mixed media daily, Year 2

Thursday, April 13, 2017

13 April 2017

The Punch and Judy show that currently passes for American foreign policy kept on keepin' on today. We dropped an enormous bomb on Afghanistan. We thoroughly freaked out North Korea. Russia's mad, or they're pretending they're mad so we won't catch on that they're totally making out with Trump behind the tool shed when no one is watching. China is just like, "We find your leader too dumb to work with. Is there, um anybody else we can talk to? Do we have to go to fucking Florida every time we want to discuss matters of state?" I guess all we can do in these troubled times is check in with the folks who hold the keys to preventing all-out nuclear holocaust: how's that Trump-colluding-with-Russia investigation thing going, Comey?

Wednesday, April 12, 2017

12 April 2017

Syria and San Bernardino are officially the most heartbreaking locations discussed on A1 today, so I'll dispense with the playful banter. Instead I will point out that today marks the third day in a row that I'm drawing handmade wooden structures.

Tuesday, April 11, 2017

11 April 2017

I was half expecting to be drawing the poor guy who got thrown off of a United Airlines flight for having the audacity to buy a ticket, but he did not appear (although a story about the incident did). Instead I got a wooden bridge, which, hell, I'll take it! And fine, I'll draw Gorsuch's stupid hand, too. And what's going to tie these two disparate things together? A school shooting, of course, because we live in America.

Monday, April 10, 2017

10 April 2017

Well, hey, mixed media daily is proud to present the 100th drawing of this project today! The big stories for our sort-of-special day are the Isis bombing of Coptic Christian Churches in Egypt and Trump's plans to slash the budgets of the U.S.'s international health initiatives, because he cares so much about all those beautiful babies out there in the world. Even conservative hardasses like Bill Frist find the White House's proposed budget cuts heartless and potentially devastating to the citizens of developing nations. But still, maybe when those defunded populations start to die off Trump will launch some missiles at Malaria's airfield. To show he cares.

Sunday, April 9, 2017

9 April 2017

It's Sunday, there's been a lot to process in the past week, so here at mixed media daily headquarters we're gonna kick back and enjoy the spring wildflowers. Well, we're going to allude to President Xi's surprise stop in Alaska. Speaking of Alaska, we're going to to read that story about how Exxon Mobil was working behind closed doors to retool their business to deal with the effects of the climate change science they were denying and disparaging in public. And hey, they're not the only climate change-denying assholes on the front page today; there is, of course, a story about Trump. But still, we're gonna spend some time admiring the poppies, and we encourage you to do the same. Just don't you know, walk all over them while you're admiring them.

Saturday, April 8, 2017

8 April 2017

More than representing a picture of presidential power, the front page photo of Donald Trump meeting with President Xi Jinping of China in some ridiculous, garish, sad Palace of Versailles knockoff room in Mar-a-whatever the fuck it's called, his romper room for stupid people with too much money, is more a portrait of tastelessness and pathetic posturing than anything else. I doubt the Chinese were intimidated or impressed. I'd love to hear all the jokes they passed around among themselves after visiting that place, though; there's probably some comedy gold in there. In lighter news, Mr. Fries Man popped up on A1! I mean, if you want to impress some out-of-towners, get them a box of Mr. Fries Man shrimp and lemon garlic sauce fries. That's how you do it, Don.

Friday, April 7, 2017

7 April 2017

Now I don't pretend to know the late Don Rickles' political leanings, but I can't imagine he wouldn't look at the tableau of political power couples on the front page and just be like, "Well, civilization was nice while it lasted." I mean, maybe I'm just projecting. In any case, rest in peace, Mr. Warmth; may your one-liners forever shake the heavens with laughter.

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.