Red Telephone pops up again, in this strip from Another Room #9, 1980. He doesn’t seem happy.

“The Puppet Show,” a large exhibit of artworks relating to puppetry, curated by Ingrid Schaffner and Carin Kuoni, appeared at the Institute of Contemporary Art, University of Pennsylvania, Philadelphia, January 18 – March 30, 2008. It then toured other museums.

Michael Smith and I were represented by some videos of our performances, and a display of some of our puppet props. As you can see from this photo in the catalog, it was very artistic.

It doesn’t seem right for there to be a Gideon Bible in every hotel room; so I often substitute a nice secular book: one by Thomas Love Peacock, for example, or the Baroness Orczy. I had these cards printed for those occasions.

When I visited my family in Beggs, Oklahoma, I became interested in a local curiosity, The Giants’ Highway, or Checkerboard Crossing. The unusually flat limestone bed, crossed with regular cracks, is the subject of much local folklore; and has been marketed at times as a tourist attraction. It had generally escaped the notice of simulacra and rock buffs, so I wrote it up for the October 2005 issue of Fate. This being the 666th issue, they put Crowley on the cover, thereby enraging many pious readers.

Killing time in Besançon, back in 1984, I drew a picture of the building next door.

While researching the life of the novelist and Fortean Tiffany Thayer, I came across an unfamiliar photo of Charles Fort. I passed it along to the Fortean Times, which inspired the art director, Etienne Gilfillan, to search for more. His discoveries were published in the March 2006 issue (#207). I provided captions, and an article on Fort’s friendship with Dreiser.

A love song to the viola, lamenting that the poor instrument is usually relegated to offbeats, set to viola offbeats. The viola does play a solo at the end, though.

This bustling prelude is taken from the music I wrote for Bill Irwin’s show The Courtroom, back in 1985. And it starts out like this.

I am intrigued by the hapax legomenon, a word that appears only once in a given work, author, or language. For a musical equivalent, I placed one F♯ against randomized 4-pitch diatonic arpeggios in C.