The Sixteenth Episode of The Get Stuff Done Cast Cast

This is the Get Stuff Done Cast Cast. I’m Dave.

The Mayor of New York City, a city that birthed movements from the Flushing Remonstrance and religious freedom to Occupy Wall Street, has a podcast. The only person listening to it is a dog walker in Queens named Dave.

If this is your first time listening, hi. You ready for some weird podcast action? I always say that I think it might help to listen from the start, and then I always say that you should do whatever you think is best for you. And now I’ve done that. Don’t listen to the mayor’s podcast, it’s bad. Today, I’m talking about the 16th episode of mayor Eric Adams’ podcast, the Get Stuff Done Cast, titled S1 E16 - Ch-Check It Out: Artist Shepard Fairey Brings a Beast of a Mural to NYC, released October 5th, 2023. I’m so close to caught up.

Brief background on Shepard Fairey, since I often do my own research on the subject of the mayor’s podcast. I mean, someone should, and typically it’s not the mayor. Fairey grew up in South Carolina and Idyllwild California. He attended private school for the entirety of his education. He’s the son of a doctor and realtor and went to RISD where he created his Andre The Giant has a Posse stickers, and OBEY Giant which are incredibly influential works of iconography.

After school he opened a guerrilla marketing firm, working for Pepsi, Hasbro and Netscape. He designed album covers for the Black Eyed Peas and Smashing Pumpkins and a did work for a bunch of other musicians, Hollywood films, corporations and, to be fair, lefty political movements. He designed the famous Obama Hope poster. He does a lot of donating and supporting. His aesthetic is undeniably influential to the world of pop art.

He’s in town to unveil a mural of the Beastie Boys on the Lower East Side.

The mayor asks him the meaning of the name OBEY, Fairey tells him what wiki will tell you, it’s from a movie called They Live, and by the by They Live whips, you should watch it. Fairey says his goal was to get people to think about what they obeyed and view their lives more analytically. The mayor says he’s seen They Live and he liked it. Point to the mayor.

From the time Shepard was a kid art was therapy, helping him deal with his stresses. And he discovered it as a social tool. He lists a bunch of musicians that he liked that were conveying ideas with their music. He wanted to do that with visual art.

He also found himself responding to graffiti, people on the margins expressing themselves without gatekeepers.

What do you hope people walk away with after seeing one of your pieces, asks the mayor. Well, I hope they consider the power of art. His art is often about social justice, so he hopes they see the possibility of a better path forward.

Inspiring words, though dude has done an awful lot of corporate art and consumerist art, and he was born well off enough that I doubt he had to take those gigs.

Powerless people are often unhappy, Fairey says, so he wants his art to be about empowerment.

We need emotional nourishment as well as physical nourishment, says the mayor. Colors, sounds, he has a whole list. He says that the Obama poster was a good example of this because it used colors not typically associated with political campaigns, red and blue.

The AMERICAN FLAG Eric.

Fairey said he was really inspired by Obama. Got the campaign’s permission to make the image, which is nice. He doesn’t mention the famous image of Che that it kinda looks like. He also makes mention of being inspired by Obama’s 2004 speech when he said “we’re not red states or blue states, we’re united states” and again, it’s just wild to me that Adams saw Red and Blue and was like “Incredible! No one’s put these two colors together before!”

Anyway Eric Adams says he saw a lot of shades in the poster. He lets us know that he had a lot of interpretations of it. I feel like I’ve been listening to this interview for about a million years.

Fairey did a poster of Mandela in Johannesburg, they talk about it. They don’t have a lot of interesting things to say about it, so I’m just gonna say that.

The mayor realizes that he hasn’t yet asked a vague question about his subject’s past so he does that now, and Fairey give a reasonably fair accounting of the massive number of green lights that he faced growing up the son of, as he puts it, a football captain and head cheerleader.

He got into skating and punk cultures. And so forth.

They talk about their children and it’s boring as fuck. And then they stop and end the episode.

Aside from the mayor mentioning it in the intro, they don’t talk about Fairey’s Beastie Boy mural at all, which is weird because it’s referenced in the title of the fucking episode and the show notes discuss it as the reason for the interview. As usual I’m left asking what the hell this was, and what it was supposed to be. And why Shepard Fairey, who absolutely doesn’t need whatever the hell it was, agreed to do it. Even if no one is listening, it’s 20 minutes of his life he’ll never get back.

I’ll never get it back either.

What was the mayor doing when not interviewing Shep? Well from the time the previous episode was released, September 9th, 2023, to the current one, October 5th, he did a bunch. As always, I am leaning heavily on the reporting from two excellent NYC news outlets, the City and Hell Gate, and I encourage you to support them both if you can. Links to their websites are in the show notes.

His former Buildings Commissioner, Eric Ulrich was indicted for accepting bribes from real estate developers, tow truck companies, pizza shop owners, buildings permits consultants, just a real meaty stew of corrupt New York Guys. He did them favors, got projects approved, health code violations done away with, homeless shelters shuttered, opposing tow truck operators run out of business. Allegedly. Fortunately that’s the last shady person who was anywhere near Eric Adams.

He asked for employees of the Public Engagement Unit to volunteer to be his on call street team, a position that would require 24/7 availability when the mayor is at events. Typically the PEU connects New Yorkers with benefits and city services, this, uh, seems different.

A sudden and violent storm flooded a great deal of the city, dropping 10 inches of rain in 24 hours. The mayor’s office gave very little in the way of warning beforehand. Adams only addressed the city for the first time at noon, after the flooding had wrecked the morning commute and 150 schools that children were already in were innundated. At that address he declared a state of emergency. The governor had already done so at about 9:45 in the morning. At that same press conference he declared that schools engage their should shelter in place procedures, but no one actually reached out to schools to make sure they got the message, so they more or less did not.

In a ceremony that was not on his public schedule, Adams was made a freemason for some reason.

And Adams announced that he’ll only be taking off topic questions at press conferences once a week.

Good times!

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stuffstuffcastcast@gmail.com

See you next time.