Along with a lot of others, we recognized way back when that Shepard Fairey’s Obama posters had the potential to be serious icons of the campaign especially among young grassroots activists. But Fairey designing the cover of Time magazine? For its person of the year issue no less? That would have been beyond comprehension.

Stay tuned for Obama’s appointment of Fairey to the newly created post of Street Art Czar.

The big Art Basel Miami weeklong party and art fare spectacular went down last week. I’m short on words at the moment (I’m hording them up elsewhere I’m afraid) so I though I’d just pop up a few of my favorite images and links from the massive amount of blog coverage.

Starting with the gloriously arresting piece above by Mark Ryden that I believe is titled Sophia’s Bubbles.

Brian Viveros


Colin Christian (huge!)


Murakami decked out in his Gigantic Plush Flowerball gear


and new work from Shepard Fairey, who is currently being vetted for a secretary of street art position in the Obama administration.

Monk’s rules. I think my favorite is “it must always be night, otherwise the wouldn’t need the lights.”

via Arthur blog with no further explanation.

An absolutely gorgeous poster for James Jean’s highly anticipated show at Jonathan Levine next month. Jean has also made available a high res version of the poster here.

A rather nice collection of his amazing Fables covers is out just in time for the holidays.

Oh, Science Fiction, I know I’ve neglected you this last year or so, but baby I’m ready to make it up to you.

New Scientist has a state of Sci Fi special issue that includes opinions on the pulse of the genre by a few of its greats including, of course, William Gibson:

The Future of Science Fiction? We're living in it. Those "Future History" charts in the back of every Robert A Heinlein paperback, when I was about 14, had the early 21st century tagged as the "Crazy Years". He had an American theocratic dictatorship happening about then. I hope we miss that one. Otherwise, I'm assuming these are those years.

The thing called science fiction that we do with literature will always be with us. The genre we've called science fiction since about 1927, maybe not so much. That's something to do with the nature of genres, though, and nothing to do with the nature of science fiction.

Rudy Rucker gives us a look at the early days of Cyberpunk, by sharing a snippet from his memoir Nested Scrolls:

Sterling’s zine, Cheap Truth¸ didn’t have any particular name for the emerging new SF movement—it wouldn’t be until the next year that the cyberpunk label would take hold. I got together with Sterling, William Gibson, and Lew Shiner in September of 1983. We partied together at a world science fiction convention in Baltimore—they’d all read my new novel The Sex Sphere, which had just been published by Ace.

Gibson was an impressive guy from the start. He was tall, with an unusually thin and somewhat flexible-looking head. When I met him at one of the con parties, he said he was high on some SF-sounding drug I’d never heard of. Perfect. He was bright, funny, intense, and with a comfortable Virginia accent.

If you scroll down you’ll see a rather witty comment from Charles Stross, one of the only people that I honestly believe moves Sci Fi forward. Somewhat related, Stross recently admitted to just now finishing Sterling’s 2005 book Shaping Things and has playfully waved off any aspiring writers dealing in the near future from mining it for ideas (so he can have them for his own).

I’m looking to catch up on my Science Fiction over the winter. If you have any must reads from the last year of so please drop suggestions in the comments.

According to X-Play, both Barack Obama and Sarah Palin will be playable characters in new downloadable content for Mercenaries 2: World in Flames on the Xbox360 and PS3. I haven't actually played it yet, but the game already looked like complete madness(You can fire tactical nuclear warheads and call in airstrikes as you rampage across the land.) and now you can actually play as Sarah Palin or Barrack Obama blowing shit up and killing people for cash. Quite the follow-up videogame appearance after the billboards in Burnout Paradise. I don't see a specific release date, but they say "November".

Holy Shit, Jesse Jackson was weeping like a wee lass!!

That was the moment when I lost it last night. Home alone with a 102 fever it was inevitable that I was going to get a bit teary eyed at some point, but thanks the Rev. Jackson I didn’t even make it the speech with my eyeliner intact.

My first political memory, the point zero for the quick metastasizing political virus in my life, was Jackson’s ’88 primary campaign. On paper I was a little too young and way too country to be so excited by Jesse’s fiery rhetoric but that didn’t stop me from running home from school to watch the news each night with the naïve hope that he could actually pull it off.

So seeing the man that first piqued my interest in politics twenty years ago and gave me my first insight into the civil rights struggle, completely took my knees out from under me. For a moment I was that naive little kid again though this time the soul crushing letdown at the campaign’s end dissolved into joy.

With the huge amount of reporting and punditry right now I'm not going to run this out too long but there is one point that I think is being lost in the excitement. Sure on its face it would be great to have any African-American elected president under any circumstance, but this event transcends that. That this candidate, an intelligent, thoughtful post-boomer pragmatist, was elected in this manner, with historic voter turnout, carrying states across the middle of the country both big and small and over performing his Democratic predecessors with white voters by a large margin, at this time, well things are bit desperate ‘round these parts aren’t they?, that makes this a truly monumental opportunity for renewal and redemption of the American story.

A couple of odd post-election pieces you may not have caught:

B-more Dubstep heavyweight and all around good guy, Joe Nice shares his personal election experience with Martin Clarke.

UK native, and tweakers’ preferred futurist, Charles Stross explains after the fact how he would have voted if he was and American

Fellow Brooklyn boy Matt Shadetek channels a little Sam Cooke

One more personal story, as I was trying to get to sleep last night amid the rawkus celebrating and fireworks that I really wanted to be a part of, a girl walked by my window gently singing My Country Tis of Thee, now let my explain that drunken singing is the norm in our corner of Williamsburg, we don’t know quite why but last call BillyBurg hipster are a musical lot, but to hear this rather earnestly patriotic song sung spontaneously and without irony, well it was fucking weird man, sweet yes, but still weird.

Anyway, I’m going to let myself enjoy this moment with a bit of optimism the next few days and then begin psyching myself up for the Obama’s foot meets fire mission that will begin by years end. This is a moment of great opportunity but that doesn’t mean I’m giving up skeptical criticism and positive cynicism for love beads and an Obey/Hope hoodie.