mixed media daily, Year 2

Sunday, April 30, 2017

30 April 2017

There were Just so many hats on the front page today that they could not---would not---be ignored. Funny pope hats, funny chef hats, plain jane baseball caps, you name it, it was on there. Well, at least if you named one of those three it was. Plus, the main image above the fold was a perfectly lovely illustration by Chris Gall. And what do you do when your illustration project unexpectedly finds somebody else's illustration as its subject matter? You steal their hat, that's what you do.

Saturday, April 29, 2017

29 April 2017

We all know that today is the 100th day milestone/nonmilestone (depending on where you live on the spectrum of acceptance) of Trump's Idiot Variety Hour. There are plenty of entertainment options out there for you to turn to that'll get you through this dark night, but not here. At mixed media daily, we're taking the high road. We're just gonna replace the heads of religious leaders with craps dice. Hey, did you know that there's a Golden Arm Club at many casinos for craps players who can throw for over an hour without hitting seven? I sure didn't. Not until today.

Friday, April 28, 2017

28 April 2017

Here in the greater Los Angeles area---just like regular folks elsewhere---we like to acknowledge the anniversaries of significant events in our town. This month we are revisiting the '92 LA riots, which means we are, collectively, temporarily obsessed with them. We are talking about whether they should even be named "riots," or if "civil unrest" or "insurrection" or some other term would be a name that better fit the circumstances. Today the LA Times worked the story from a pretty great angle: the pastors in South LA who spent those fraught days trying to cool down a lot of overheated people on both sides. I mean, 25 years was a long time ago, but are those guys still working? Because we might need them again, only this time for the entire nation.

Thursday, April 27, 2017

27 April 2017

Today we're celebrating filmmakers here at mixed media daily because, well,l that who was on the front page today. Up top we have Justin Chon, who just released a film about the Korean American experience during the 92 LA riots (did you know that this year is the 25th anniversary of the LA riots?). Down below we have Jonathan Demme, who passed away recently, and who of course directed a quiet little film called "The Silence of the Lambs," which pretty much makes him a goddamn national treasure. Also in local film-related news, the WGA might go on strike next week, which, if you're not in the entertainment business, will affect you not at all, but for me, well, let's just say that if it goes down I might have a lot more time to put into these drawings.

Wednesday, April 26, 2017

26 April 2017

Ah jeez, look who showed up on the front page today. To be fair, I haven't had to draw the tang creeper in a while (19 days, to be exact! That's got to be a record here at mixed media daily). Trump's 100 day mark is coming up, so of course there are a lot of job performance think pieces popping up, including the one today in the LA Times whose accompanying photo provided the fodder for today's drawing. As a bonus I've included my own assessment of Trump in the illustration. Feel free to quote me on that.

Tuesday, April 25, 2017

25 April 2017

Monday, April 24, 2017

24 April 2017

I have to go iron some shirts and generally get ready for my day tomorrow, but let me mention the big story above the fold today: Marine Le Pen is in the French presidential runoff. Hey France, remember how all of us here in America joked around all through our presidential campaign after Trump won the Republican nomination? And then you remember what happened after that? So, um, don't let that happen in your country. Be smart, France!

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.