This slice of life appeared in the sole issue of Carousel Comics and Stories in 2004.

These are pinbacks; let me know if you want one.

“Oh,” for psaltery or keyboard, is brief, diatonic, freely metered. It’s a simple stirring of the strings, often landing on sevenths and sixths; it’s as slight as I could make it. Here’s how it begins.

White Knuckle Sandwich used to perform this lively number. I’ve resurrected it, added a viola part, and am now performing it with David Gold. And it begins in this way.

This piece is written for the “cloudboard,” a keyboard instrument that generates clouds; naturally, it uses the standard symbols for cloud formations. Since the instrument does not exist, the piece cannot be performed. I regret the inconvenience.

You have the first bit of the piece here.

And now might be a good time to reread Baudelaire’s “L’étranger,” from Le Spleen de Paris.

“Let’s Ask Skinner” ran in Crimewave USA, edited by Mark Maynard and Linette Lao, from 1996 to 2003. It usually included both accurate and inaccurate misinformation, plugs for my other projects, toilet humor, and mockery of organized skeptics and the Grateful Dead — the last not from any animus on my part, but simply to provoke peevish mail from certain readers who held those topics sacred. The questions were sent in by readers, provided by the editors, or swiped from other publications. Here’s a sample.

George Kuchar and John Keel visit my studio, in one of George’s inimitable videos. In other sections, George visits Mimi Gross and Whitley Strieber.

I wrote this glum little tune back in 1983, when I was staying in Nancy. It was choreographed by Pam Quinn for a concert at Dance Theater Workshop (in NYC) in 1985.

Here’s the first part of it.

This realization of Mozart’s “Musical Game in C” (K.516f) was written for an evening organized by the Cannery Works on Mozart’s birthday, January 27, 2005. Mozart’s piece gave the materials to construct minuets on the names of his friends; I applied it to “Cannery Works,” and harmonized the result.

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.