A button showing the back of a button, made on my handy home machine.  Celebrate the other side!  

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The second issue of Black Scat Review contains one of my series “Shorten the Classics.”  Not this one, another.  Black Scat Review is available from Black Scat Books.

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This is a very earnest song; and this is how it begins.

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The first issue of Black Scat Review is now out!  Among its interesting contents is my translation of “The Man in the Iron Mask,” by Pierre-Henri Cami.  Cami is now mostly forgotten by English readers, but he once published in Vanity Fair and was lauded by Chaplin.  He specialized in fast-moving, gag-driven playlets; he’s sometimes […]

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White Knuckle Sandwich (Jennifer Duffy, Anne Shapiro, and I) recorded this song of mine on our eponymous album.  I also made a semi-animated paper cutout cartoon of it for the old “internet TV station,” pseudo.com, back in 1999.  Anney Bonney was at the camera.  It’s up on YouTube now, and you can watch it if […]

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I wrote the score for Katie Nelson’s dance “Blunders” back in 1980.  Frankie Mann recorded it; I played all the instruments, including piano, toy piano, ‘cello, organ, and percussion.  Here’s the first page.

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Michele Larsson put together The Big Show in 1978, in connection with an exhibit devoted to Loie Fuller at the California Palace of the Legion of Honor, in San Francisco.  I provided music, which was mostly improvised, as I recall; Tony Gnazzo talked and rode an exercise bike; Helen Dannenberg and Michele danced.

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“The Baptistown Crawl” is a delightful and catchy tune, recorded by “Hitch’s Happy Harmonists” in 1924.  Historians remember the band as the first that Hoagy Carmichael recorded with.  This tune, however, seems to have been written by the leader, Curtis Hitch.  I transcribed it, and arranged it for viola and piano, in which form David […]

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