The clip above aired back in 2013 on “This Is Radio Clash,” a radio show hosted by the Clash’s Mick Jones, Paul Simonon and Topper Headon. “Hello everybody,” this is David Bowie making a telephone call from the US of A. At this time of the year I can’t help but remember my British-ness and all the jolly British folk, so here’s to you and have yourselves a Merry little Christmas and a Happy New Year. Thank you very much.”
It’s maybe not as memorable as his 1977 Christmas duet with Bing Crosby, but, hey, it’s still a fun little way to get the holiday season in swing.
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In January, 1970—with a line that might have come right out of any number of current opinion pieces taking the media to task—Rolling Stone ripped into Time, Life, Newsweek, the New York Times for their coverage of the 1969 Altamont Free Concert: “When the news media know what the public wants to hear and what they want to believe, they give it to them.”
What did the public want to hear? Apparently that Altamont was “Woodstock West,” full of “peace and love” and “good vibes.” Since, however, it was “undeniable that one man was actually murdered at the concert, a certain minimal adjustment was made, as if that event had been the result of some sort of unpredictable act of God, like a stray bolt of lightning.” The murdered fan, 18-year-old Meredith Hunter, was not, of course, killed by lightning, but stabbed to death by one of the Hell’s Angels who were hired as informal security guards.
Hunter was killed “just 20 feet in front of the stage where Mick Jagger was performing ‘Under My Thumb,’” writes the History Channel: “Unaware of what had just occurred, the Rolling Stones completed their set without further incident, bringing an end to a tumultuous day that also saw three accidental deaths and four live births.”
We know the moment best from the Maysles brothers concert film Gimme Shelter, which opens with a scene of Jagger viewing footage of the violence. See the unrest during “Sympathy for the Devil,” above, and the confused scene of the killing during “Under My Thumb,” further down.
It’s one of the few dark days in the history of rock. This was the anti-Woodstock. It also took place in December of 1969, so it bookmarked the end of the ‘60s in a chronological way. The loss of innocence that day really is why this has lasted and why it endures as a cultural touchstone.
The loss of American innocence is an old trope that assumes the country, at some mythical time in the past, was a blameless paradise. But who was to blame for Altamont? The Stones were not held legally accountable, nor was the biker who stabbed Hunter. In another echo from the past into the present, he was acquitted on self-defense grounds. “What happened at Altamont,” was also “not the music’s fault,” writes The New Yorker’s Richard Brody, who blames “Celebrity” and a loss of “benevolent spirits… the idea of the unproduced.”
To ascribe such incredible weight to this incident—to mark it as the end of peace and love and the birth of “infrastructure” and “authority,” as Brody does—seems historically tone deaf. Strictly from the point of view of the Stones’ musical development, we might say that the close of the sixties and the year of Altamont marked a transition to a darker, grittier period, the end of the band’s forays into psychedelia and folk music. That summer, Brian Jones drowned in his swimming pool. And the band followed the sneering “Under My Thumb” at Altamont with a brand new tune, “Brown Sugar,” a song about slavery and rape.
You can hear the first live performance of the song at the top of the post, captured in an audience recording, two years before its official recording and release on 1971’s Sticky Fingers. “It was a song of sadism,” writes Stanley Booth, “savagery, race hate/love, a song of redemption, a song that accepted the fear of night, blackness, chaos, the unknown.” It’s a song that would face instant backlash were it released today. “Twitter would lampoon [the band] with carefully thought out hashtags,” writes Lauretta Charlton, “Multiple Change.org petitions would be signed. The band would be forced to issue an apology.”
Jagger himself said in 1995, “I would never write that song now. I would probably censor myself.” And he has, in many subsequent performances, changed some of the most outrageous lyrics. Charlton confesses to loving and hating the song, calling it “gross, sexist, and stunningly offensive toward black women.” And yet, she says, “When I hear ‘Brown Sugar,’ the outrage hits me like a postscript, and by that point I’m too busy clapping and singing along to be indignant.” Surrounded by the violence at Altamont, Jagger channeled the violence of history in a raunchy blues that—like “Under My Thumb” and “Sympathy for the Devil”—captures the seductive nature of power and sexualized aggression, and gives the lie to facile ideas of innocence, whether of the past or of the contemporary social and political late-sixties scene.
You have to hand it to the English: they know how to do Christmas right. Maybe it has to do with their respect for tradition, maybe with their sense of occasion, maybe with their aptitude for pageantry, and maybe with their compulsion, for all that, not to take anything too seriously. It helps that they also produce performers of the highest caliber, especially of the oratorical variety: Monty Python’s John Cleese, for instance, or man of letters and all-around entertaining personality Stephen Fry. And so today, with its titular eve nearly here, we give you both of those Englishmen’s renditions of “ ‘Twas the Night Before Christmas.”
Fry’s reading at the top of the post, which comes with orchestral backing, adheres closely to Clement Clarke Moore’s original 1823 text. The poem, for those who’ve never spent Christmas in an English-speaking country, tells of a father awakened in the middle of the night by none other than Santa Claus, come to deliver his family’s presents. More recently, Fry narrated another story of Santa Claus in “Santa Forgot,” an animated promotional video for Alzheimer’s Research UK that uses the beloved figure glimpsed so vividly in Moore’s poem to raise awareness of dementia and the research dedicated to curing it.
In his reading of “ ‘Twas The Night Before Christmas” just above, John Cleese modernizes the story, freighting it with references to safety belts, flat-screen televisions, and Apple computers — and ending with Santa Claus captured by the father: “So he now lives with us, locked up in the cellar. We go down each day to see the old fellow and get our new presents. And we ate the reindeer, so we’re sorry but Christmas is canceled next year.” Cleese has a tendency to display such irreverence to the holiday. “So sad to see u end with a tirade against Christmas,” tweeted someone who’d attended a live show of his and Eric Idle’s last month in Arizona. “Not against Christmas,” Cleese fired back, “against its commercial exploitation. Big difference, which the rest of the audience understood.”
Nothing like a bracing shot of English wit to treat an overdose of commercialism, especially of the powerful American variety. But for all the mastery of Christmas on the other side of the pond, Clarke Moore, an American, defined the very character of Santa Claus in the popular imagination — a spry old gentleman with rose-like cheeks and a cherry-line nose, a beard “as white as the snow,” and “a little round belly that shook when he laughed, like a bowlful of jelly.” “ ‘Twas the Night Before Christmas,” originally titled “A Visit from Saint Nicholas,” remains quite possibly the best-known poem ever written by an American. But wherever in the world one reads them, Santa Claus’ final words, and the poem’s, still resonate: “Happy Christmas to all, and to all a good-night!”
Taught by Yale professor Donald Kagan, this introductory course in Greek history traces “the development of Greek civilization as manifested in political, intellectual, and creative achievements from the Bronze Age to the end of the classical period.” In it, students “read original sources in translation as well as the works of modern scholars.” You can watch the 24 video lectures above, or find them on YouTube. The lectures also appear on iTunes in audio and video. Find the texts used in the course below. More information about the course, including the syllabus, can be found on this Yale website.
Pomeroy, Burstein, Donlan and Roberts. Ancient Greece. Oxford University Press: New York, 1999.
Kagan, Donald. “Problems in Ancient History.” In The Ancient Near East and Greece. 2nd ed., vol. 1. Prentice-Hall: New York, 1975.
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Say you find yourself in a one-party state that promises to dismantle every civil institution you believe in and trample every ethical principle you hold dear. You may feel a little despondent. While a “this too shall pass” attitude may help you gain perspective, the problem isn’t simply that you’re on the losing side of a political contest. As George Orwell wrote in 1984, total authoritarian control means that “Who controls the past controls the future. Who controls the present controls the past.” The epistemic baseline you took for granted may become increasingly, frighteningly elusive as the ruling party reshapes all of reality to its designs.
With more vivid clarity than perhaps anyone since, Orwell characterized the mechanisms by which totalitarianism takes hold. His 1948 novel has not only given us a near-universal set of terms to describe the phenomenon, but it also gives us a metric: when our society begins to resemble Orwell’s dystopia in pervasive and alarming ways, we should know without question things have gone badly wrong. Whether we can do much about it is another question, but we should remember that Orwell himself was not simply an armchair observer of Fascism, Soviet totalitarianism, or oppressive English colonial rule. He fought Franco’s forces in Spain during the Spanish Civil War and as a journalist wrote critical articles and essays exposing hypocrisies and abuses of law and language. The impact of his work on later generations speaks for itself.
In the CBC radio documentary The Orwell Tapes, in three parts here, we have a comprehensive introduction to Orwell’s work, thought, and life. It opens with alarming soundbites from lightning rods (and villains or heroes, depending on who you ask) Julian Assange and Edward Snowden. But it doesn’t stray into the clichéd territory of overheated conspiracy those names often inspire. Instead we’re largely treated throughout each episode to firsthand accounts of the subject from those who knew him well.
“CBC is the only media organization in the world,” says host Paul Kennedy, “with a comprehensive archive of recordings featuring people who knew Orwell, from his earliest days, to his final moments. 75 people, 50 hours of recordings.” Edited snippets of these audio recordings make up the bulk of The Orwell Tapes, hence the title, making the program oral history rather than sensationalism. The interviewees include friends, former girlfriends, comrades-in-arms, and critical opponents. Each episode’s page on the CBC site features a list of names and relations to Orwell at the bottom.
But of course, accusations of sensationalism always follow those who warn of Orwellian trends and tendencies. Like many of our contemporaries, Orwell was a contradictory figure. He served as a colonial policeman in Burma even as he grew disgusted with Empire; he considered himself a Democratic Socialist, but he never looked away from the authoritarian horrors of state communism; and he has been held up as a pillar of resistance to state surveillance and control, even as he also stands accused of “naming names.” But the overall impression we get from Orwell’s friends and colleagues is that he was fully committed—to writing, to political engagement, to telling the truth as he saw it.
In releasing The Orwell Tapes this month, the CBC gives us five reasons why Orwell “is still very much with us today.” Some of these—modern surveillance, the corruptions of power (and the power of corruption)—will be familiar, as will number 3, a variation on what we’ve come to call “empathy” for one’s opponent. The 4th reason, CBC notes, is the renewed relevance of socialism as a viable alternative to capitalist predation. And finally, we have the continued danger of speaking truth to power, and to those who serve it religiously, uncritically, and often violently. As Orwell wrote in the preface to Animal Farm, “If liberty means anything at all, it means the right to tell people what they don’t want to hear.”
The writer David Auerbach once posted a fascinating inquest on left-brained literature, an examination of what he calls “a parallel track of literature that is popular specifically among engineers,” excluding genre fiction (science- or otherwise), with an eye toward “which novels of some notoriety and good PR happen to attract members of the engineering professions.” Favored author names turn out to include Richard Powers, Umberto Eco, Haruki Murakami, William Gibson, Italo Calvino, and Jorge Luis Borges.
More of these literarily inclined left-brainers exist than one might imagine. From the publisher’s point of view, what cover art could best attract them? Books targeted toward that demographic could do far worse than to use the work of M.C. Escher, who spent his career with one foot in art and the other in mathematics.
In the hitherto unseen (and even unimagined) worlds pictured in his woodcuts, lithographs, and mezzotints, he made use of mathematical concepts from tessellation to reflection to infinity in ways at once impossible and somehow plausible, all of them still intellectually and aesthetically compelling today.
The non-novelist Douglas Hofstadter appears in Auerbach’s inquest since his best-known work, Gödel, Escher, Bach: an Eternal Golden Braid, “which partly uses fictional forms, is too great not to list.” Not only does Escher’s name appear in Hofstadter’s book title, his art informs its central concepts. “Hofstadter wove a network of connections linking the mathematics of Gödel, the art of Escher, and the music of Bach,” writes Allene M. Parker in the paper “Drawing Borges: a Two-Part Invention on the Labyrinths of Jorge Luis Borges and M.C. Escher.” In Gödel, Escher, Bach he describes their common denominator as a “strange loop,” a phenomenon that “occurs whenever, by movement upwards (or downwards) through the levels of some hierarchical system, we unexpectedly find ourselves right back where we started.”
Parker identifies 1948’s “Drawing Hands” as a “particularly striking and familiar example” of a strange loop in Escher’s work. We can interpret that image by recognizing that “it is Escher, the artist, who is drawing both hands and who stands outside this particular puzzle.” Or we can “adopt a Zen-inspired solution and let mystery be mystery by choosing to embrace a unity which contains oppositions,” such as one described by the opening of Borges’ poem “Labyrinths”:
There’ll never be a door. You’re inside
and the keep encompasses the world
and has neither obverse nor reverse
nor circling in secret center.
The Escher-Borges connections go deeper beyond, and as you can see in John Coulthart’s original post, the selection of Escher-covered books extends farther.
Aside from countless nonfiction publications, the Dutch mathematical master’s work has graced science-fiction and fantasy magazines, one edition of Flatland, a collection of “Forteana, weird fiction, occultism and historical speculation,” Clive Barker’s The Damnation Game, and George Orwell’s 1984, a novel more widely read than ever by the left- and right-brained alike. But no matter which hemisphere we favor, Escher — like Orwell, Borges, and Calvino — shows us how to see reality in more interesting ways.
Satellite-connected devices do all the hard work of navigation for us: plan journeys, plot distances, tell us where we are and where we’re going. The age of the highly skilled cartographer may be coming to an end. But in the past few hundred years—since European states began carving the world between them—the winners of colonial contests, World War battles, and Cold War skirmishes were often those who had the best maps. In addition to their indispensable role in seafaring and battle strategy, “good maps,” writes Danny Lewis at Smithsonian, have been “an integral part of the tradecraft of espionage.”
The CIA will tell you as much… or they will now, at least, since they’ve declassified decades of once-secret maps from the days when they “relied on geographers and cartographers for planning and executing operations around the world” rather than on “digital mapping technologies and satellite images.”
Now celebrating its 75th anniversary, the CIA’s Cartography Center boasts of “a long, proud history of service to the Intelligence Community,” at the Agency’s friendly website; “Since 1941, the Cartography Center maps have told the stories of post-WWII reconstruction, the Suez crisis, the Cuban Missile crisis, the Falklands War, and many other important events in history.”
Whatever noble or nefarious roles the Agency may have played in these and hundreds of other events, we can now see–thanks to this new online gallery at Flickr–what presidents, Directors, and field agents saw when they planned their actions, beginning with the country’s first “non-departmental intelligence organization,” the COI (Office of the Coordinator of Information). Once the U.S. entered WWII, it became the Office of Strategic Services (OSS). The Cartography Center’s first chief, Arthur Robinson, was only 26 and a graduate student in geography when COI director William Donovan recruited him to lead the organization. The office rapidly expanded during the war, and by 1943, “geographers and cartographers amassed what would be the largest collection of maps in the world.”
In the early forties, “map layers were drafted by hand using pen and ink on translucent acetate sheets mounted on large Strathmore boards.” These drafts were typically four times larger than the printed maps themselves, one of which you can see at the top of the post, “The Russian Front in Review.” In the fifties, “improved efficiency in map compilation and construction” produced visually striking documents like that further up from 1955, “USSR: Regional Distribution of Gross National Product.” Not a map, but what we would call an infographic, this image shows how the Cartography Center performed services far in excess of the usual map app—visualizing threats to the U.S. from Cuban surface-to-air missile sites in 1962 (above) and threats to the African elephant population from poachers in 2013 (below). Further down, you can see a 2003 map of Baghdad, with the ominously non-threatening note printed at the top and right, “This map is NOT to be used for TARGETING.”
These maps and many more can be found at the CIA Cartography Flickr account, which has a category for each decade since the 1940s. Each map is downloadable in low to high resolution scans. In addition, one category, “Cartography Tools,” features high-quality photography of vintage draughtsman’s instruments, all of them, like the German-made ink pens further down, symbols of the painstaking handicraft mapmaking once required. While we can probably draw any number of political lessons or historical theses from a deep analysis of this deep state archive, what it seems to ask of us first and foremost is that we consider cartography as not only a useful discipline but as a fine art.
As the Cartography Center’s first director put it, “a map should be aesthetically pleasing, thought-provoking, and communicative.” Given these standards we might see how current technology, for all its tremendous ease of use and undeniable utility, might improve by looking to maps of the past. Visit the CIA’s flickr gallery here.
Google has created a free Python class designed for “people with a little bit of programming experience who want to learn Python.” A fortunate thing since Python is a computer language that’s now strongly in demand. (By the way, did you know that Python takes its name from Monty Python? A true story.)
The class includes “written materials, lecture videos, and lots of code exercises to practice Python coding. These materials are used within Google to introduce Python to people who have just a little programming experience. The first exercises work on basic Python concepts like strings and lists, building up to the later exercises which are full programs dealing with text files, processes, and http connections. The class is geared for people who have a little bit of programming experience in some language, enough to know what a “variable” or “if statement” is. Beyond that, you do not need to be an expert programmer to use this material.
If you’re looking for a generally well-reviewed textbook, consider Learning Python, 5th edition (from O’Reilly Media.
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The life of Russian-born poet, novelist, critic, and first female psychologist Lou Andreas-Salomé has provided fodder for both salacious speculation and intellectual drama in film and on the page for the amount of romantic attention she attracted from European intellectuals like philosopher Paul Rée, poet Rainer Maria Rilke, and Friedrich Nietzsche. Emotionally intense Nietzsche became infatuated with Salomé, proposed marriage, and, when she declined, broke off their relationship in abrupt Nietzschean fashion.
For her part, Salomé so valued these friendships she made a proposal of her own: that she, Nietzsche and Rée, writes D.A. Barry at 3:AM Magazine, “live together in a celibate household where they might discuss philosophy, literature and art.” The idea scandalized Nietzsche’s sister and his social circle and may have contributed to the “passionate criticism” Salomé’s 1894 biographical study, Friedrich Nietzsche: The Man and His Works, received. The “much maligned” work deserves a reappraisal, Barry argues, as “a psychological portrait.”
In Nietzsche, Salomé wrote, we see “sorrowful ailing and triumphal recovery, incandescent intoxication and cool consciousness. One senses here the close entwining of mutual contradictions; one senses the overflowing and voluntary plunge of over-stimulated and tensed energies into chaos, darkness and terror, and then an ascending urge toward the light and most tender moments.” We might see this passage as charged by the remembrance of a friend, with whom she once “climbed Monte Sacro,” she claimed, in 1882, “where he told her of the concept of the Eternal Recurrence ‘in a quiet voice with all the signs of deepest horror.’”
We should also, perhaps primarily, see Salomé’s impressions as an effect of Nietzsche’s turbulent prose, reaching its apotheosis in his experimentally philosophical novel, Thus Spake Zarathustra. As a theorist of the embodiment of ideas, of their inextricable relation to the physical and the social, Nietzsche had some very specific ideas about literary style, which he communicated to Salomé in an 1882 note titled “Toward the Teaching of Style.” Well before writers began issuing “similar sets of commandments,” writes Maria Popova at Brain Pickings, Nietzsche “set down ten stylistic rules of writing,” which you can find, in their original list form, below.
1. Of prime necessity is life: a style should live.
2. Style should be suited to the specific person with whom you wish to communicate. (The law of mutual relation.)
3. First, one must determine precisely “what-and-what do I wish to say and present,” before you may write. Writing must be mimicry.
4. Since the writer lacks many of the speaker’s means, he must in general have for his model a very expressive kind of presentation of necessity, the written copy will appear much paler.
5. The richness of life reveals itself through a richness of gestures. One must learn to feel everything — the length and retarding of sentences, interpunctuations, the choice of words, the pausing, the sequence of arguments — like gestures.
6. Be careful with periods! Only those people who also have long duration of breath while speaking are entitled to periods. With most people, the period is a matter of affectation.
7. Style ought to prove that one believes in an idea; not only that one thinks it but also feels it.
8. The more abstract a truth which one wishes to teach, the more one must first entice the senses.
9. Strategy on the part of the good writer of prose consists of choosing his means for stepping close to poetry but never stepping into it.
10. It is not good manners or clever to deprive one’s reader of the most obvious objections. It is very good manners and very clever to leave it to one’s reader alone to pronounce the ultimate quintessence of our wisdom.
As with all such prescriptions, we are free to take or leave these rules as we see fit. But we should not ignore them. While Nietzsche’s perspectivism has been (mis)interpreted as wanton subjectivity, his veneration for antiquity places a high value on formal constraints. His prose, we might say, resides in that tension between Dionysian abandon and Apollonian cool, and his rules address what liberal arts professors once called the Trivium: grammar, rhetoric, and logic: the three supports of moving, expressive, persuasive writing.
Salomé was so impressed with these aphoristic rules that she included them in her biography, remarking, “to examine Nietzsche’s style for causes and conditions means far more than examining the mere form in which his ideas are expressed; rather, it means that we can listen to his inner soundings.” Isn’t this what great writing should feel like?
Salomé wrote in her study that “Nietzsche not only mastered language but also transcended its inadequacies.” (As Nietzsche himself commented in 1886, notes Hugo Drochon, he needed to invent “a language of my very own.”) Nietzsche’s bold-yet-disciplined writing found a complement in Salomé’s boldly keen analysis. From her we can also perhaps glean another principle: “No matter how calumnious the public attacks on her,” writes Barry, “particularly from [his sister] Elisabeth Förster-Nietzsche during the Nazi period in Germany, Salomé did not respond to them.”
Unlikely as it might seem, the Japanese jazz scene has for decades and decades produced some of the finest players in the world, from traditionalists to experimentalists and everything in-between. One might say the same about other jazz-inclined countries (those of northern Europe, for instance, having developed particularly robust scenes), but those countries have to do without enlivenment by “only in Japan” moments like the one we have above: jazz pianist Yōsuke Yamashita, acclaimed on both sides of the Pacific, playing piano on the beach — a piano on fire on the beach, to be precise.
This wasn’t even the first time he’d done it. In 1973, famed graphic designer Kiyoshi Awazu asked Yamashita to appear in his short film burning piano, playing the titular instrument. Watching it again 35 years later, Yamashita wrote, “Seeing myself engaged in that extraordinary performance, I felt this wave of emotion that was like, ‘What was that?’
In one sense, I had performed as an ‘object’ in a Kiyoshi Awazu artwork. In another, however, I had perhaps experienced a form of artistic expression that no one before me had ever experienced before, as the result of a situation that could only have happened at that time. ‘What was that?’ There was only one way I could reconfirm this for myself—by doing it one more time.”
The opportunity arose at the behest of Kanazawa’s 21st Century Museum of Contemporary Art, who staged Burning Piano 2008. You can read the event’s program as a PDF, which contains Yamashita’s reflections leading up to the event. It also contains remarks from an Awazu Design Room representative who witnessed the original burning piano shoot, a local piano dealer (who assures us that long after the piano “began to appear in Japanese homes in the era of high-level economic growth,” some “must be destroyed amid reluctant feelings”), and the mayor of Shika Town, on whose Masuhogaura Beach Yamashita donned his silver protective suit and played a funeral requiem on the flaming instrument until it could produce not a sound more.
“I did not think I was risking my life,” Yamashita later said, “but I was almost suffocating from the smoke that was continuously getting into my eyes and nose. I had decided to keep on playing until the piano stopped making sounds, so though I did not mean it, but it ended up having a life-or-death battle between the piano and myself.” Dedicated jazz players know what it means to suffer for their art, as do all the participants in the age-old intensive Japanese conception of mastery, but who would have guessed that those cultures would intersect so… combustibly?
But it would have been difficult for anyone to overlook seven animatronic dinosaurs, traveling by barge on October 15, 1963, bound for the Sinclair Oil Corporation’s “Dinoland” exhibit at the 1964 World’s Fair.
In a stunt worthy of Barnum, the synthetic beasts trekked 150 miles from the exhibit’s designer, Jonas Studios, to the World’s Fair site in Flushing, Queens, hailed by fireboats and an enthusiastic throng. The sponsoring corporation, whose highly recognizable logo was a brontosaurus, had furnished the public with a timetable of estimated arrivals along the route.
For good measure, every family to visit the exhibit within the first year was offered a coupon for a free gallon of gasoline.
Installed in what the marvelously evocative Jam Handy short below termed a “prime location surrounded by titans of American industry,” the dinosaurs attracted over 10 million “car-owning, traveling” fans. (That’s a lot of fossil fuel.)
On the way out, visitors were encouraged to avail themselves of the Mold-A-Rama machine, which pumped out miniature plastic dinosaur souvenirs at 25¢ a pop.
After the fair closed, the dinosaurs went on tour, put in an appearance in the Macy’s Thanksgiving Day Parade, and eventually settled into zoos and natural history museums around the country.
Sinclair uses the Dinosaur “Brontosaurus” as a symbol to dramatize the age and quality of the crude oils from which Sinclair Petroleum Products are made — crudes which were mellowing in the earth millions of years ago when Dinosaurs lived.
Ayun Halliday is an author, illustrator, theater maker and Chief Primatologist of the East Village Inky zine. Her play Zamboni Godot is opening in New York City in March 2017. Follow her @AyunHalliday.
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