Jean Giraud, better known as Mœbius, may have passed away in 2012, but he gave his many fans glimpses into his unparalleled artistic imagination right up until the end. In 2010 and 2012, the Fondation Cartier pour l’Art Contemporain put on Mœbius-Transe-Forme, the first major exhibition in Paris devoted to his work, and one that, at Mœbius’ request, explored “the theme of metamorphosis, a leitmotif that runs throughout his comics, drawings, and film projects” and that presented his work in a variety of ways that even some of his most avid readers, used to experiencing his work only on the page, would never have seen before.
One such way took the form of The Dancing Line, a series of videos which capture Mœbius drawing live on a graphic tablet, offering an artist’s-eye-view into how he transformed a blank digital canvas into a window on the world he spent his career creating. Here we have three selections from the series: at the top we have Mœbius filling in the details on the face of Malvina from The Airtight Garage.
Just above, he draws the title character from his even better known comic series Blueberry, the unconventional Western he created with Jean-Michel Charlier. Below, you can watch the creation of a piece called “Inside Mœbius” — not a self-portrait, exactly, but a portrait of the sort of artist that exists in Mœbius’ world drawing a portrait of Mœbius himself.
“Staying alive for an artist means to always be in an unknown part of himself, to be out of himself,” Mœbius told the Los Angeles Times in 2011. “The exhibition in Paris, the theme was transformation. Art is the big door but real life is a lot of small doors that you must pass through to create something new. You don’t always need to go far.” Nobody, artist or otherwise, stays alive forever, but Mœbius knew how, in the time he had, to stay as alive as possible by constantly seeking out those unknown parts. The Dancing Line videos show us how he felt his way through that terra incognita, pointing the way with the expansive body of work he left behind toward all those small doors we, too, must pass through to create something new of our own.
Last Tuesday, December 1st, marked the 60th anniversary of Rosa Parks’ refusal to relinquish her seat at the front of a Montgomery, Alabama bus, and as some people pointed out, the story many of us were told as children about Parks’ act of civil disobedience was fabricated. Parks was not a humble, elderly seamstress worn out from a long day of work, a myth author Herbert Kohl summarizes as “Rosa Parks the Tired.” She was a well-connected activist and NAACP leader who had already initiated actions to integrate local libraries. Of her grossly oversimplified biography, Parks remarked in her memoirs, “I was not tired physically, or no more tired than I usually was at the end of a working day. I was not old, although some people have an image of me as being old then. I was forty-two. No, the only tired I was, was tired of giving in.”
Nor was Parks the first to brave arrest for refusing to give up a seat at the front of the bus. That same year, 15-year-old Claudette Colvin refused to give in, and seven months later, so did 18-year-old Mary Louise Smith. Neither of their arrests, however, had the power to spark the Montgomery Bus Boycott, the action that brought national attention to the civil rights movement and to Martin Luther King, Jr.’s leadership role. King would later recall that “Mrs. Parks was ideal for the role assigned to her by history” because “her character was impeccable and her dedication deep-rooted.” King’s repeated emphasis on “character” throughout his direction of the boycott and beyond often seems an awful lot like what is today disparaged, with good reason, as “respectability politics”—the notion that only those who conform to conservative, middle-class norms of dress and behavior deserve to be treated with dignity and to have their civil rights respected.
But this was not necessarily his point. His embrace of nonviolent resistance was in part a strategic means of presenting the Jim Crow power structure with an implacable united front that could not be moved to react in ways that might seem to justify violence in the eyes of a largely unsympathetic public—to make it clear beyond any doubt who was the aggressor. And the violence and repression directed at the boycotters was significant. They were attacked while walking to work; King’s and civil rights leader E.D. Nixon’s houses were both firebombed; and King, Parks, and 87 others were indicted for their participation in the boycott.
Nor did the boycott’s success in 1956 put an end to the attacks. As a site commemorating this history summarizes, “After the boycott came to a close, snipers shot into buses in black communities, at one point hitting a young black woman, Rosa Jordan, in the legs.” And on one single night in 1957, “four black churches and two homes were bombed.” These acts were on the extreme end of a daily series of aggressive confrontations and humiliations black riders faced as they boarded the newly-integrated Montgomery buses. To help those riders navigate this environment, King prepared the list of guidelines above on the week before the buses integrated. You can read a full transcript of the list below, thanks to Lists of Note, who include it in their recent book-length collection.
King makes his agenda clear in the introductory paragraph: “If there is violence in word or deed it must not be our people who commit it.” Some of these directives encourage great passivity in the face of often extreme hostility. It is very difficult for me to imagine responding in such ways to insults or physical attacks. And yet, the boycotters had already daily, and calmly, faced death and severe injury. As white Lutheran minister Robert Graetz—whose home was also bombed—remembered later, “Dr. King used to talk about the reality that some of us were going to die and that if any of us were afraid to die we really shouldn’t be there.”
INTEGRATED BUS SUGGESTIONS
This is a historic week because segregation on buses has now been declared unconstitutional. Within a few days the Supreme Court Mandate will reach Montgomery and you will be re-boarding integrated buses. This places upon us all a tremendous responsibility of maintaining, in face of what could be some unpleasantness, a calm and loving dignity befitting good citizens and members of our Race. If there is violence in word or deed it must not be our people who commit it.
For your help and convenience the following suggestions are made. Will you read, study and memorize them so that our non-violent determination may not be endangered. First, some general suggestions:
1 Not all white people are opposed to integrated buses. Accept goodwill on the part of many.
2 The whole bus is now for the use of all Take a vacant seat.
3 Pray for guidance and commit yourself to complete non-violence in word and action as you enter the bus.
4 Demonstrate the calm dignity of our Montgomery people in your actions.
5 In all things observe ordinary rules of courtesy and good behavior.
6 Remember that this is not a victory for Negroes alone, but for all Montgomery and the South. Do not boast! Do not brag!
7 Be quiet but friendly; proud, but not arrogant; joyous, but not boisterous.
8 Be loving enough to absorb evil and understanding enough to turn an enemy into a friend.
Now for some specific suggestions:
1 The bus driver is in charge of the bus and has been instructed to obey the law. Assume that he will cooperate in helping you occupy any vacant seat.
2 Do not deliberately sit by a white person, unless there is no other seat.
3 In sitting down by a person, white or colored, say “May I” or “Pardon me” as you sit. This is a common courtesy.
4 If cursed, do not curse back. If pushed, do not push back. If struck, do not strike back, but evidence love and goodwill at all times.
5 In case of an incident, talk as little as possible, and always in a quiet tone. Do not get up from your seat! Report all serious incidents to the bus driver.
6 For the first few days try to get on the bus with a friend in whose non-violence you have confidence. You can uphold one another by a glance or a prayer.
7 If another person is being molested, do not arise to go to his defense, but pray for the oppressor and use moral and spiritual force to carry on the struggle for justice.
8 According to your own ability and personality, do not be afraid to experiment with new and creative techniques for achieving reconciliation and social change.
If you feel you cannot take it, walk for another week or two. We have confidence in our people. GOD BLESS YOU ALL.
We’ve long been able to read books online. More recently, the internet has also become a favored distribution system for movies, and certainly we’ve all heard more than enough about the effects of downloading and streaming on the music industry. No new technology can quite substitute, yet, for a visit to the museum, but as we’ve often posted about here, many of the museums themselves have gone ahead and made their paintings, sculptures, and other artifacts viewable in great detail online. At this point, will the experience of any art form at all remain unavailable to us on the internet?
Not long ago, I would have named any of the performing arts, but the brains at the Google Cultural Institute have now got around to those most living of all forms as well. The New York Times’ Michael Cooper writes of our newfound ability, through a series of 360-degree videos, to “stand, virtually, on the stage of the Palais Garnier, among the dancers of the Paris Opera Ballet,” ” journey to Stratford-upon-Avon, where you can try to keep up with a frenetic Alex Hassell of the Royal Shakespeare Company as Henry V, exhorting his troops to go ‘once more unto the breach,’ ” or “go onstage at Carnegie Hall, where the video places you smack in the middle of the Philadelphia Orchestra as it plays a rousing ‘In the Hall of the Mountain King.’ ”
These come as part of a virtual exhibition involving “an innovative assemblage of performing arts groups” that went live earlier this month at the Google Cultural Institute’s site. The organizations, now more than 60 in total, include not just the Paris Opera, the Royal Shakespeare Company, and Carnegie Hall, but the Berlin Philharmonic, the Vienna State Opera, the American Ballet Theater, the American Museum of Magic, the Brooklyn Academy of Music, the Country Music Hall of Fame, the John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts, the Metropolitan Opera, and the Rome Opera. You can find the performances neatly divided into categories: Music, Opera, Theatre, Dance, and Performance Art.
Google’s blog describes some of the technology behind all this, including the 360-degree performance recordings, the “indoor Street View imagery” of the grand venues where many of the performances happen, and the “ultra-high resolution Gigapixel” images available for your scrutiny. When you play the video above of the Philadelphia Orchestra, you can click and drag to view the performance from every possible angle from your vantage right there in the midst of the musicians. I can’t imagine what the Google Cultural Institute will come up with next, but surely it won’t be long before we can see things from the Black Swan’s point of view.
The BBC is getting ready to air a documentary, Secrets of the Mona Lisa, which will delve into the research of French scientist Pascal Cotte. Using an innovative imaging technique, Cotte has managed to probe the paint layers beneath the surface of da Vinci’s sixteenth-century masterpiece. And, lo and behold, he’s found hidden paintings, including what he believes is an original, “real” portrait of Lisa del Giocondo (the subject of da Vinci’s painting).
The host of the documentary, art historian Andrew Graham-Dixon, announced, “I have no doubt that this is definitely one of the stories of the century.” Other art historians are not getting carried away. Martin Kemp, Emeritus Professor of the History of Art at the University of Oxford, said in an interview: “They [Cotte’s images] are ingenious in showing what Leonardo may have been thinking about. But the idea that there is that picture as it were hiding underneath the surface is untenable. I do not think there are these discrete stages which represent different portraits. I see it as more or less a continuous process of evolution. I am absolutely convinced that the Mona Lisa is Lisa.” Or, put differently, there are not different portraits on da Vinci’s canvas, just stages of the same portrait that now hangs in the Louvre today.
Should we have any doubt about the malleability of George Orwell’s dystopian 1948 novel 1984, we need look no further than its most recent, very loose incarnation in a coming film titled Equals, which Variety’s Peter Debruge writes “should resonate most with the arthouse-going segment of the ‘Twilight’ fanbase.” That’s not a description that fills me with hope for a film project that might have brought us a worthy update of Orwell’s classic, as relevant as ever in a world full of high-tech surveillance states, technologically-enabled post-factualism, and choose-your-own creeping totalitarian political scenarios. These are concerns that deserve, nay beg, for a mature cinematic treatment, and a sophisticated new film adaptation of 1984 might be just the thing we need to grasp the moment. Instead, we may have to settle for glossy, Orwell-esque teen romance.
On the other hand, we might consider what should presumably be a sophisticated treatment of the novel in a recent adaptation that premiered in 2005 at London’s Royal Opera house. Composed by New York Philharmonic conductor Lorin Maazel, with a libretto by poet and critic J.D. McClatchy and Tony-award winning writer Thomas Meehan, the 1984 opera would seem to offer much more than an entertaining diversion. The work is Maazel’s first production, and he told the BBC, “I found that once I got into the material I was very inspired, very motivated, by the breadth of the story, by the challenge of making this extraordinary novel come alive in a different frame and context.”
As Maazel points out, and as the coming Equals movie exploits, the novel’s plot does indeed turn on a romance, among other potentially theatrical elements. Maazel says he “found within [it] the true stuff of opera—doomed love affair, political intrigue—very much like Don Carlos, or Fidelio, or Tosca.” How successful were Maazel and his writers at translating the dark political plotting of the novel to the brightly-lit stage of the Royal Opera? Well, you’ll notice that the “Press Articles” section of the opera’s website is tellingly thin, perhaps because the critics were not kind to the production, many calling it a vanity project, given that Maazel had financed it himself (with a company called Big Brother Productions). Nonetheless, the New York Times praised the libretto as “an effective treatment of George Orwell’s complex and iconic novel” that honors Orwell’s “themes and characters,” though they found the music in general much less compelling.
Widespread critical disparagement did not seem to impact ticket sales, however; the performance nearly sold out for three nights in a row. Opera houses everywhere, struggling as they are to attract new audiences and patrons, may yet consider reviving the work for its popularity. In the meanwhile, curious fans of opera, the novel, or both, can purchase a DVD of the production and see several clips here. At the top of the post, hear the overture and below it, see the love duet of Winston (Simon Keenlyside) and Julia (Nancy Gustafson). Further down, hear audio of the hymn “All Hail Oceana,” and just above, see the production’s finale. Speakers of Italian may find this brief television segment on the production of interest as well. While neither Maazel’s ambitious opera nor the upcoming, very loose commercial film adaptation seem to offer the contemporary 1984 we need, I for one hold out hope for a treatment that can effectively crystalize our fraught political present and Orwell’s disturbingly imagined future.
Flannery O’Connor’s surgical satire has the ability to strip away the pretensions of not only those characters we are already predisposed to dislike, but also those with whom we may sympathize—that is, educated people with broadly humanist views who think they see right through the self-important prejudices and provincialism of people like Mrs. Hopewell in “Good Country People” or Mrs. Chestny in “Everything that Rises Must Converge.” Both stories dramatize generational tensions in the form of mother/child pairs at odds. In the former, superficial, condescending Mrs. Hopewell and her daughter Joy—a miserable, graduate-educated amputee who prefers to call herself Hulga—battle over their conflicting moral philosophies, only to both be taken in by a devious bumpkin posing as a Bible salesman.
In the latter story—also the title of O’Connor’s most widely read collection, published posthumously in 1965—a mother and son pair present us with two kinds of intolerance. Mrs. Chestny is an overt bigot whose self-importance depends on her sense of herself as a descendent of a proud, if decayed, Southern aristocracy. Julian, her unemployed son, a despairing recent college-grad with designs of becoming a writer but with no real prospects, thinks himself above his mother’s ugly racism and desires nothing more than that she learn her lesson: “The old world is gone,” he says, “You aren’t who you think you are.” When she finally gets her comeuppance at the end of the story (on the way, comically, to a “reducing class”) it may have come, to Julian’s dismay, at the cost of her life. Though we are inclined to sympathize at first with the bitterly ironic son, as the story progresses, the narrator reveals his motivations as hardly more elevated than his mother’s hate and fear.
These are not characters we fall in love with, but we never forget them either. Through them we come to see that none of us is who we think we are, that the human capacity for self-deception is boundless. This is the lesson common to each of O’Connor’s stories, one she offers anew with wit and variety each time, and each time through a kind of revelation. Her stories draw us into points of view that reveal themselves—through sudden epiphanies and gradual unfoldings—to be inadequate, deluded, profoundly limited. And though O’Connor’s Southern Catholic pessimism has astonishingly universal reach, the regional grounding of her stories and novels present us with particularly American versions of the petty meanness and conceit common to the human species.
In “Revelation,” another story from Everything Rises Must Converge—read above by Studs Terkel—O’Connor lays bare some particularly American race and class biases in the character of Mrs. Turpin, another older Southern lady whose prejudices are more vicious and spiteful than both Mrs. Hopewell and Mrs. Chestny put together. The story achieves a subtle examination of some very unsubtle attitudes, and the reading by Terkel, in his Chicago-accented radio voice, does it justice indeed. Terkel read the story on his radio show, The Studs Terkel Program, in 1965, the year of its publication and a little over a year after O’Connor’s death. See a complete transcript of the broadcast at the Terkel show’s Pop Up Archive. The audio above has been kindly enhanced for us by sound designer Berrak Nil.
As an added treat, hear “Everything that Rises Must Converge” read above by Academy Award-winning actress Estelle Parsons, who became known in her later years for playing an overbearing mother like the story’s Mrs. Chestny in the TV sitcom Roseanne. Despite the quaintness of O’Connor’s characterizations, we are not far at all from the world she depicted, given the stubborn persistence of human bigotry, selfishness, and blind self-regard. For more classic O’Connor, hear the sharp-tongued writer, who died too soon of complications from her lupus at age 39, read her story “A Good Man is Hard to Find” here.
“There’s nothing left but to introduce you to some people whose lives will forever be a part of the life of Paris. These are our brothers. They were robbed of their stage three weeks ago, and we would like to offer them ours tonight.” And with those words from Bono, the Eagles of Death Metal took the stage again tonight in Paris, just three weeks after the horrific terrorist attack at Le Bataclan. Up top, see them sing, along with U2, a version of Patti Smith’s “People Have the Power.” Next, a version of their own song, “I Love You All the Time.”
Whether the band would perform again was never in doubt. Interviewed days after the attack, the band, still reeling, told Vice they had an obligation to carry on. In the poignant video below, Jesse Hughes said it all: “I cannot wait to get back to Paris. I cannot wait to play. I want to come back. I want to be the first band to play at Le Bataclan when it opens.” Playing at Le Bataclan may have to wait. But getting back to Paris, that’s now certainly done.
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Of all the technological innovations happening around me as I grew up in the 1980s and 90s, none excited me more than the DVD director’s commentary. Yes, LaserDisc diehards, I know commentary tracks didn’t begin with the advent of DVDs, but they unquestionably came into their own as a form on that format. A promising-enough director’s commentary — one featuring a funny filmmaker, or one full of fascinating stories, or one wonky enough to get as deep into the nuts and bolts of the craft as time allowed — could by itself convince me to rent or even buy a disc, whether or not I cared for or had even heard of the movie itself.
And so I found it a bit dismaying that, as online streaming began to displace disc-watching as the home-theater technology of choice, director’s commentary tracks — or commentary tracks by anyone else, for that matter — looked like a soon-to-be thing of the past. But as we’ve learned, especially this century, technology tends to open a window when it closes a door. At the New York Times, internet video has opened another window onto the mind of the modern filmmaker with Anatomy of a Scene, a series of clips that each take just one scene from a film and have the film’s director explain in depth, DVD-commentary-style, what went into that scene.
At the top of the post, you can hear Wes Anderson, a director long known for his mastery of a certain aesthetic, explain some of the techniques that make up that aesthetic as he and his collaborators used them in The Grand Budapest Hotel. Below that, Tim Burton, who grew famous using an equally distinctive but wholly different visual vocabulary from Anderson’s, talks about a scene from Big Eyes, his film about the life of painter Margaret Keane. Keane’s paintings feature heavily in the background, which gives Burton the opportunity to talk about how they captivated him in childhood: “I found them quite disturbing, and the color schemes were quite lurid” — and so he explains how those lurid colors provided the color scheme for the movie itself.
The directors of Anatomy of a Scene tend to talk about their recent films, and in recent years we’ve seen a fair few high-profile Hollywood movies dealing with outer space and the worlds beyond Earth: Christopher Nolan’s Interstellar, for instance, whose scene of its astronauts hurtling into the great unknown provides the material for its Anatomy of a Scene video. Ridley Scott, always a stimulating commenter, has also done one on The Martian, his own latest space movie which came out this year. Scott talks over the scene where his film’s astronaut, marooned and seeking any tool of survival, digs NASA’s Pathfinder out of the Martian sands, about how, as “one of those primitives who can actually draw,” he storyboards everything in detail: “By the time I start the movie, I’ve kind of ‘filmed’ it on paper, and when I get there, it gives me the confidence to feel free to allow the actors and everybody else to do their thing.”
But Anatomy of a Scene doesn’t just invite household names. I used to live in Los Angeles and still keep up with movies that examine the city, and so I found fascinating indeed their video with Dan Gilroy on Nightcrawler, my favorite Los Angeles movie of this past year (maybe alongside Paul Thomas Anderson’s Thomas Pynchon adaptation Inherent Vice, a scene from which also gets anatomized). The Times has put together over a hundred of these videos, all of which you can watch at their Anatomy of a Scene page or on Youtube. They’ve included scenes from the work of such auteurs as Olivier Assayas, Noah Baumbach, Richard Linklater, and Lukas Moodysson (as well as scenes from such, er, other sorts of pictures as Zack Snyder’s Man of Steel). If the commentary is dead, well, long live the commentary.
Of the rare and extraordinary times in U.S. history when the U.S. government actively funded and promoted the arts on a national scale, two periods in particular stand out. There is the CIA’s role in channeling funds to avant-garde artists after the Second World War as part of the cultural front of the Cold War—a boon to painters, writers, and musicians, both witting and unwitting, and a strange way in which the intelligence community used the anti-communist left to head off what it saw as more dangerous and subversive trends. Most of the highly agenda-driven federal arts funding during the Cold War proceeded in secret until decades later, when long-sealed documents were declassified and agents began to tell their stories of the period.
Of a much less covertly political nature was the first major federal investment in the arts, begun under Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s New Deal and championed in large part by his wife, Eleanor. Under the 1935-established Works Progress Administration (WPA)—which created thousands of jobs through large-scale public infrastructure projects—the Federal Project Number One took shape, an initiative, write Don Adams and Arlene Goldbard, that “marked the U.S. government’s first big, direct investment in cultural development.” The project’s goals “were clearly stated and democratic; they supported activities not already subsidized by private sector patrons… and they emphasized the interrelatedness of culture with all aspects of life, not the separateness of a rarefied art world.”
Thousands more whose names have gone unrecorded were able to fund community theater productions, literary lectures, art classes and many other works of cultural enrichment that kept people in the arts working, engaged whole communities, and gave ordinary Americans opportunities to participate in the arts and to find representation where they otherwise would be overlooked or ignored. Federal One not only “put legions of unemployed artists back to work,” writes George Washington University’s Eleanor Roosevelt Papers Project, “but their creations would invariably entertain and enrich the larger population.”
“If FDR was only lukewarm about Federal One,” GWU points out, “his wife more than made up for it with her enthusiasm. Eleanor Roosevelt felt strongly that American society had not done enough to support the arts, and she viewed Federal One as a powerful tool with which to infuse art and culture into the daily lives of Americans.”
Now, thanks to the Library of Congress, we can see what that infusion of culture looked like in colorful poster form. Of the 2,000 WPA arts posters known to exist, the LoC has digitized over 900 produced between 1936 and 1943, “designed to publicize exhibits, community activities, theatrical productions, and health and education al programs in seventeen states and the District of Columbia.”
These posters, added to the Library’s holdings in the ‘40s, show us a nation that looked very different from the one we live in today—one in which the arts and culture thrived at a local and regional level and were not simply the preserves of celebrities, private wealth, and major corporations. Perhaps revisiting this past can give us a model to strive for in a more democratic, equitable future that values the arts as Eleanor Roosevelt and the WPA administrators did. Click here to browse the complete collection of WPA arts posters and to download digital images as JPEG or TIFF files.
Briefly noted: Google will now let you pay a virtual visit to one of my favorite places on the planet — Machu Picchu, the great Inca ruins located in the Andes in Peru. There’s nothing like visiting Machu Picchu in person. But if you can’t get there, you can do worse than take this tour.
The film above documents a 1965 performance of his most celebrated piece, Youth, Maturity, Old Age, and Death, given at 42, the exact midpoint of his life. In four abstract minutes, he progresses through the seven ages of man, relying on nuances of gait and posture to convey each stage.
He performed it countless times throughout his extraordinary career, never straying from his own precisely rendered choreography. The playing area is just a few feet in diameter.
Observe the 1975 performance that filmmaker John Barnes captured for his series Marcel Marceau’s Art of Silence, below. Nothing left to chance there, from the timing of the smallest abdominal isolations to the angle of his head in the final tableau.
Time’s effects may have provided the subject for the piece, but its perennially lithe author claimed not to concern himself with age, telling the New York Times in 1993 that his focus was on “life-force and creation.”
When I started, I hunted butterflies. Later, I began to remember the war and I began to dig deeper, into misery, into solitude, into the fight of human souls against robots.
This would seem to support the theory that maturity is a side effect of age.
His alter ego Bip’s legacy may be the infernal invisible ropes and glass cages that are a mime’s stock in trade, but distilling human experience to its purest expression was the basis of Marceau’s silent art.
He feels his advancing age and fears that the art of mime will die with him. It’s a transitory, ephemeral art, he explains, as it exists only in the moment. As an old man, he works harder than ever, performing three hundred times a year, teaching four hours a day. He is named the UN Ambassador for Aging. Five nights a week he smears the white paint over his face, draws in the red bud at the center of his lips, follows the line of his eyelid with a black pencil. And then takes to the stage, his sideburns frayed, his hair dyed chestnut and combed forward, looking like a toupee.
His body is as elastic as ever, but the old suit of Bip hangs loose on him now. Beneath the whitened jawline is a baggy, sinewy neck. With each contortion of his face, the white paint reveals deep lines. At the end of his show, he folds in a deep bow and the knobs of his spine show above the low cut of Bip’s Breton top.
Ayun Halliday is an author, illustrator, and Chief Primatologist of the East Village Inky zine. In college, she earned a hundred dollars for appearing as a mime before a convention of hungover glassware salesmen, an experience briefly recalled in her memoir, Job Hopper. Follow her @AyunHalliday
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