Was This Necessary?

I hate people who write in books. I know that there’s a long and illustrious tradition of marginalia, from Montaigne to Coleridge to Kant, great insights can always be found on the margins. Still, I hate to find other peoples thoughts and observations scrawled along the edges of a book. For me it’s like sleeping on someone else’s unwashed sheets or having someone chew my food. For me it borders on repulsion.

So you can imagine my reaction when I checked out an old copy of Wittgenstein’s Tractatus from the UOR Library and found this on page 11.

Anonymous

ARTISTIC EDACITY

Call me crazy but I absolutely love art collectors! Some people think they are under-educated philistines overcompensating for an inherent poverty of imagination. Other accuse them of buffoonery and I suppose they can be susceptible to caricature. I, however, am gravely attracted to their aura of feigned invincibility. I am possessed by a thorough fascination of the culture of acquisitiveness, especially when the commodity has cultural capital. I think money has its own form of charisma and when the dazzle of dollars is hitched to the magnetism of art, the cocktail is unstoppable.

I find these qualities in rash abundance in the person of Jean-Luc Episteme. I become weak when I’m around him. He smolders with a mixture of fractious entitlement and dauntless materialism. He owns several homes and has each one filled with extremely expensive works of art.

Dahlia with Jean-Luc Episteme

That he owns four of my paintings only adds to the attraction. His taste may be questionable but his determination is electric!

Bedecked in Bern

I am spending New Years in Switzerland. A good friend of mine, the painter Spark Boon has a studio in Bern and a cabin at the summit of Gurten Mountain just south of the city. The views are spectacular! From the bedroom you can see through the crystal clear air, the lush, snow-capped Jura mountains. It’s like one of those dumb, sentimental 60′s movies … but I love it.

Dahlia on Gurten Mountain, New Years 2012

Spark Boon is a true gentleman in the great European tradition: Erudite, gallant, charming and cultivated. In Bern, after showing me his new work (which, do be honest, is fairly conventional, derivative and slight) he took me to Pendulus, the world famous jewelry boutique. I told him of my absolute itch, my irrational passion for the color turquoise.

He’s such a gracious, urbane man!

Dahlia at the studio of Spark Boon, Bern

THE FUTURE IS NOW … AND I’M UNDERWHELMED

A friend of mine who works in Silicon Valley at a place called Lepidium Technologies International (LTI) has let me know, in no uncertain terms, that the newest thing coming down the pike in 2012 will be VEBIC’s, or Visually Enhanced Business Information Cards. This nifty new piece of technology will altogether replace the traditional card stock business card that invariably get lost or crushed in the pandemonium of one’s purse.

The idea is that when professionals exchange information an application on their smart phone or tablet will mutually draw files (MDF) in any of the current media formats (jpg, jpeg, png, gif, pdf, doc, ppt, odt, pptx, docx, pps, ppsx, xls, xlsx.) containing an enhanced presentation of one’s bona fides.

As a favor to me (we dated briefly in college and this shy, diffident geek is always trying to do me favors), he gave me access to an early prototype of the app and together produced the following video business card.

What do you think?

INSIPID LUTES NEED NOT APPLY: THE HOLIDAYS

I have always considered myself a seeker. The path to enlightenment is a jagged thicket of possibilities. For a while I dabbled in Sufi mysticism. Later I joined an ashram near Seattle where all the female acolytes were expected to offer themselves to the residing guru, a hairy former drummer for the short-lived country western band The Devil You Know. When I finished graduate school I had a lot of time on my hands and I started taking classes on Zen Buddhism at the local community college. That led me to a trip to Japan where I stayed for over ten months retracing the Tokaido Road and meditating of the transitory nature of our lives.

By far, the most serenity and the greatest wisdom that I have found to date was in the Kabbalistic speculations of the ecstatic Los Angeles rabbi Malkizedek Obah Rivli. I have, what you might call, your typical history of drug use – I was particularly fond of Peyote buttons, crushed into a gummy paste and smoked through a hookah – but I have never experienced a high so blissfully profound as the one I get humming a Hasidic niggun with Reb Malki.

The ecstatic Los Angeles Rabbi Malkizedek Obah Rivli, 2011

Coupled with the intense study of Midrash and the Zohar, the mesmeric singing of Eastern European Jewish melodies have elevated me to an entirely new plane of existence. What I love about Reb Malki’s approach is that he is completely uninterested in the religious taboos typically associated with the major faiths. He somehow finds in the Scripture justification for all the pleasures one associates with contemporary life. He is extremely articulate, charming, charismatic and cute and I simply love being around him.

Happy Hanukka!!

VANITY

When this video first surfaced on YouTube I was thrilled because I appear in front of one of my early paintings. It’s a nice piece and in many ways it still holds up. But three years later and after over 90,000 views I demanded that the video be withdrawn from public view. The premise of this short film is a multi-dimensional view of the French artist Currado Malaspina. As many of my readers know, I have been involved – on again/off again – with this wildly charismatic, insanely talented idiot for a number of years. What I find particularly offensive about the video is the gushing behavior of Lita Abruzzi, the dancer.

At first I assumed that her fawning depiction of Currado was just a vapid yet innocent expression of hero-worship – after all, it was well known that Abruzzi was married to the famously possessive Italian industrialist Giovanni Malpaghino. Now. it tuns out, that this “marriage” was a sham – a pathetic ruse to hide Malpaghino’s homosexuality – and all the while Abruzzi and Currado were involved in a torrid role-playing romance whose kinky, abject, squalid sordidness was known to everyone ….. but me!

I just found out that it has just reappeared online so I might as well throw up my hands and (don’t ask me why) post it here:

I guess I like the way I look in it …

I admit that I am easily influenced. I struggle to this day to shake the powerful force of what I call “infatuated coercion.” The critic and scholar Harold Bloom calls it “the Anxiety of Influence.” I call it (in my case), weak, derivative eclecticism.

Below is a drawing I did just after graduate school.

An early drawing, Danton 2004

I did it shortly after a long, gauzy weekend in Paris where I was drifting in the floating world of absinthe and voluptuary indulgence. In short, 72 hours with Currado Malaspina.

Compare my feeble scribble with the work of that rotten master.

Maquettes pour le Marquis #8, Currado Malaspina

Inspiration comes in the most unexpected forms

I became very intimate with a few of my former teachers and mentors. Whether this was appropriate or not was an issue I never chose to dwell on. I’m a big girl and I’ve always taken pride in my ability to own up to my choices, however unconventional or politically incorrect.

One former teacher of mine, a middle-aged man who shall remain nameless, became an avid lover while somehow retaining his professorial authority. He was married with three grown children, a painter of huge geometric abstractions and a fierce intellectual with a breadth of knowledge that was encyclopedic in it’s scope. Had I not crossed that intimate line between student and amante, I never could have probed the capaciousness of his intellect and the beautiful subtlety of his ideas.

Maquettes pour le Marquis #7, Currado Malaspina 2010

Another mentor, the French painter Currado Malaspina, was a Gallic giant of sensuality and lust. He taught me to embrace not only the world of flesh but the idea of flesh. He correctly assessed North American culture as something noble, dynamic but inherently distrustful of the senses. He both changed my life and for a time ruined it as well.

The oddest encounter with an older man was with an artist whose antic sense of humor was irrepressibly and irresponsibly excessive. In the ten years of our on again/off again romance I don’t remember him ever being serious. He is a great, I dare say even an important artist but he continues to pay the steep price of blinding societal awkwardness and complete social ineptitude.

…. oh men …

Gallimaud Transapian

Gallimaud Transapian was my very first painting professor. He was petulant, erudite, opinionated, condescending, aloof, articulate and wildly charismatic. He died last week after a long illness and about two-hundred of his former students gathered at his sprawling hillside property in Vermont to pay their last respects.

I was deeply moved by our common grief and each of us shared our favorite Transapian story. He once told me that to be an artist, it was not sufficient to be merely an advocate of one’s ideas. One must be virulently against as well. To Transapian, art was a form of blood sport and to think of it as merely an expression of beauty or the representation of an idea was far from sufficient.

Art, he always said, is vital, and aggressive and should be a gauntlet and a provocation.

His own work was rather weak but he shaped an entire generation of strong, confident and important artists.

Gallimaud Transapian. I hate you with such a deep love.

Gallimaud Transapian

I’M NOT QUITE SURE WHAT TO MAKE OF THIS!

Someone recently brought the following video to my attention. I appear in it sporadically and I’m not entirely sure why.

… and who, can anyone tell me, is “Beatrice?”