mixed media daily, Year 2: September 2011

Friday, September 30, 2011

30 september 2011

In the middle of all the downward pressure, it's nice to see a little bit of pushback.

Thursday, September 29, 2011

Wednesday, September 28, 2011

Several times this year the LAT has turned over prime front page real estate to götterdämmerung moments for neighborhoods or towns or, in the case of today's A1, entire civilizations. Joe Mozingo's story on the twilight of the Kumeyaay is a well wrought (and heartbreaking) example of this kind of reporting. Certainly journalists today have a deep well of personal experience to draw on when crafting these stories, and maybe that's partly why they're such affecting reads. Of course we are all living in a time of exceptional cultural, economic, and political upheaval, so maybe these stories are natural expressions of the zeitgeist (at this point i'd like to point out that I've used pretty much all the German i know in a single paragraph--Vielen Dank und gute Nacht!), stalactites in our collective cultural cave.

Monday, September 26, 2011

26 september 2011

Sunday, September 25, 2011

25 september 2011

Saturday, September 24, 2011

24 september 2011

23 september 2011

What I learned about myself today: when given the choice to draw land-based wreckage or explosions, I will find a way to split the difference between them.

What I learned about Susan Lucci today: she's ending a pretty impressive run. And here I thought it would be interesting to do the same thing daily for a year. I'm clearly not thinking big enough.

Friday, September 23, 2011

22 september 2011

Wednesday, September 21, 2011

21 september 2011

20 september 2011

Only after I completed this entry did I take a step back and realize, "hey, this drawing is going to confuse those readers who don't get the actual physical paper. And is that cat puke on the rug?" so while I was cleaning cat puke and giving my cat the stink eye, it occured to me that I should just include a photo of the front page as it arrived today. So here it is . Oh, and rest in peace, Dolores Hope.

Tuesday, September 20, 2011

19 september 2011

Monday, September 19, 2011

18 september 2011

Saturday, September 17, 2011

17 september 2011

Friday, September 16, 2011

16 september 2011

15 september 2011

Wednesday, September 14, 2011

14 september 2011

13 september 2011

Monday, September 12, 2011

12 september 2011

Sunday, September 11, 2011

11 september 2011

10 september 2011

Friday, September 9, 2011

9 september 2011

8 september 2011

Thursday, September 8, 2011

7 september 2011

There is some skepticism surrounding Eddie Murphy's Oscar gig. Personally I'm looking forward to it. There's at least a chance that it will be hilarious/insane. And really, why not him? Why not anybody? It's the fucking Oscars. If it's terrible you get to do it all again next year, and maybe this time you'll get it right. Of course you won't, because you're the Oscars, but we'll tune in to see how you do anyway. You're like the friend with the crappy band who plays out once a year, and you go to see them because they're good people and they share their drink tickets. But I'm not discouraged this year. It could happen. And if it does, and it's a hit, you suddenly have a new Billy Crystal, which is great for everybody. Except Billy Crystal, who will henceforth be known as the old Eddie Murphy.

Tuesday, September 6, 2011

6 september 2011

Man, it's been awhile since I've drawn a good old-fashioned plume of smoke. Hang in there, Texas. And congratulations, um, sweet potato, for making the front page. Your time is now, baby.

Monday, September 5, 2011

5 september 2011

4 september 2011

Saturday, September 3, 2011

3 september 2011

2 september 2011

Better late than never! This entry was, indeed, drawn (partially) in the middle of Berlin's set, and Between The Fixx and the B-52s, with the aid of a booklight (yes, i brought a booklight to a concert. Feel free to yell "NERD!" at me at your leisure. Anyway, my concert going experience generally involves a certain amount of revelry, so the work on the drawing ended when the revelry kicked into high gear.

Thursday, September 1, 2011

1 september 2011

Well well well. Today, on the cusp of a Labor Day holiday, at the end of summer (for me summer always ends with Labor Day weekend), exactly (roughly) two thirds of the way into this project, we get baseball and butcher's knives. Appropriate! I'll tell you what else is appropriate here at the end of the summer season: this song. Enjoy it!

Tomorrow I will, somehow, draw the day's entry while I'm at a concert at the Hollywood Bowl. So if you're there and you see me leaning against a wall somewhere scribbling away, stop by and say "Hi". If I'm in a good mood I might just draw you with a big head, sitting in a dune buggy.

31 august 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.