haberfield also appeared alongside Bruce Pennington providing covers for Panther paperbacks by HP Lovecraft, Clark Ashton Smith and others, although his work there isn’t always credited. Dangerous Minds collected some of his covers for a feature in 2017. (The US cover for The Iron Dream isn’t a Haberfield, however.)

• “Like Alice, who can only reach the house in Through the Looking-Glass by turning her back to it, Gorey reversed the usual advice to ‘write what you know’ and wrote the apparent opposite of his own situation.” Rosemary Hill reviewing Born to Be Posthumous: The Eccentric Life and Mysterious Genius of Edward Gorey by Mark Dery.

• “Orvil…wanders the countryside, visits churches, rummages in antique shops, and encounters strange men to whom he is no doubt equally strange.” John Self reviewing a new edition of In Youth Is Pleasure by Denton Welch.

• At the Wyrd Daze blog: Q&A sessions with Stephen Buckley (aka Polypores), Gareth Hanrahan, and Kemper Norton.

• “Fellini liked to say that ‘I fall asleep, and the fête begins’.” Matt Hanson on Federico Fellini’s phenomenal films.

• A Beautiful Space: Ned Raggett talks to Mick Harris about the thirty-year history of Scorn.

• Deep in the dial: Lawrence English on the enduring appeal of shortwave radio.

• Clive Hicks-Jenkins on making a picture for Annie Darwin (1841–1851).

• DJ Food looks at pages from Grunt Free Press circa 1970.

• Mix of the week: Fact Mix 814 by Loraine James.

• New music: Clash (feat. Logan) by The Bug.

• At BLDGBLOG: Terrestrial Astronomy.

• LoneLady‘s favourite albums.

• At Dennis Cooper’s: Porn 2.

• Tilings Encyclopedia

• Betrayal (Sorcerer Theme) (1977) by Tangerine Dream | Science Fiction (1981) by Andy Burnham | Sorceress (2018) by Beautify Junkyards

Gioconda of the Mausoleum

“MAGIC REALISM • Like the video technique of “keying in” where any background may be electronically inserted or deleted independently of foreground, the ability to bring the actual sound of musics of various epochs and geographical origins all together in the same compositional frame marks a unique point in history. • A trumpet, branched into a chorus of trumpets by computer, traces the motifs of the Indian raga DARBARI over Senegalese drumming recorded in Paris and a background mosaic of frozen moments from an exotic Hollywood orchestration of the 1950’s [a sonic texture like a “Mona Lisa” which, in close up, reveals itself to be made up of tiny reproductions of the Taj Mahal], while the ancient call of an AKA pygmy voice in the Central African Rainforest—transposed to move in sequences of chords unheard of until the 20th century—rises and falls among gamelan-like cascades, multiplications of a single “digital snapshot” of a traditional instrument played on the Indonesian island of JAVA, on the other side of the world.” — Jon Hassell

Jon Hassell’s text is part of the sleeve note for his Aka—Darbari—Java (Magic Realism) album which was released on Editions EG in 1983. The description of a picture of the Mona Lisa made from tiny reproductions of the Taj Mahal always intrigued me even though it’s only a shorthand metaphor for the sampling process, as well as being an encapsulation in miniature of one aspect of Hassell”s “Fourth World” concept: the blending of East and West, the sacred and the profane. Nevertheless, 20 years ago—17th May, 2001, according to the date on the file—after realising that Photoshop allowed the creation of just this kind of mosaic imagery, I decided to try and bring Hassell’s metaphor to digital life.

The end result in its full-size version looks at a distance like an ordinary halftone rendering of the painting but it really is made of tiny images of the Taj Mahal, albeit very rough ones since the process always resulted in a bitmap image. So much time has elapsed I’ve forgotten the procedural details although I do recall the involvement of one of those legacy features of Photoshop that most people ignore, possibly the Apply Image function. And I only did this at all because I’d found a tutorial somewhere that described how to create a mosaic image in this manner. The resulting picture wasn’t particularly satisfying but as a proof of concept it did at least work.

Continue reading “Gioconda of the Mausoleum”

Sounds off the Beaten Track

In 1987 the Glastonbury Festival opened its WOMAD stage for the first time to provide a showcase for the kind of acts you might expect to see at the separate World Of Music And Dance festival. Sounds off the Beaten Track is a 52-minute TV documentary about the acts who appeared on the WOMAD stage at Worthy Farm that year, and also about the WOMAD ethos itself, a project inaugurated in 1980 by Peter Gabriel and others to give greater prominence to musicians from all over the world. One of the WOMAD initiators, Mark Kidel, also directed the film, while co-founders Peter Gabriel and Thomas Brooman talk on camera. The film captures the Glastonbury Festival at a time when it was still a relatively small and rather ramshackle affair, closer to its hippy roots, and very different from the sprawling tent city of later years.

The main interest, however, is the music, especially the amount of time given to the Burkina Faso group, Farafina, and to Jon Hassell, whose Flash Of The Spirit collaboration with Farafina was released the following year. This was the first I saw of Hassell on TV, and also the last until he turned up much later as a guest on MTV’s Seal Unplugged session. I remembered the Farafina performance but I’d forgotten that Hassell also talks a little about his Fourth World idea. Among the other featured artists are The Bhundu Boys, Toumani Diabaté, Amadu Bansang Jobarteh, The Inspirational Choir, and Najma Akhtar who subsequently appeared on another unplugged (or partly plugged) session with Jimmy Page and Robert Plant. Jon Hassell had been under the WOMAD umbrella since 1982 via the excellent Music And Rhythm compilation album which included an exclusive live recording of Ba-Benzélé. He was often critical of the “world music” marketing label, seeing it as a convenient way for record companies and music sellers to appear to be supporting musical diversity while placing all the non-Anglophone recordings in a ghetto area away from everything else. He preferred to talk of “worldly music”, an idiom that was of the world, uncloistered, freed from the ghetto; music where the beaten and unbeaten tracks might combine to form a new highway.

Previously on { feuilleton }
• Jon Hassell, 1937–2021
• Jon Hassell, live 1989
• Power Spot by Michael Scroggins

Jon Hassell, 1937–2021

Goodbye, Nature Boy, it was a pleasure and a privilege to work with you for a brief time.

One of my Mixcloud mixes was a Jon Hassell special, a collection of odds and ends rather than a best of, but it serves as an introduction to his unique music. Or you could go here and gorge yourself on a collection of albums that only sound like the people who followed in his footsteps.

• The Guardian
• Libération
• The New York Times

Previously on { feuilleton }
• Jon Hassell, live 1989
• Power Spot by Michael Scroggins