Good Riddance to Shepard Fairey’s Awful ‘Hope’ Posters
How André the Giant became Barack Obama
Laughing at ‘Hope’ made you an asshole
The message of both posters was actually the same: OBEY
The Obama “Hope” Poster, probably the most iconic image from American politics of the last thirty years, is also the most famous work by artist Shepard Fairey. In it, a photograph taken from an Obama press junket was restyled into Fairey’s signature graphic style, forged through his early years as a creator of iconic stickers and stencils for skateboards and T-shirts. Heavily reworked and flattened into bold colors, it reframed Obama as an icon of new leadership, marked by the single fat, sans-serif word: Hope. Once it became officially embraced by the Obama campaign, the image emerged as an emblem of his presidential run and an icon of Democratic Party progressivism. It gave the campaign a grassroots life, eventually becoming its de facto symbol. After his victory, Obama thanked Fairey directly in a letter.
This wasn’t Fairey’s first foray into viral imagery. He had initially generated …
Gavin Newsom’s Giant Ponzi Scheme
California’s Con Man in Chief rips off American taxpayers while crushing small businesses to pay the state’s supersized population of scammers
A scheme too obscenely corrupt for his own party to stomach
Let them eat Gruel
Last November, the celebrity chef and restaurateur Andrew Gruel got a call from his wife, who manages parts of his business. There was an issue with their payroll taxes: They were $2,000 more than the couple had expected. Getting billed for thousands of dollars, without explanation, understandably alarmed the chef. So Gruel called their payroll company to find out what had happened. What he was told provoked him into posting a tweet that went viral the following day.
“California has a budget shortfall,” his tweet explained, “and the federal government wants money back that it lent California for UI that it ‘lost.’ They are making up for it by having business owners pay it.” When Elon Musk commented with his signature one-word boost — “Really?” — Gruel replied, “Yup, state defaulted on their loan and the businesses …
My Horse Fox
With one last sneer in my direction, she tweezed the pineapple from the fork with her lips.
‘I don’t remember having a deformed oal, but I must have.’
She might decide to take off at a gallop, at the edge of an uncut hayfield, while I scream.
Before Robert and I moved to the Mesa in southwest New Mexico, I lived in upstate New York near the Finger Lakes and the Cargill salt mines. The mines got the salt from under Seneca Lake. When I was there, sometimes men asked me timidly, “Tama, why do all these middle-aged women suddenly start riding horses? Is there something sexual?”
“No,” I said. “There are only two types of young girls. Those who identify as a girl, and those who identify as a horse. When they grow up, or when their kids have gone, or when they retire and have some extra money, they fulfill their dream of owning and learning to ride a horse.”
“And the others?”
“They get designer handbags. Only one percent of the population ends up with both.”
“What about men?”
“Men don’t have the ‘horse thing.’ Unless they grow up riding when they are young, they don’t have interest as adults. The non-rider men are …
