mixed media daily, Year 2

Monday, March 21, 2011

20 march 2011

I don't want to get into the habit of qualifying what I post here, but possibly some reader(s) would find it interesting that this drawing was executed by candlelight during an all-night blackout here at casa de tecnica mixta diaria. I certainly found it interesting. And by "interesting," I mean "annoying." How the hell did medieval monks illuminate all those beautiful book pages under such crappy lighting conditions?

Anyway, my man Bijan put in an appearance this Sunday, and this time he brought along a Gulfstream Jet Aircraft and a Limited Edition Bugatti by Bijan. And he was wearing some sort of aviator's neckerchief, bless him. He described this impressive tableau thusly: "3 Fastest Growing Brands in the World!" Take that, Steve Jobs!

19 march 2011

And there you have it. Making its fourth appearance on the last day of the week, "fear" grabs the top spot in our nonexistent countdown of words that appear in A1 headlines. It's just been that kind of week.

That stain you see halfway down the pagealong the left edge is candle wax. Now how did that get there?

Programming Notes

All attempts to post this weekend were stymied by a variety of culprits (let's just call them "toddler-borne illness" and "power outage"), but things seem to be back on track now here at Mixed Media Daily Blog and Domestic Triage Center. This weekend's drawings (I did somehow manage to finish the drawings) will be posted tonight, along with whatever I draw today (it's looking to be another one of those "big plume of smoke central photo" days, which are always kind of fun). Sorry for the holdup, but delay could not be avoided in this case.

Saturday, March 19, 2011

18 march 2011

I think it's safe to say that "fear," with three appearances since Sunday, is officially the word of the week. It certainly does seem to have permeated many A1 stories this week, from the very real, justified fears of the people in Japan and Benghazi to the hysterical, all-too-human fear-based run on iodized salt in China. Oh, and the supermoon freakouts here in good old California. And there's still one more day of the week left! Will fear rear its ugly head on the front page tomorrow? And if it does, what the hell will I pair it with?

Thursday, March 17, 2011

17 march 2011

It has been a pretty intense week of news out of Japan, but these guys appeared on the front page for the first time in a little while so I decided to give them the spotlight; they're not out of the woods yet either.

16 march 2011

Wednesday, March 16, 2011

15 march 2011

extra extra

Well, hello. I’m a little surprised we’re all meeting up again like this. I’m more than a little surprised to be launching a project called “Mixed Media Daily, Year Two.” And, to be honest, I’m a little disappointed that the subtitle isn’t “Electric Boogaloo.” But I’ll get over that.

You know what I won’t get over? The way 2016 came to a close. Like the darkness around a sputtering campfire. Like a venus flytrap around a hapless fly.

Back in 2011, when I did the first round of Mixed Media Daily, I thought of the project as an experiment in portraiture, an homage to a style of media that was slowly slipping out of daily life and into the history books. In some sense it felt a like an early obit; I imagined that the death of any newspaper would occur only when they actually (forgive the hackneyed phrase) stopped the presses. Simpler times!

The Los Angeles Times, and newspapers in general, I’m happy to report, are still alive. What seems to have kicked the bucket is the desire of a not inconsequential number of Americans to digest hard news, to do the minimal mental work required to be able to call oneself an informed voter. Which may be the same thing as the death of the newspaper industry, but with one hell of a twist.

How did we get here? How did so many of our fellow citizens mutate into a pack of political rageaholics who rely exclusively on easily debunked garbage journalism to justify their vote? Who have such a white-hot mistrust of mainstream media that they’ll happily believe anything thrown up on the web by any random, anonymous domestic or international opportunist over a well-researched piece from a credible news source? There’s no simple way to unpack this sad, confounding turn of events. Some things we know are worth considering: Since the election many journalists have written about the profusion of fake news outlets, sites set up to turn a quick profit by playing to the latent (or overt) biases of their readership. Traditional news outlets---cable and network television, and of course, print media---also received a measure of blame for what some saw as their unfair equivocation of two clearly unequal candidates. More recently, post apocalypse---sorry, I mean post election---there have been reports of conservative politicians appropriating the term “fake news” to describe stories published by legitimate news sources that do not jibe with their agendas. It all adds up to a campaign of misinformation (hi, Putin!) that is designed to erode our democracy. That, fellow citizens, is unacceptable.

The saddest thing might be that the truth was out there, and easily accessible. I read plenty of well-written, well-researched stories that laid out the truly damning details of our shifty President-Elect’s shifty behavior in his business and his personal life. After reading each piece, I would think, should the country be crazy enough to elect this clown, they cannot say that they weren’t warned. And then the country went ahead and elected this clown.

So here we are. Our country is in serious crisis mode, but I’m not ready to give up on it. We need every weapon primed and ready for the coming four-year bar brawl. One of those weapons will most certainly be solid investigative journalism (Woodward and Bernstein, anyone?). Of course as much as we need good journalism, good journalism needs our attention. So I’m going to pay attention. Close attention, and with a critical eye. And since I’m going to be processing a lot of what will undoubtedly be fucked-up news, I’ll run it all through the old illustration filter, so it least it’ll be kind of fun to look at, and maybe I’ll be able to keep my blood below boiling point.

All of this adds up to a very different mission from the one I used to launch this project six years ago. The main focus will still be the Los Angeles Times, but in an effort to doodle a broader consensus of opinion, I’ll occasionally be working from other local papers (we publish a lot of daily papers here in the Golden State). If I go out of town, there might be an even farther-flung guest paper in the mix. That’s the plan for now. It’s sort of a loose plan, but we’re all just winging it at this point, aren’t we? We’re all stuck in the upside-down, where clowns become kings, homes become battlegrounds, and pens become swords. It’s a scary place, to be sure. Let’s not let it scare us into submission.

Monday, March 21, 2011

Saturday, March 19, 2011

Thursday, March 17, 2011

Wednesday, March 16, 2011

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