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!

A melancholy scrap of Shelley; it seemed to call for an equally melancholy round in 5/4.

Some low-tech stereoscopy: cross your eyes to see the fly hover over the bed.  It will probably work better if you click to enlarge it first.

A button showing the back of a button, made on my handy home machine.  Celebrate the other side!

In 1996, listener-sponsored radio station WFMU issued a set of playing cards as a premium for subscribers. The theme was “Missing Persons,” and each card illustrated someone who had disappeared. I was assigned the clubs, and I drew each from the viewpoint of the person who vanished.  The ace and face cards were drawn by other artists (George Erling, Krystine Kryttre, Diane Farris, Chris Ware); the box above was by Wm Graef. A 60 page booklet told the stories.

Here are my cards, with a key below (and, as always, I hope you realize that you can click to enlarge).

2: Karl Hunrath and Wilbur J. Wilkinson, UFO buffs who planned to meet with aliens from the planet Masar; their plane was found abandoned in the desert. (1953)

3: Dr. Ludwig Leichhardt, who never returned from searching for giant wombats in Australia. (1848)

4: Rudolf Diesel, who went missing on a ship crossing the English Channel. (1913)

5: Carl Robert Disch, who disappeared between two buildings in Antarctica. (1965)

6: Owen Parfitt, a elderly disabled man who vanished after his sister propped him up in a chair outside and went inside for fifteen minutes. (1768)

7: Harold Holt, Australian Prime Minister who never came back from a swim; a shark is suspected. (1967)

8: Louis XVII, the “lost dauphin,” shown here spirited away in a basket. (1792)

9: The Roanoke Colony, English settlers in North America, who abandoned their settlement, leaving a post inscribed with the word CROATOAN. (1590)

10: Dorothy Arnold, an heiress who disappeared among puzzling circumstances; Charles Fort suggested that she had turned into a swan. (1910)