The microphone is such an essential part of music-making that I thought it needed a song of its own. Here’s the first bit of it.

This article on Xavier Forneret, “the Unknown Romantic,” appeared in the third issue of Strange Attractor Journal (2006), edited by Mark Pilkington. I translated two of Forneret’s transcriptions of his dreams, for which Betsy Heistand provided illustrations.

Here’s the first page:

When I was in Perth, playing piano for an IBM industrial, I spent some time drawing kangaroos in my sketchbook. There’s nothing like drawing kangaroos.

“Walter & Benny Strike a Deal” appeared in Legal Action Comics #2, an anthology edited and published by Danny Hellman in 2003 to raise funds for his continuing legal troubles with Ted Rall. Benny’s name was originally Danny, but I rechristened him so that readers wouldn’t think he was a puzzlingly inaccurate caricature of Hellman. Their adventures had first aired as a slide show, which is why the captions are below the panels. Here’s the first page.

Danny Hellman made up a page with digital shading, which was very pretty; but I opted for the directness of unalloyed pen and ink.

Ventriloquists! Thirty of them, here colorized for your enjoyment. Some of them have turned up on postcards for the “Carousel” series.

The photocopied dossier you see here collects 49 pages of my songs, mostly for voice and piano. Do let me know if you would like one.

The songs (and the texts) are:

Epitaph (Richard Corbett)
Greenaway Pictures (Kate Greenaway, Jane and Ann Taylor)
We Have No Life Beyond Our Daily Life (Doug Skinner)
En Route (Blaise Cendrars, in my translation)
When I Sleep (Gertrude Stein)
Anecdote (Jean de La Fontaine, in my translation)
My Mistake (Doug Skinner)
Why Do We Have To Die? (from The Book of Wonders)
Im Hinterland (H. L. Mencken)
The Inchworm (Doug Skinner)
The Oatmeal Song (Doug Skinner)

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.