Alphonse Allais was a peerless French humorist, celebrated posthumously by the Surrealists for his elegant style and disturbing imagination.  Among other things, he wrote a series of wonderful stories about his friend Albert Caperon.  In Allais’s hands, “Captain Cap” became an adventurer and inventor, with a disdain for bureaucracy and a heroic thirst for cocktails.  […]

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The Fortean Times ran a series about worthwhile books from the past; my appreciation of George Jean Nathan’s New American Credo appeared in issue 147, June 2001.

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I have a fondness for chorales: nuggets of harmony, where I can play around with voice leading.  I wrote several for piano, later incorporated into my 4th String Quartet.  

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My translation of Isidore Isou’s “Considerations on the Death and Burial of Tristan Tzara” is published by Black Scat Books, as the eighth in their elegant chapbook series, “Absurdist Texts and Documents.”  Isou, founder of that unusual literary movement, Letterism, describes his hilarious, often embarrassing, behavior at Tristan Tzara’s funeral.  It’s published in a limited […]

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Jim Moore created the character of Baron Otto von Tu, an aristocratic hermit.  The Baron, in turn, founded Club Recluse, a society for the anti-social.  I wrote the handbook, which included information about the society, tributes to great recluses, and tips for solitary living.  Jim tried to sell membership kits, containing this manual, a certificate, […]

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I designed this flyer and program for a concert with dancer/choreographer Helen Dannenberg, at Mills College in 1979.

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I wrote and performed “A Campaign Speech” for “The General Election Rally Vote Ballot,” an event curated by Mel Brimfield for the Serpentine Gallery in London in 2007.  I appeared via DVD, videoed by Anthony Matt.

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“Cinderella’s Glass Eye” is a bit of fairy tale music, scored for tuba and piano.  There is a story to go with it; here it is.  (Some readers have complained that the images are too small; let me remind them, gently, that you can enlarge a thumbnail by clicking on it.) And here’s the brooding […]

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For Virginia Matthews’s dance “Check Mate,” I provided piano music (severe, contrapuntal, and diatonic), a spoken text (scrambled chess instructions), and chess pieces with bells in them.  This was all back in 1980, in San Francisco.

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