mixed media daily, Year 2: October 2011

Monday, October 31, 2011

Saturday, October 29, 2011

Friday, October 28, 2011

Tonight we pass the 300 barrier. I'll save all the misty-eyed reminiscing for the actual end of the project, but I would like to point out that just yesterday I cracked open the eighth sketchbook for this project (not including sketchbooks used for other drawings as well as thumbnails for Mixed Media Daily). I think I normally average about two sketchbooks a year, so . . . sorry, trees.

Thursday, October 27, 2011

26 october 2011

Wednesday, October 26, 2011

25 october 2011

Monday, October 24, 2011

24 october 2011

23 october 2011

Saturday, October 22, 2011

22 october 2011

21 october 2011

Friday, October 21, 2011

20 october 2011

Thursday, October 20, 2011

19 october 2011

Wednesday, October 19, 2011

18 october 2011

Tuesday, October 18, 2011

17 october 2011

For the past couple of weeks, and for the foreseeable future, I'll have less time to draw than usual. At first I tried to shoehorn my usual process into this truncated schedule, and it was never easy, and not always, in my opinion, successful. And then today, confronted with that photo of MLK frozen in carbonite, halfway through an ambitious, text-heavy thing, i decided to scale back, keep it simple. Leave more page than scribble. And lo and behold, that felt pretty good! So thanks, MLK; for everything, of course, and also for this little thing.

Monday, October 17, 2011

16 october 2011

That's Philip Berg up there. If in my drawing it looks like he's (a) gettin' down and (b) wearing nurse's shoes, you've been mislead by my misleading drawing. He's actually (a) testifyin' about kabbalah while (b) wearing nurse's shoes.

Sunday, October 16, 2011

15 october 2011

Saturday, October 15, 2011

14 october 2011

Friday, October 14, 2011

13 october 2011

Thursday, October 13, 2011

12 october 2011

Tuesday, October 11, 2011

11 october 2011

Monday, October 10, 2011

10 october 2011

Sunday, October 9, 2011

9 october 2011

8 october 2011

Saturday, October 8, 2011

7 october 2011

Thursday, October 6, 2011

6 october 2011

I would like to point out that the word "ketchup" has appeared in a front page header exactly two times this year, and I have drawn it both times. I'm pretty proud of that. I mean, probably not as proud as Steve Jobs was of being the co-founder of Apple, but still. Which reminds me: rest in peace, Steve, you modest old technophobe, you.

Wednesday, October 5, 2011

5 october 2011

Tuesday, October 4, 2011

4 october 2011

I knew the Amanda Knox story would be big, but I had no idea that it would be prevented from completely dominating the front page by the equally compelling story of Ralph Steinman. When you consider that we are all hooked into a giant, seemingly homogenous news stream fed by a myriad of sources, it's a pleasure to be genuinely surprised and, um, informed by that most humble of news sources, the daily paper. Rest in peace, Dr. Steinman.

Monday, October 3, 2011

3 october 2011

Sunday, October 2, 2011

2 october 2011

1 october 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.