Tim McDonnell

Climate Desk Associate Producer

Tim McDonnell joined the Climate Desk after stints at Mother Jones and Sierra magazine, where he nurtured his interest in environmental journalism. Originally from Tucson, Tim loves tortillas and epic walks.

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What the Hell Is David Shrigley Doing?

"Hey, I could've done that," you might say of the Scottish artist's dark, childlike drawings. Right, but you didn't.

—By Tim McDonnell

| Sat Oct. 22, 2011 3:00 AM PDT

When I reach cartoonist David Shrigley at home in Glasgow, Scotland, he's in the midst of cleaning up his computer desktop, which is cluttered with digital scans of his work. His routine involves filling notebook after notebook with sketches, so you can see how his desktop might feel overwhelmed. But he's tidying up for his own sake. "The computer forgets things," he quips. "Then it dies and takes your life with it."

It's an apt metaphor for an artist whose work is rife with perverse takes on death and dismemberment. But Shrigley, 44, isn't morose: His approach to such topics, while not exactly lighthearted, is often hilarious, compelling Dave Eggers to call Shrigley "probably the funniest gallery-type artist who ever lived."

[Read the full article]

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Ry Cooder's Vintage Los Angeles Fiction

The renowned guitarist's short story collection follows hardscrabble musicians and other vagabonds in a postwar City of Angels.

—By Tim McDonnell

| Mon Oct. 17, 2011 3:00 AM PDT

"What LA is now is appalling and unspeakable," Ry Cooder says.

A stifling, stormy wind is blowing up a desolate Los Angeles beach. It's late, and the driver of the defunct 606 trolley, freshly laid off, stops his coach here, the end of the line on his last nostalgic trip down the rails. He is listening to the waves and taking pulls from a bottle of Old Stagg. A beautiful young blonde, distractedly grasping a handbag, approaches and asks for a lift back into town. As they pull away, a body in a heavy overcoat sinks slowly in the surf.

The year is 1954, and no one would be surprised if the next grim mug to appear on the scene were that of Philip Marlowe, squatting in the sand and sucking a Camel. But this isn't a story about a detective; it's a story about a trolley driver. The author, Ry Cooder, puts his stock in the blue-collar underclass of the City of Angels, and the stories he tells are about their hard, bewildering lives.

Yes, that Ry Cooder, the one with the guitar. And yes, he tells stories: Last week San Francisco's legendary City Lights Publishers, home to the likes of Lawrence Ferlinghetti and Allen Ginsberg, released Cooder's Los Angeles Stories, a collection of brooding short stories about the dark inner life of postwar downtown Los Angeles. The collection is a requiem to a city wherein the world's tides swept together an impossibly diverse culture that was quickly squandered and homogenized by Hollywood and hit-hungry record executives.

[Read the full article]

Jeff Bridges Abides

The Oscar-winning actor on becoming a real-life country singer, conquering stage fright, and keeping his "give-a-shitter in kick."

—By Tim McDonnell

| November/December 2011 Issue

In his nearly lifelong career as an actor, 61-year-old Jeff Bridges has portrayed everything from POTUS (The Contender) to a surly US Marshal (True Grit). To fans of The Big Lebowski, of course, he'll forever be the Dude. The remarkable thing is that Bridges seems as natural loping up to the bowling alley bar for a White Russian as he does wooing vice presidential candidates. Born to an established Hollywood family, Bridges—son of Lloyd, brother of Beau—recently made his most surprising transition yet: walking off the set and into the recording studio. Following his Oscar-winning performance in Crazy Heart as whiskey-soaked country singer Bad Blake, Bridges—a lifelong guitarist—teamed up with his longtime pal and Crazy Heart music director T Bone Burnett to produce his own self-titled album of sensual country tunes. I caught up with the artist/crooner/star on the eve of a Lebowski cast reunion to chat about growing up Bridges, conquering stage fright, and how to play a drunk without drinking.

[Read the full article]

Justin Townes Earle Lives Up to His Name

—By Tim McDonnell

| Mon Oct. 10, 2011 3:00 AM PDT

Justin Townes Earle at the Hardly Strictly Bluegrass Festival.

Being born into a famous family can be an artist's greatest blessing or most reviled curse. Sure, things come easier when your parents are there to open doors, but there's always the fear that your life's work is validated not by merit, but by your last name. So what happens when your famous parent leaves you at a young age? The baggage is there, but not the benefit.

Such is the story of Justin Townes Earle, the singer-songwriter son of successful country rocker Steve Earle—who in recent years landed a role on HBO's Treme. JT was born in Nashville, and shortly thereafter, his father took off for Los Angeles to develop his burgeoning music career, leaving Justin with an overworked mother, two younger siblings, a last name, and not much else. "He was very absent in my early life. There was very little contact with my father," Earle told me.

Now 29, Earle, is waist-deep in his own burgeoning career, with a fourth album out last year and, to hear him tell it, plans for the future as big as the summer Tennessee sky. And like any folk-music hero worth their salt, his success is built on a life of hard luck, hard work, and plenty of wanderin'.

[Read more in the Mixed Media blog]

Justin Torres' Hard-Knock Debut Novel

The author of "We The Animals" on the fuzzy line between fiction and memoir, and why he hates the word "dysfunctional."

—By Tim McDonnell

| Mon Oct. 3, 2011 4:10 PM PDT

Justin Torres didn't grow up yearning to write a novel. He was born into a poor family in upstate New York, and spent his early years "dropping out of a bunch of colleges and working random jobs." But when a friend in New York City invited Torres to tag along to an informal writing workshop, he unwittingly lit a spark that would turn Torres, in a few short years, into one of the most promising new fiction writers of his generation.

Torres' recent debut, We the Animals—which promptly landed him on the bestseller lists of NPR and the New York Times—is the gut-wrenching story of, well, a poor family in upstate New York, told from the perspective of the youngest of three brothers. Lightly supervised by an abusive father and an exhausted, overworked mother, the boys run wild through town and struggle to understand their hard-knock family life and the roles they play in it. Ma and Paps are besieged by money troubles and deteriorating trust. Our unnamed narrator wrestles with a secret identity crisis. And older brothers Joel and Manny face the grim prospect of growing up to be like Paps. Torres' prose is sparse and exacting, and he knows his characters well, as they're based on his own kin. I sat down with Torres, who just kicked off a reading tour, in his adoptive home of San Francisco to talk about life-based fiction, the human/animal dichotomy, and how a child copes with a family that seems both to love him deeply and be hellbent on his destruction.

Mother Jones: So, how much of the book is autobiographical?

Justin Torres: The hard facts are autobiographical. I have two brothers, my mother worked in a brewery, my parents were teenagers when they started having kids, and I'm the youngest of the three. But everything that happens, all the incidents, are fiction. Nothing that happened in the book happened—or happened like that.

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