mixed media daily, Year 2

Tuesday, October 31, 2017

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.

Monday, October 30, 2017

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.

Sunday, October 29, 2017

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.

Saturday, October 28, 2017

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.

Friday, October 27, 2017

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!

Thursday, October 26, 2017

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?

Wednesday, October 25, 2017

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.

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.