NECK FACE.(The Talk of the Town)

Publication: The New Yorker

Publication Date: 05-APR-04

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COPYRIGHT 2004 All rights reserved. Reproduced by permission of The Condé Nast Publications Inc.

For the past year and a half, a mischievous presence has been asserting itself on the city's street lamps, doorways, traffic-light-control boxes, and any other visible surface that it is in no one's interest to monitor or clean too diligently: drawings of snaggletoothed monsters and hairy limbs with sharpened nails, and oblique yet strangely pointed phrases such as "beat with the ugly stick." These images are often signed "Neck Face," in angular capital letters that look like the work of an angry toddler or of Danny Torrance in "The Shining."

Neck Face is nineteen, little and shy, with black eyes and brows, and fanglike teeth of his own. He wears a...

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