From the May 20, 1994 issue of the Boston Globe:

A special thanks to Faceisonfire for sending this article from microfilm and providing the following description of images!

(Article continuous on one page, four columns. Above the article are three stills of Crispin making specific gestures {1. right fore finger to mouth, eyes squinting in contemplation, 2. right forefinger pointing straight up, head tilted slightly left with wide eyes aimed slightly left of camera POV, 3. right hand down almost out of frame, head still tilted as before, now grinning, same eye position only not so wide} in a jacket and black turtle-neck shirt. I identify the stills as from the scene of the meeting between him and Tate Donovan in Little Noises. The caption reads "From the film "Little Noises." The interview snippet 'I am a pretty normal person, actually.' appears in bold at the top of the third column. All syntax, grammatical, spelling, spacing, etc. errors are reproduced exactly as in the original article)

By Jim Sullivan

"I can see why I'm perceived as strange certainly," muses Crispin Glover, "but I am a pretty normal person, actually. I keep a fairly regular schedule, and definitely people in my personal life don't think of me as strange." Nevertheless, as an actor he's perhaps best known for his roles in the "Back to the Future" movies, and he has played odd and creepy characters in other films. He stuffed cockroaches down his pants for a cameo in "Wild at Heart." He played a nerd in bell-bottoms wandering around the desert with a hubcap tied to his head, dragging a cooler containing his thawed corpse of a dead cat, in "Rubin and Ed." He played a cynical, nasty teen-ager who protects a friend who killed his girlfriend in "River's Edge."

As a writer/text reassembler he has released three books, "Concrete Inspection," "Rat Catching" and "Oak Mot." As a recording artist he has released one album, "The Bis Problem {does not equal) The Solution. The Solution = Let It Be," which includes a funny rap ode to masturbation and a sweet/creepy version of "The Daring Young Man on His Flying Trapeze," the daring young man likes checking out the opposite gender. His remake of the Nancy Sinatra song, "These Boots Are Made for Walking," is positively twisted and tortured.

As a talk show guest, he was hustled off "Late Night With David Letterman" after he had the temerity to try to kick the host in the head.

So Glover - who shows up to perform Sunday night at the Middle East Downstairs, as well as sign books and CDs at the Institute of Contemporary Art on Saturday at 3 p.m. - wonders about possible audience expectations, on the phone from his home in Los Angeles.

"I don't know if they expect me to be peculiar or not," he says of the Sunday night performance. "I describe the presentation itself as highly straightforward. They're going to show his film, "The Orkly Kid," which is a film they made a long time ago. It's really an excellent movie, just 35 minutes long. It's based on this fellow who dresses up as Olivia Newton-John when he's by himself. He wants to get into show biz. I'm proud of this."

Peculiar? Depends on your point of view.

Then Glover, 30, will read from his three books, all of which are cut-and-paste remakes of books originally from the 19th century. "I've reworked them," says Glover, "put illustrations in and made new stories."

Glover interrupts himself to explain the chomping sound accompanying this phone chat: "I haven't eaten yet, so I'm chewing." Back to the books ..., "So I had slides of these books taken and I'll be presenting the books, reading along with the slides. No music."

Glover, who does sing and write, has recorded a new album called "The Big Love," which he calls simpler than the "Let It Be" sonic pastiche. "It's not necessarily love songs," he says, "but it's things that have to do with love. I feel like the first album was more of an intellectual exercise and this new one is more of an audio experience."

Sunday night's performance is not a regular part of Glover's multimedia gig. He did a reading at a film festival where they were showing his movies in Olympia, Wash. He did a reading on the late "Dennis Miller Show." He's doing this one because Timothy Fichter of Boston's Speedway Gallery "contacted me a while back about getting involved in an art project and he put this together."

Before coming to Cambridge, Glover headed to France for the Cannes Film Festival. There, he wanted to attract financial backing for a screenplay he's written, "The Jeff Jones Experience," which he would like to star in and direct. "It's about a fellow who is born with the unfortunate neurological disease cerebral palsy," explains Glover. "He's kind of a shut-in, so he wants to start a rock 'n' roll band called the Jeff Jones Experience, and he ends up becoming friends with Gary Coleman, who would play himself and ... that's it."

Is there any conflict here?

"The conflict has to do with Jeff Jones' mind. There's a problem where his mind doesn't really want him to become integrated into society and he has to battle with that, which is visually and dramatically represented."

Glover has been fortunate to balance mainstream movies such as the "Back to the Future" films - he plays Michael J. Fox's dad, Marty McFly - with more experimental fare like "Twister," "Rubin and Ed" and "Little Noises." He is in the new Gus Van Sant film, "Even Cowgirls Get the Blues."

Glover likes movies - big or small. "I like coming in and doing a short part in a film - I can enjoy that quite a bit. I hope I'll be able to continue doing that. I definitely also like to play the larger parts; it's a different kind of concentration."

Is there a thread that connects the characters Glover plays?

"Even if I knew, I wouldn't like to say," he says. " 'Cause I would feel pretentious. I always feel it's better to let other people say what your theme is rather than state it. If you don't achieve, you look kind of silly."

A typical role, then, would not be, say, someone not mentally all together?

"Not necessarily," Glover says. "I've certainly played people that are mentally together. It depends on what your point of view on 'together' is."

So, if you do look at Glover and think there might be a screw or two loose, he hopes you can make the distinction between art and real life: "That's probably my artistic sense of mind rather than my lifestyle."