Archive | January, 2008

Corndawg in the Hospital

Corndawg doesn't know what day it is.
He’s trying to figure out how much time remains until he’ll be released from his extended captivity, currently confined within the boundaries of one long, tired hospital corridor. A jaded hospital guard with slicked-back hair is leaning back in his chair, keeping a watchful eye on us to make sure we don’t help Corndawg escape. The place is air-tight– sealed on each end with heavy card-access-only doors, and filled in the middle with crumpled Doritos bags, goofy nurses dancing lurid, grotesque dances, and a pungent locker room odor.

“If you think about it, it really starts to drive you nuts,” says Corndawg. “I’ll just be lying in bed and thinking, ‘Why am I here? This is a place for sick people. This whole place was built to help sick people… but I’m not sick, and that’s why I’m here… wait, why am I here?’” Corndawg is here, in this cinder block Glendale medical center, because he’s participating in a medical research study for some giant pharmaceutical corporation, trying out a new cholesterol pill. He’s here because he’s trading his body for money in the name of medical research, and it doesn’t sound like such a bad idea. They give him one 5-milligram pill and then he stays under constant observation for nine days while they make detailed notes on the side effects. And then he walks out with $2,300 in his pocket.


Since 2004, Corny has completed eight of these studies– and it’s at least partially how he funds his free-wheeling lifestyle. He talks to my roommate Liz, who’s smuggled him in some fresh carrot juice from Yum Yum Donuts, about where the best places to visit in Portugal and Spain are. In the past year alone, Corndawg’s been back and forth across the U.S. (often traveling on motorcycle with little more than his laptop, guitar, and trusty airbrush gun), down to Argentina, and overseas to Spain, Germany, Italy, and the Czech Republic. “It provides a nice cushion for an artist’s life,” he says of his intermittent medical studies. “It’s nice to not have to hitchhike or hop trains, when you can say, ‘Oh, I have an extra thousand bucks– I’ll buy a plane ticket.’”

Aside from the stuffy sterile surroundings, the conditions of Corndawg’s nine-day imprisonment aren’t so bad. He has his laptop and cell phone and he’s been watching the second and third seasons of “Lost” in back-to-back marathon sessions. Once an hour he’s allowed a brief respite from the fluorescent lighting– a few moments of fresh air on a secluded hospital balcony. Corndawg recommends avoiding the longer studies, however. In an 18 day study he once partook in, the effects of confinement began to set in quickly. Without Lose Weight Exercise and meaningful human interaction, he sunk into a deep depression and slept 12 hours a day (actually, I probably should have asked if those feelings might have been related to the medication they’d had him on).


“Lie as much as possible on your screening tests,” he says– it’s a surefire way to guarantee eligibility. “Just answer ‘no’ to every question: ‘Have you ever fainted?’ ‘Oh, never!’ and then play dumb if they confront you about it later.” He also warns against radioactive tracers. “Those stay in your system for 30 years.” Likewise, he mentions, it’s not a hot idea to undergo the spinal tap tests. A couple brazen girls on the floor are undergoing double spinal tap tests, which require them to lay completely still for 48 hours straight. “It’s gruesome. They got up today and they were just stumbling around, on the verge of passing out.” But, he notes, they’re getting paid $500 a day.

Over the course of our conversation, Corndawg draws alternate analogies for his medical trials: at times he calls them a prison, but the next minute they become a vacation: “Sometimes I’ll fly out to a distant city, planning my trip around a medical study, and it ends up paying for itself.” That seemingly contradictory coupling accesses the heart of capitalism– his studies are just another way of exchanging time and personal risk for wealth and freedom. Corndawg’s willingness to bring it to such romantic extremes is either valiant or ludicrous, but it seems to be working out pretty well for him.

Let Freedom Bling.

Brief Highlights from Art L.A.

 
Art LA is a huge convention that took place last weekend in Santa Monica. My roommate Liz had a free ticket so we went and checked it out. Here are three rad artists whose work I found out about as a result!

Most of Adrian Ghenie‘s paintings use the same drab color palette. It’s all black and white and beiges and dark browns– which, combined with his blotchy impressionist brush strokes, would usually be a total turn-off for me. But the subject matter in Ghenie’s work is too rad to dismiss. I mean, maybe I’m wrong here, but I’m pretty sure that picture above depicts two gay Nazis secretly making out. Kinda hot. He also draws submarines, dark basements, and cold men hiding under their desks during wartime.

Adrian Ghenie has shown at Kontainer Gallery in L.A.

 
It’s no surprise to learn that Michael Williams went to summer school at RISD in 1996, because his paintings have that endearing Fort Thunder touch. The work leaves a first impression of haphazard juvenile nonsense, but it only takes a second glance to notice the insane intricacies. Williams’ paintings are firmly rooted in the realm of the absurd and cartoony, without crossing the line into annoying abrasiveness. There’s a hidden reservoir of mystery in each image– like we’re just peering at the calm facade of a raging battle between sinister and friendly forces.

Michael Williams has shown at Canada Gallery in New York.
 
Jocelyn Shipley‘s sculptures weren’t on display at Art LA, but I came across her ridiculous/amazing work on the Canada Gallery website. Sculptures aren’t my cup of tea. They’re usually just snooze-inducing abstract shapes that often aren’t thought-provoking or even viscerally enjoyable. But Jocelyn Shipley is the kind of sculpturist I can dig: she makes technicolor mutilated corpses with ham-and-cheese sandwiches spilling out of their guts, pentagrams constructed out of old pantyhose (dripping with blood, of course), and weird pagan performance art involving nauseatingly adorable puppies.

Jocelyn Shipley has shown at Canada Gallery in New York.

Lasagna Cat


the Internet this month, for good reason: it’s a recipe for genius. First, re-enact (with eerie accuracy) a classic “Garfield” comic strip using green screens, hairpieces, and a full-grown man in a terrifying Garfield costume. Then slap a masterfully edited absurdist music video on the end, and you’ve got yourself comedy gold. I can’t believe no one’s thought of this before! It’s like David Lynch’s “Rabbits,” with a Web 2.0 sense of humor.

“Lasagna Cat” also brings to mind the much simpler, but still hilarious comic strip deconstruction blog, Marmaduke Explained– a daily analysis of the cryptically terse single-panel comic strip “Marmaduke” and its its frustrating canine puns.
 
Because the Internet’s lack of spatial boundaries has rendered the format of newspaper comics obsolete, artists can now express themselves in full thoughts, rather than snippets fragmented by the fiscal restrictions of the printed page. Hell, these days they can afford to make full animations or videos available to a mass audience, expressing their blasé distaste for Mondays or their doe-eyed love of lasagna. So “Lasagna Cat” and “Marmadue Explained” are comedies of antiquity, laughing at holdovers from the recent low-tech past.

The makers of “Lasagna Cat,” an L.A. based group called Fatal Farm, are definitely going places. Check out the Reimagined TV Themes project– their reworking of the “Duck Tales” intro as a Myspace child abduction nightmare reaches new heights of hilarity.

 

Tied to the 90′s

Maybe it’s Hillary Clinton’s cyborgian persistence, or maybe it’s just my compulsive cultural consumption of the “90210″ DVDs– but wouldn’t it be rad if we could just go back to the 90′s? Everything was so uncomplicated! Cell phones were for millionaires and coke addicts, we were not yet tethered to the realms of Myspace and Facebook, and Bush Jr. was still just a recovering alcoholic that no one gave a second thought. We were never asked to choose between Blu-Ray and HD-DVD, and gas prices were cheap enough for even slacker Gregg Araki characters to go on extended road trips.

Everyone just rollerbladed around the streets of San Francisco in pastel shirts and cut-off shorts, listening to cassette tapes on their Walkmans and quipping “Don’t have a cow, man.” When they were forced to work, it mainly consisted of serving up burgers at The Peach Pit or dancing in record stores with Liv Tyler and Renée Zellweger. They traded zines, watched the skies for UFOs, and played Sega Genesis. But, alas, there are no time machines to allow us to return to that idyllic golden age. I feel like Jeff Lynne, tragically trapped in the future!

Anyway, I must apologize for my absence. I’ve had a busy month, working more frequently at Mean Magazine, and also doing some still photography for a friend’s independent gay horror film. Here are 21 pictures: some taken from my car while inching through traffic on the west side of L.A., and some taken in a dry state park that has been used in a million movies, out near the cold desert of Palmdale.

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Rad Films of 2007
 
 

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