mixed media daily, Year 2

Thursday, November 30, 2017

30 November 2017

Yes, that's Matt Lauer. Not to be outdone in disgusting behavior (as if), Trump decided now is a good time to retweet racist videos from Britain First, just to remind you all that he is still, and probably ever will be, the most repulsive sack of shit to ever slither across this earth. And even though I know you are itchin' to blow your whole rage budget on these two stories, the one you should be saving it for is the tax bill that Republicans are trying to cram down the throat of America so that they can justify all those fat donations they've been getting for years from assholes like the Koch brothers.

Wednesday, November 29, 2017

29 November 2017

The Grammy nominations are officially out/reported on in this here paper. As a help to their older/less with it readers, the LA Times provided pictures on A1 of all of the folks up for album of the year. Except Donald Glover. That's just weird, LA Times. What do you have against Donald Glover, man? Anyway, I drew Kendrick (not very well! Sorry, Kendrick).

Tuesday, November 28, 2017

28 November 2017

I would expect to have to draw certain categories of events no matter what year I do this project---there's always wars, there's always natural disasters, there's always shitty politicians doing shitty things, and, because I'm dealing with American news, there are always mass shootings. British royal weddings, however, are not one of these things. But here we are. In 2011 I drew William and Kate (twice, I think), and this year it's Harry and Meghan. well, their engagement anyway. You get the idea. In other news, the grammys will never be interesting, but the story of how those statues are made? Well hey, that's pretty interesting.

Monday, November 27, 2017

27 November 2017

Michigan Democratic Congressman John Conyers Jr. is stepping down from his position on the House Judiciary Committee while he faces an ethics investigation for alleged sexual harassment. At the same time, sexual predator Roy Moore is being heartily endorsed by fellow sexual predator Donald Trump to take over a senate seat. Clearly neither side has a monopoly on virtue, but come on.

Sunday, November 26, 2017

26 November 2017

Boy, nothing says "your long Thanksgiving holiday is over" quite like a picture of California's lethal injection chamber on the front page of the Sunday paper. We get it, LA Times; tomorrow is Monday. If you're in need of further reality check to wrench you from the sweet, narcotic embrace of a surfeit of free time, dive into the piece about the disaster that is Mexico's housing market.

Saturday, November 25, 2017

25 November 2017

Back when I did this project in 2011 I was drawing Egypt-related things all the time---it was the year of the Arab Spring. Remember that? And today is, I think, one of maybe two times I drew anything about Egypt this year. And to have it be for such a horrendous terrorist attack---well, this is sort of the tenor of the news cycle this year, so I shouldn't be surprised.

Friday, November 24, 2017

24 November 2017

Oh Michael Flynn, you mean-spirited dumbass, 2017 has been quite a rollercoaster for you, champ. How could you ever think that doing grunt work for a foreign government while you were involved, at high levels, in the machinery of our own government wouldn't ever come back to bite you in the ass? Is it hubris or are you just fucking stupid? I imagine, in your case, a little from both columns.

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.