The (Middle) Namesake

Most people know something about the person after whom they were named -- I do -- but middle names are often a more curious business. Some have just 'been in the family,' or represent a shout-out to a favorite aunt or uncle. In my case,  I was named after my father's childhood best friend, Alan Laxdal. I knew him as a balding, cherubic, dry-witted man, a man who taught in the Snohomish school system for many years, and whose audiophile stereo system was a thing of wonder. His mother was from Iceland -- the Laxdals even have their own saga -- but I knew her only as the quirky old lady who once lived next door to my grandmother. This photo, found among my father's papers after his death, reveals another Alan Laxdal -- a young boy who made this dramatic self-portrait by flashlight, and developed it in his own photo lab.  There is something quite powerful in his gaze -- he almost seems to look through you -- the intensity is visceral. I'm certainly proud to carry his name.

The Terrific Register

Writing to his friend W.H. Wills in 1851, Charles Dickens recalled his boyhood fascination with a periodical known as The Terrific Register.  Every issue featured a grisly woodcut of some horrid murder, disembowelment, beheading, or massacre, and Dickens thought the subscription well worth the cost: "I used, when I was at school, to take in the Terrific Register, making myself unspeakably miserable, and frightening my very wits out of my head, for the small charge of a penny weekly; which, considering that there was an illustration to every number, in which there was always a pool of blood, and at least one body, was cheap." The images seem to have had quite a lasting effect on the young Dickens, as many of them re-appeared in his mature works; Mr. Foscue, the 'Miser that eats himself' may have been one of the inspirations for Ebenezer Scrooge!

Hans Conried does Dixieland

One of the strangest LP's I can remember stumbling upon at a used record shop in many years of browsing, this LP features the inimitable Hans Conried narrating, of all, things, a Dixieland version of Prokofiev's "Peter and the Wolf." I rather suspect that rarely, since Conried's turn as "Dr. Terwilliker" -- the mad piano teacher who condemned "screechy violins" and "nauseating trumpets," did he -- or his listeners -- have quite so much musical fun.

The Polar Dog

Many songs have been sung of the thrilling exploits of Polar explorers, but what of Polar Dogs? This particular dog, exhibited by one "Professor Faber" in 1846 alongside other curiosities such as a dwarf in a bear-skin, may not have in fact hailed from the Arctic seas, but many expedition dogs were publicly exhibited -- three of Dr. Elisha Kent Kane's dogs, "Etah,""Whitey,"and one known as "Myouk, the celebrated Singing Esquimaux Dog" were exhibited in the United States in the 1850's and 1860's.

Goddard College Trail Map, 1979

I picked up this map of the trails on the campus of Goddard College when I was a student there from 1978 to 1980 (the map is dated "Spring 1979"). I knew all of these trails well, and even added a few items to the map and key: two of the improvised treehouses where free spirits could enjoy a vertiginous sojourn, the "Puppeteer's Grave" (this was a memorial to Bill Dalrymple, a key early member of the Bread and Puppet Theater), and the "Zen Garden," established -- along with mysterious wooden xylophones and flutes made out of PVC piping that hung on strings -- by Dennis Murphy, music professor and wizard of these woods. You can also download this map as a .pdf here.

Lucky Bucks

Not long after I was born, my great-grandfather Dr. Elbert H. Clarke left me a note -- I note that I still have today. With it, he enclosed two "Lucky Bucks" -- US "silver certificate" dollars which had already, by the 1960's, grown scarce in general circulation. Dr. Clarke was a math professor at Hiram College, as well as a minister, a lecturer on astronomy, a political writer, and a bit of an adventurer (he decided to try out the Alaska Highway for a drive in 1957, just a few years after it was completed). I still keep one of these "Lucky Bucks" with me at all times!

Lenormand's Astro-Mythological Cards

I've collected Tarot and other fortune-telling card decks over the years, but one of the strangest of all the decks I've seen is one of the first I ever purchased -- the "Astro-Mythological" deck credited to Mademoiselle Lenormand. Like many of my early acquisitions, it was made by B.P. Grimaud in France; the cards are oversized, on very heavy card-stock, and printed in full color. As with other Lenormand decks, cards depicting a man and a woman are used to represent the querent, but this deck has numerous correspondences: each card shows a standard paying card, a constellation, a flower, and an illustrated scene -- on this card, a man in red (a cardinal) is shown in his study next to a clock and a magnetic dip-circle.

Dear Music Sender

Back in 1978, after I'd finished recording an album's worth of solo guitar compositions, the first place I thought to send a tape was the legendary Takoma Records, home to my guitar hero John Fahey. Alas, my demo tape was rejected -- with a letter addressed to "Dear Music Sender" no less! -- but happily, I persevered, and released two LP's on my own Black Snake Records label; keep an eye out for the re-issue of the second of these, coming later in 2018!

Caribou Bill

William Frank "Caribou Bill" Cooper led a storied life, from his days as a dog-musher in Alaska, to the Alaska-Yukon-Pacific exposition of 1909, to New York's Coney Island, to being the proprietor of his own film studio in Saranac Lake, NY. Among the films he produced at his facilities was 1915's "The Shooting of Dan McGrew," based on Marvin Dana's prose adaptation of the Robert W. Service poem -- you can see dozens of stills from this lost film in the GoogleBooks version of the book. In his later years, Bill worked as a consultant for RKO Pictures; he died in a tuberculosis sanatorium in Takoma, Washington on November. 2, 1933.

A Girl and Her Dog

A girl and her dog -- an all-American family moment -- except that this was Nancy Columbia, the most famous Inuit girl of her day. This stereoview was taken at the "Esquimaux Village" at the 1904 St. Louis World's Fair, where Nancy and her family were appearing. Nancy had, in fact, been born at a world's fair -- the 1893 Columbian Exposition  -- and would go on to be a fixture at more than twenty major fairs in the United States, France, Germany, and Spain, as well as appearing in a dozen early silent films, for one of which -- 1911's "The Way of the Eskimo"-- she wrote the scenario (the equivalent of a screenplay for a sound picture). You can read more about Nancy here, and here, and here.

The Burning of the Crystal Palace

On the evening of November 30th, 1936, Mr. Edgar McWilliam was living at 35 Sydenham Park Road not far from the great Crystal Palace, and was on his way to a dinner party a short walk from his home. He and his wife saw a strange glow in the sky -- it was a little after 8 p.m. -- and "wondered what it was." It was the Palace itself, on fire. As they wound their way past fire-engines and hoses up a nearby road, the full extent of the conflagration became apparent, as they saw "the blinding blaze of the C.P. alight from end to end." Edgar wrote an detailed eyewitness account to his son, and quoted the entire text in this letter, which he wrote to his mother the next day. You can read the full letter here.  (I am grateful to Mary Melling of Rancho Palos Verdes, California, for making her great-uncle's letter available.)

New Wave meets Bluegrass, 1980

Back in 1980, Cleveland was a proving ground for all kinds of New Wave and experimental music. And one of the more unusual experiments was this bluegrass version of DEVO's "Mongoloid" which I produced on my own Black Snake label. Bob Frank of the Hotfoot, a musical omnivore, was a fan of DEVO's music and eager to to give it a try, so I booked him and his band into the legendary Boddie Records studio for the recording, with guest mandolinist "Bobbie Smack" (Bob Smakula). The recording session was a hoot, and for good effect Bob rented fake radiation suits and hired John Thompson of "The Drome" record store, who'd done a lot of the early cover work for DEVO, to design the cover. You could spend years searching for this rare '45 -- or you could just listen to it here.

Imaginary Maps

Along with invented languages and manuscripts, maps are often the key to imagined worlds. Certainly, Tolkien's maps of Middle-Earth gave his realm a definite sense of reality, but there are maps, too, of other imagined realms: Utopia, Earthsea, Oz (including its lesser-known neighbors Ev, Ix, and Mo), and the Hundred Acre Wood. This map, which I drew when I was 14, was, like A.A. Milne's a projection of the imagination onto an actual landscape: just sixty acres of trees, brush, and fields -- including part of an abandoned tree-farm -- that lay behind my childhood home on Brainard Road in Ohio.

Invented Artifacts

The invention of seemingly ancient artifacts, from fake rune stones to Tolkien's laboriously-burnt and bloodstained facsimile of the Book of Mazarbul, is an old and perhaps even honorable tradition. Those who turn their gifts to forgery, employing re-used parchment and ancient oak-gall ink, fall far lower, in my view, than those who invent the whole thing. The above "ancient" manuscript is of this latter sort: it's written in Edglash, a language I invented when I was seventeen, along with its own alphabetic script. It's the first page of the Teklo ge Krissor Kal, the "Book of the Children of Kal" -- part of a saga of stories I wrote along Tolkienesque lines. Amateur cryptographers may have at it; I'll post a transcription as soon as I can find one in the "ancient" manila folders in which this imaginary world is stored.

Origins of the (animated) Hobbit

Despite the success of Peter Jackson's in-progress live action Hobbit trilogy, many still fondly remember the Rankin/Bass animated version, which aired on NBC in 1977 and is readily available on DVD today. What's less well-known is that the original treatment of Bilbo was based on work by RISD grad (and later faculty member) Lester Abrams, whose illustrations of Bilbo and Gollum for an excerpt of The Hobbit published in the February 1974 issue of the Children's Digest must have caught their attention. Abrams ended up doing all the original concept art for the animated version, and was also responsible for suggesting to Rankin and Bass that they use the art of Arthur Rackham -- one of his personal favorites -- as a reference. This cover, which predates the animated version by three years, is little-known today, but quite striking in the context of how it shaped Bilbo and Gollum for the boomer generation. More details here on my Tolkien course blog.