Nobody had really done much research into Tiffany Thayer, the founder of the original Fortean Society, and an entertaining character in his own right. So, I did; and wrote an article on him for the special 200th issue of the Fortean Times, in 2005. I read Thayer’s books, dug up photos and reviews of him, and found a copy of a film he acted in. You can read it here. (UPDATE: The link no longer works, since FT has revamped its website.)

The original article was published as “Doubting Tiffany”; and included my capsule summaries of his books. The summaries were fun to write, and are not included in the link above, so I’ll post them here.

You can get 49 pages of my keyboard music in this photocopied dossier. Let me know if you want one.

It contains excerpts from dance and theater scores, examples from lectures, harmonizations, Solrésol translations, occasional pieces, gags, and experiments.

The pieces are:

Stumbling Block
Rameau’s Nephew
Spang
Aubade
Rousseau’s Three-Note Tune
The Party Next Door
Quickstep
Music for Piano-Zither
Guesstimate
Honorificabilitudinitatibus
Infix
Dip
Aretino in Solrésol
On a Theme by Lewis Carroll
Ineffervescence
It All Went Pfft
Clot
The Underground Mountain Concert in Norway

A round to see in a new year. It’s palindromic, except for that flickering F and F#.

I drew Charles Fort for the cover of the 72nd issue of the INFO Journal, published by the International Fortean Organization. The drawing has also been reproduced on a tee-shirt, and a few other places. Whenever it’s reprinted, I add a few more scraps of paper.

“A Grim Reckoning” is one of my more gothic offerings. It began its life as incidental organ music for “Misguiding Lights,” a dance/theater piece by Pam Quinn and Michael O’Connor. I reworked it for viola and electronic organ, and performed it on the “No Soap Radio” series at Dance Theater Workshop, in NYC, in 1996, with David Gold on viola.

Here’s the first page.

On the occasion of Jim Steinmeyer’s biography of Charles Fort, I contributed an article to Fate on Fort’s books: his style, models, and reception. Among other things, I pointed out his Pyrrhonist and Bohemian tendencies; and compared his comic and speculative use of science with Jarry’s ‘pataphysics. Here’s the first page.

That gentleman of the pen, Danny Hellman, published this comic strip in his anthology Typhon, in 2008. I originally drew it for performance, which is why the dialogue is not contained within the balloons. Here’s how it begins.

How did I ever end up in a movie? I don’t even watch movies.

However — I was appearing, yet again, in Bill Irwin’s show The Regard of Flight, and casting agents noticed me. I auditioned for a movie called Three Men and a Baby (as one of the three men, not as the baby). I didn’t get that part, but was eventually assigned a small part in Crocodile Dundee II. I emerged from a toilet stall during a tense moment, retreated, and then emerged again to say “He’s gone.”

I have no idea if the movie was nice, since I never got around to watching it.

The curious thing is that friends and family (especially family) saw the fact that I delivered one line in a movie as much more important and interesting than anything else I did. For me, it was just a lark, a chance to earn a few bucks. My fellow citizens often mystify me.

A round on a trenchant scrap of Yeats. Hear, hear!

A funereal snippet, to illustrate a point of physical comedy in a performance with Bill Irwin, at the Walter Reade Theater (NYC) in 1999.