My neighborhood just got an art upgrade from Shepard Fairey. Our local independent hardware and art supply store Baller Hardware, which is a perfect name for a store in Silver Lake, had a huge boring beige wall, so Fairey, who is friends with the owner and shops at Baller, spent the last two days with a two (cute) dude crew putting up a mural. Since it’s just down the road from me, I went back a few times and documented the process.

Director Morgan Spurlock (“Supersize Me,” the upcoming “Mansome” which is screening at the Tribeca film festival this week, “The Greatest Movie Ever Sold” and one of my bibles, “50 Documentaries to See Before You Die“) curates his first art show “New Blood,”opening next Saturday at Thinkspace Gallery. He also kindly gave MyFDL an exclusive interview about the show.

Shepard Fairey pleaded guilty to one count of criminal contempt for manufacturing evidence, destroying documents, and other misconduct in his case involving his “Hope” poster of Barack Obama. Reprehensible that he did behave so badly. It makes him look like a spoiled little rich kid who was trying to cover his ass when he got caught doing something wrong.

Today I joined with Michael Stipe, Viggo Mortensen, Daniel Ellsberg, Roseanne Cash, Tom Morello, Jesselyn Raddick, Shepherd Fairey and others to demand that President Obama and Secretary of Defense Gates investigate the degrading treatment that Bradley Manning is being subjected to at the Quantico brig.

Tanem Davidson’s New Brow: Contemporary Underground Art presents a through line for the development of this uniquely American genre of painting which burst out of Abstract Expressionism through the Pop Art’s screened realism into a chrome flecked, hyper-sexualized, fuel-injected dream state. The icons of childhood–Rat Fink, hot rods, movie monsters, robots, toys, cartoons–conjoin in transgressive, illicit intercourse with tikis, animals, dead presidents, dollar signs, slogans, guns, girls, raw meat, and bombs; characters live in their own universes fraught with action and symbols, caught in moments just before, just after Something Happened.