R. U. Sirius

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R. U. Sirius is also the name of the space ship in the comic strip Brewster Rockit: Space Guy!.

R. U. Sirius (born Ken Goffman) is a US writer, editor, talk show host, musician and cyberculture icon, best known as co-founder and original Editor-In-Chief of Mondo 2000 Magazine from 1989–1993. Sirius was also chairman and candidate in the 2000 U.S. presidential election for The Revolution Party.[1] The party's 20-point platform comprised a hybrid of libertarianism and liberalism.[2]

At one time, he was a regular columnist for Wired News and San Francisco Examiner, and contributing writer for Wired and Artforum International. He's also written for Rolling Stone, Time, Esquire and other publications. Sirius has written several hundred articles and essays for mainstream and subculture publications. (See Works by R. U. Sirius at Project Gutenberg.) He was Editor-In-Chief of Axcess magazine in 1998, and GettingIt.com from 1999-2000.


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[edit] Activities

[edit] 1970s-80s

Sirius was a teenage Yippie activist in the early 1970s. He was the lead singer for Rochester, New York-based punk band Party Dogs from 1979-81.

[edit] 1990s

Sirius recruited Timothy Leary to be a Contributing Editor for Mondo 2000 and has taught an online course in Leary's philosophy for the Maybe Logic Academy. He co-authored Leary's last book, Design For Dying (1998), and wrote the introduction for a 1998 edition of Leary's 1968 book The Politics of Ecstasy.

Sirius appeared in the films Synthetic Pleasures (1995) and Conceiving Ada (1997). His mid-90s techno-rock band Mondo Vanilli recorded an unreleased CD titled IOU Babe for Trent Reznor's Nothing Records. The music was available on the internet for several years but has since disappeared.

Sirius has been a speaker at many events, such as the Starwood Festival[3]. He delivered the Keynote address for the Virtual Reality conference, Oslo VR, in 1994.

[edit] 2000s

Sirius shifted his media focus in 2005, becoming a show host for two ongoing weekly podcasts, The RU Sirius Show and NeoFiles. Both went on unannounced hiatus in August 2007. In September 2006 he helped launch the webzine 10 Zen Monkeys with fellow GettingIt.com alumni Jeff Diehl and Lou Cabron. All these projects are part of a media network MondoGlobo. As of March 2008, its web site mainly offered new material on three new media-political initiatives, "QuestionAuthority", "The Open Source Party" and "Open Wire".

[edit] Trivia

Mondo 2000 designed a February 8, 1993 "Cyberpunk" cover feature for Time Magazine that featured their art director Heide Foley on the cover and a picture of R.U. Sirius inside. According to Cyberia, Douglas Rushkoff's 1994 book about early '90s cyberculture, Sirius' girlfriend, Lady Drew, once had an abortion while on LSD.

After U2 sued sound collage artists and media pranksters Negativland for trademark violations, R.U. Sirius helped them confront U2's guitarist, The Edge. Sirius hired Negativland members Mark Hosler and Don Joyce to do an interview with The Edge for Mondo 2000 by phone. Negativland revealed who they were about 15 minutes into the interview.

Sirius has been called "the Wired visionary of post-modernism and psychic pandemonium" in Artforum, "a head on the Mt. Rushmore of cyberculture" in the LA Times and "a yokel cousin of Beavis and Butt-head" in Swedish Daily[citation needed].

[edit] Bibliography

[edit] Books

[edit] Articles

  • Before Mondo 2000, was Reality Hackers, and High Frontiers.

List of articles to be completed before the Singularity, hopefully.

[edit] Interviews given

[edit] External links