mixed media daily, Year 2

Sunday, May 7, 2017

7 May 2017

Today's A1 drawing most certainly got filtered through up-to-the-minute news gleaned via social media. The LAT story about the French election was that Macron's campaign got hacked and, exactly one day before French voters went to the polls, thousands of documents were dumped, and fake documents were intermixed with the authentic documents. That's potentially a category 5 political shit storm for Macron (how do you say "political shit storm" in Russian? Just asking), but it turns out French voters are not easily swayed by stupid bullshit they read online. Macron won handily, with over 65% of the vote. Well done, France! Oh, and can a bunch of you move here and live in small towns in Pennsylvania and Michigan and get American citizenship by 2020? Merci, that would be great.

Saturday, May 6, 2017

6 May 2017

Hey, if you were worried about all the federal money (i.e., your tax dollars) that's being spent so Trump can go to Mar-a-fucktwat every single weekend (check your list of grievances; it's on there, probably about 30-40 items down), worry no more. He's decided to go to another resort in New Jersey that he owns and, according to him, it'll cost less. Which is another way of saying that it'll still cost you money. But really, what do you expect him to do? Stay at the White House? Go to his house in New York and pretend he has a real marriage? Not do something that is completely fucking idiotic?

Friday, May 5, 2017

5 May 2017

Jesus, look at these smug pricks. That's Donald Trump, Paul Ryan, and Steve Scalise up there, and they're all super happy because they managed to squeeze some health care legislation through the House! In case you couldn't or wouldn't read the contents of their bill, let me give you a one-sentence summary: They took federal funds away from healthcare programs that aid the poorest and most vulnerable Americans and gave all that money---$600 billion dollars, give or take---to the wealthiest Americans and to insurance companies. And they are really fucking happy about it. They had cases of beer (shitty, shitty bud light, of course, because they are lacking in taste as well as empathy) brought into the white house so they could toast their victory, they were so fucking proud of the fact that they fucked over millions of their fellow citizens. But those people are poor, so fuck them. The rich people they gave all that money to, they're the ones who fund their campaigns.

Thursday, May 4, 2017

4 May 2017

Comey? Again? This guy floats to the top of A1 every so often, and every time I see him I think, "Hey, it's that Comey guy! Maybe this time he has the news we've been waiting for, i.e., the Trump-Russia smoking gun." Invariably, I am disappointed, because he's either in super-vague spy mode or he's talking about Hillary's goddamn emails. One of these days, I hope he'll do us all proud. Anyway, props to photographer Tomas Ovalle for providing an ominous photo of huge, gaping, industrial pipes (in an unrelated story about the crazy amount of snowmelt we're bracing for here in California), because they were really useful for this drawing.

Wednesday, May 3, 2017

3 May 2017

Since the writer's strike is over, I figure this is great time to pitch new show ideas, so here goes: a bunch of supreme leaders and dictators and strongman-type presidents meet up to discuss their nefarious plans, but instead they realize that what was really missing in their lives was each other. No? The only thing more insane than this idea is the fact that these assholes are actually in charge of shit? I mean, at least if it was on TV maybe our authoritarian nitwit would see it and realize---what's that? Preposterous? He has no love in his heart? You're probably right. I'll, uh, work on it and get back to you.

Tuesday, May 2, 2017

2 May 2017

The Los Angeles Times covered yesterday's local May Day march from the angle of, "how did the cops do?" Pretty well, in their assessment.In any case, big props to all who marched for worker and immigrant rights.
There was a little nugget at the very bottom of the front page that caught my eye. The new head of the USDA, Sonny Perdue, made his first act as Secretary the rollback of parts of Michelle Obama's Healthy eating initiative, because of course he did.

Monday, May 1, 2017

1 May 2017

You know who has a logo that's really hard to draw? The United Nations, that's who. I wonder if our UN ambassador, Nikki Haley, has ever considered the visual complexity of her new workplace's emblem, or the fact that it centers the world around the North Pole, or if she wonders what's with the leaves surrounding the map, or if she's just too busy making veiled threats at the rest of the UN body on behalf of her idiot boss to notice such things.

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.