Black Scat Review 3 is out!  I contribute a translation of Alphonse Allais’s story “Absinthes,” as well as translations of texts about Allais by François Caradec and Jules Renard.  You can purchase this desirable publication at Black Scat Books.

I do love Billy Reid’s 1945 song “The Gypsy,” so I wrote this viola part so that I could perform it with David Gold.

“Walter & Danny Start Out to Go to the Beach, But Instead — No, Wait, I Don’t Want to Give Away the Plot” was one of my first cartoon slideshows, first unveiled in 1985 or thereabouts.  It has since been refurbished.  Danny became Benny in later adventures in publications edited by Danny Hellman, so that readers wouldn’t think I had drawn a poor portrait of Hellman.

In this epic tale, our two heroes decide to go to the beach, find out it’s raining, and go to the zoo instead.  Overwhelmed by the number of animals, they decide to look at them in alphabetical order, but can’t think of an animal that begins with an L.  So they go home.

Here are a few panels:

A song about falling asleep with the radio on.  As the chorus reminds us, You’ve got to wake up to turn the radio off.

“What You Cannot Eat You Can” was a solo performance piece I did with the Oberlin Dance Collective back in 1977, out in San Francisco.  It involved found verses, non-magic tricks, painted plastic eggs, and water; in the course of it, I changed a set of riddles into their answers.  Here are a few pages from my notebooks for the piece, including a rare photo of my 1977 beard, followed by a review from Nancy Steele, The Daily Californian, 12/16/77.

Francisque Sarcey (1827-1899) was, for much of his career, the most powerful theatrical critic in Paris. He was the perfect model of the blunt bourgeois, championing common sense, anti-intellectualism, and traditional values. He favored light, commercial fare, and railed against Ibsen and Jarry.

He was, predictably, a prime target for young artists. Alphonse Allais took the ridicule to new heights: from 1886 to 1893, he wrote a regular column for Le Chat Noir, which he simply signed as Francisque Sarcey. The pseudo-Sarcey became a grotesque caricature of the smug middle class, a sort of proto-Ubu: an obese, gluttonous, lecherous, hypocritical dolt, prattling on about his constipation and hemorrhoids, in loosely-knit sentences studded with clichés.

“How I Became an Idiot” collects four of Allais’s nastiest columns, translated, introduced and annotated by Doug Skinner.  It’s available in a limited edition of 60 from Black Scat Books. None of this material has appeared in English before: snap one up!