31 October 2017

Alright, it's Halloween. Take the night off. All of the sordid details swirling around Manafort and Richard Gates and George Papadopoulos (not to mention all the ridiculous statements coming from the white house) will be waiting for you tomorrow, when you've finished binge-watching Stranger Things.

30 October 2017

Every media outlet who isn't a shill for the far right was talking about Mueller's opening salvo of indictments in the whole Russian collusion thing. Today's front page article was guessing that the recipient of said indictment would be either Mike Flynn (nope) or political opportunist scumbag Paul Manafort (ding ding ding!). And of course what we found out today was that it was Manafort and so much more, including the revelation that a former Trump aide, who in 2016 sought to broker some sort of connection between Russian agents and the Trump campaign, is now a cooperating witness. Well damn, Mueller! That's a hell of a first act.

29 October 2017

Our current era of casual bigotry is finding expression in pretty much every corner of modern life. Yuli Gurriel, who plays for the Astros, thought that it'd be totally cool and funny to make slanty eyes at the Dodgers' Japanese-Iranian pitcher, Yu Darvish. In the middle of a World Series Game. Yep, sounds about right for the times we live in. I'm looking forward to turning our collective attention toward the Mueller investigation tomorrow.

28 October 2017

It's always mildly jarring to see historic photos on the front page. Today's photo of JFK comes compliments of a story about the release of new, previously secret documents about the Kennedy assassination. Surprise, there's nothing revelatory in there! Except that the US was spitballing some pretty hilarious ways to murder Fidel Castro. Ah, the good old days, when our biggest problem was Fidel Castro.

27 October 2017

Trump's insistence on reviving the coal industry is patently idiotic (and clearly just a way to curry favor with a slice of his voting demographic) and dangerous.  To add insult to injury, it may also threaten to disrupt areas where some serious paleontology is happening. The Grand Staircase-Escalante Monument in Utah is the site of some pretty exciting dinosaur finds, and there's immense potential there for much more. There are also, however, coal seams. You see where this is going. Fortunately coal is no longer a cost-effective energy source, so this may never become an issue. Occasionally, even a lying sack of shit like Trump can't circumvent the facts. Sad!

26 October 2017

Looks like it's going to be one of those weeks: another obit on the front page, this time for American music legend Fats Domino. Apologies to Mr. Domino for his having to share space in this drawing with a bunch of fucking tools from China's Politburo Standing Committee.  The Politburo may control China, but did any of them author the very first song that John Lennon learned?

25 October 2017

For all of our obsession with food here in LA, it's still pretty rare for a chef to land on the front page of the LA Times. This is, I think, only the second time this year I've drawn a chef for this project (the first time was Mr. Fries Man). This time it is exceptionally unusual, because it is also an obit. The chef in question, Suthiporn "Tui" Sungkamee, ran Jitlada, a local joint that, by all accounts, served up some seriously undiluted Southern Thai food and expanded our collective horizons well beyond your standard pad thai plates and satay skewers. As for the other guy, well, that's Justin Turner, the Dodger who is, hands down, the most fun to draw.

24 October 2017

That giant puppy is, like a lot of folks in Sonoma and Napa counties, homeless. It's been a weird thing over the past couple of weeks to process pictures of the burned out sections of Northern California and photos of the recently liberated city of Raqqah. This sort of comparative topography of ruin that appears on the front page is, I think, unusual but informative. We get more aerials of bombed-out wastelands in Raqqah, more closeups of people in Northern California.

23 October 2017

The ruling party in Japan has won a huge victory in their latest round of elections, giving Prime Minister Shinzo Abe the ability to do all sorts of things unimpeded by any serious political opposition. Like reforming Article 9 in the Japanese Constitution. And in China Xi Jingping, who himself has been pretty successful at consolidating power, has dusted off the old Maoist propaganda machine and is test driving it in select Chinese villages. I mean, call me over-cautious, but the global consolidation of power (and capital) does not make me feel warm and fuzzy inside.

22 October 2017

I love everything about the story of Española, the Miguel Cabrera painting that has been missing for over 100 years. I don't want to ruin it for you with a half-assed summary here (because you're totally going to read it, right?), so I won't. It's one of those rare occasions where the paper gives you something more like a New Yorker article than a grim accounting of our troubled times, and that, my friend, is to be enjoyed.

21 October 2017

It's important to have these follow-up stories to incidents of cops murdering unarmed young black men. Much like plain old, civilian-on-civilian mass shootings, they happen with such alarming frequency, and they pass into and out of news cycles so quickly, that we can forget how the act will reverberate through a community in the weeks and months and years to come. Mesquite is doing their best to deal with Jordan Edwards' death. It's on us as a nation to prevent this sort of thing from happening again.

20 October 2017

Well, the Dodgers are officially in the World Series, but it happened too late last night for their playoff victory to make it to the front page. Instead we were treated to some light local fare: a story about toll road abuse and one about a homeless piano player (did you know we have a public piano in union station?). We're experiencing one of those rare lulls in the overdriven political hell that is the typical 2017 news cycle. Enjoy it while it lasts (spoiler: it won't last).

19 October 2017

Ok, I never thought I’d say this, but I think I’m running out of fire-wreckage themed visual gags for the crumbling Hollywood patriarchy. Thankfully the Dodgers won tonight, which I guess means I’ll need some baseball-themed visual gags for the crumbling Hollywood patriarchy tomorrow.

18 October 2017

On its surface there's a lot to like on the front page: Isis was driven out of Raqqah, there may be a short-term fix in the works to keep Obamacare solvent, and the Dodgers' won game 3 of the playoffs. Still, Isis has not been dissolved, they've just been pushed back; Obamacare has not been saved (far from it), it's just been propped up for the moment. It's all equivocal triumph. Hell, I'm equivocal about the drawing I made to deal with all this equivocation.

17 October 2017

Well, it's pretty late in the evening, so I guess I'll leave you with this picture of Trump and Mitch McConnell as an obsequious dog. And why exactly are these two idiots on the front page? Well, you see, the payments to fund Obamacare that Trump only a few days ago threatened to cut off are now going to be saved, but only for a little while, and because of this reversal Trump is claiming that he got Democrats and Republicans to---you know what? There's little to be gained by going into the details on this one. It's pointless political theater of the lowest sort.

16 October 2017

Sometimes the biggest story on A1 never makes an appearance in these drawings. This project is as much concerned with finding a visual throughline as a narrative one. The grape pickers and the Dodgers, they all stack up pretty neatly, but then there's the story about the children in war-torn South Sudan who spend every day just trying not to be murdered or raped or struck down by some illness running through the camps that are their only refuge from the hell they escaped from, and you can see how it can be difficult making the leap from what goes on in California to what goes on in Sudan. And why it's important to know what goes on in Sudan when you live in California.

15 October 2017

Today's A1 made the LA Times feel like a real local paper. Every story on it was solidly local---the fires in Northern California, Harvey getting booted from the Academy, the Dodgers kicking ass in game 1 of the NLCS. I know people like to mythologize Los Angeles, but we're really like most other American towns---natural disasters, powerful men acting like assholes, and the occasional home run to give you something to feel good about. So, I guess let's wrap this up with a "go Dodgers" and call it a night.

14 October 2017

That floating face belongs to Rose McGowan, who was calling out Harvey Weinstein and other Hollywood players on their abusive bullshit long before it was fashionable. All I can say is, it's about fucking time we called out Hollywood players on their abusive bullshit. Now when can we apply these lessons to the white house?

13 October 2017

Our healthcare system is being ripped to shreds by a president who knows nothing about healthcare and who doesn't actually give a shit about anyone in this country who isn't named Trump. Enjoy your Friday night!

12 October 2017

The front page was full of people displaced, either through no fault of their own (folks in Mexico City and Northern California), or else entirely because of their own bad behavior (Harvey Weinstein, another high-ranking individual at USC. What's up, USC? You've had, um, quite a year).  No matter the reason, it feels as if everyone is being pushed out of their comfort zone, which is fitting, since we as a nation we're very roughly pushed out of our comfort zone on January 20th of this year.

11 October 2017

Looks like that dim ray of hope for DACA kids---you know, the one where Trump agreed to work with Democrats on a solution to this issue---is pretty much extinguished. Because, you see, Trump has no actual convictions or moral compass, which means he is steering our massive national vessel through uncharted waters purely on whim, on whatever random stimulus excites his pathetic lizard brain at the moment he needs to make an executive decision. This isn't leadership, it's a psychology experiment, where every hypothetical outcome is incredibly shitty.

10 October 2017

 The moderate middle is that slice of voting demographic that leans neither too far left or too far right. It's that centrist sweet spot that old-school, reasonable politicians courted fervently. It's also a smaller voting bloc these days than it was back when Senator Diane Feinstein, who has decided to run for re-election, first began winning elections. You know what's not smaller in California these days? The fucking fires. Stay safe, wine country.

9 October 2017

Alright, alright, I finally got around to drawing Harvey Weinstein, who lately has become the poster child for the creepy studio executive. It's like Halloween comes around and Hollywood brings out the gropey skeletons in its closet to decorate. Can we just use regular skeletons next year?

8 October 2017

Looks like the Republicans are chomping at the bit to balloon the deficit in order to give corporations huge tax cuts. I guess fiscal responsibility, one of the most enduring (though not always obeyed) planks in the conservative soapbox, has been wrenched out  and tossed aside, leaving---well, what's left? Stripping rights from the LGBTQ community? And women? And minorities? Is that a political platform or a Klan pamphlet?

7 October 2017

The front page was quite a bummer today, displaying 58 stamp-sized images of the victims of last Sunday's Las Vegas massacre. And let's face it, with Republicans controlling the executive and legislative branches of our government, we're unlikely to see any real change. The NRA calling for additional regulation on bump stocks (not banning them, mind you, just regulating them), which allow semi-automatic weapons to become fully automatic weapons (and which were used in the Las Vegas mass shooting), is exactly like---I'm sorry to say---putting a band aid on a gunshot wound. Which unfortunately means that the guy who made those heart-bedecked wooden crosses for the Las Vegas victims will most likely have many more opportunities to put his woodworking skills to use in the future.

6 October 2017

It's been a heavy fucking week, so here at mixed media daily we're easing into the weekend with a little light reading about baseball. Of course these days it feels like there are no small stories, even in our great American pastime. The Dodgers are having one hell of a rollercoaster of a season. From what I can gather about what's going on in tonight's playoff game vs. the Diamondbacks as of 10:30 PST, that m.o. is still in effect.

5 October 2017

"I got 30% of the crew that's not loyal to the flag." That statement was made by Ryan Zinke, the secretary of the interior, to a group of petroleum industry cronies. Let that statement sink in for a second, because it's insane. I mean, I didn't realize that the American flag was literally Trump's agenda. Does this mean our flag is now incoherent scrawl emblazoned on the back of an empty Doritos bag?
The 30% Zinke was talking about are civil servants working in his department. Zinke and EPA head Scott Pruitt are both systematically undermining their departments' missions by forcing out the very people who are there to do the work the department was intended to do, and it's really fucking worrisome. Loyalty to America and loyalty to the sitting/squatting president are not the same thing, particularly when the president is a callous, kleptocratic sack of garbage. So I guess what I'm saying is, "Fuck you and your shitty Doritos Flag, Zinke."

4 October 2017

The Nobel prize for physics this year went to Barry Barish, Kip Thorne, and Ranier Weiss, who developed and built a machine that can detect gravitational waves, which are tiny ripples in the very fabric of space time, caused by things like two black holes colliding. That's pretty fucking great, fellas, but you didn't write "Refugee," "Don't Come Around Here No More," or "Free Fallin'," so today's You-Got-Hastily-Sketched-By-mixed-media-daily prize goes to Tom Petty.

3 October 2017

Normal guy/mass murderer Stephen Paddock remains something of a mystery, the victims of his unholy rampage remain dead, and Trump and the Republicans have called for unity but not solutions to our insane, uniquely American gunlust. Sounds like this thing is about one or two news cycles from being completely forgotten in the halls of power. Because they have much more important things to do, see, like cutting taxes for the wealthy and stripping poor Americans of their healthcare. I can't even get into all the ways Trump acted like a gigantic douche during his visit to Puerto Rico. Sleep well, everyone, and try not to get fucking shot.

2 October 2017

Today at mixed media daily we had to stray from our object (the newspaper) to stay true to our subject (the news). Those numbers hovering above Mandelay Bay Casino represent the movement in value of gun manufacturers' stocks at the close of the market today. They are all up, as they often are after there is the mass shooting and murder of Americans anywhere in our country. Bill O'Reilly called todays murder of almost 60 Americans "the price of freedom," because he is a fucking idiot.
I'm pretty certain Las Vegas will dominate the news for the rest of the week at least, meaning I'll go back to using my good old trusty newspaper as a springboard for these drawings, but it felt like if there was ever a day to stray from the format, it was this shit sandwich of a day.

Oh, and RIP Tom Petty.

1 October 2017

That's, the Mayor of San Juan. She and the rest of Puerto Rico have been on the receiving end of some recent racist tirade action by our embarrassment-in-chief, Donald Trump. Word around town is that Trump plans on visiting the island on Tuesday, so that won't be awkward at all.

Also, welcome to inktober! I mean, I use ink in almost all the drawings I do for this project, so I don't know how much will change around here, but I'll try to fit in some special, extra-inky drawings for the occasion. In any case, there probably won't be any strictly pencil drawings this month. Which begs the question: do pencils get a month? Janupencil? Pencilvember? Maybe Leadtember?