ON MEANING AND SIGNIFICANCE

Explaining his improbable infatuation with country music, Charlie Parker famously suggested one, “listen to the stories.”

I totally get it.

Like Dante with the Inferno and Milton with Paradise Lost, country music is much more interested in sin than it is with redemption or virtue.

Scripture as fig leaf has been a favored tactic for centuries. With the death of God and the rise of neuroscience the governesses now stand strapless and unzipped ready at last to live without guilt.

That’s why I’m drawn to the work of the French provocateur, Currado Malaspina. His work goes to places I dare only go in my dreams.

I’m never exactly certain what his work means but on some mysterious level it speaks to me.

Malaspina is living proof that one needn’t be a decent person to be an artist of depth and compassion. Some people dismiss his work as the nugatory fantasies of an impotent old man. Others admire his inventiveness but marginalize his contribution to the contemporary discourse because of it’s phallocentricity. I just find his work funny.

So here’s my beef.

Why, in this post-modern, post-colonial, pre-apocholyptical anti-hierarchical age do we still require the genuflections of earnestness from our most gifted cultural custodians?

Why can’t we drop our drawers and have a few laughs?

When did making art become a ‘practice’? What are we … attorneys??

When Tristan Tzara finally met Micah Carpentier he famously asked the fabled Cuban artist what it felt like to work in English but dream in Spanish.

Carpentier had little patience for that kind of European paternalism and basically blew him off. But before they ultimately parted ways (the meeting took place in Miami Beach of all places) they decided to go for a swim. Tzara got stung by a jellyfish and they both took it as a sign though they differed on the significance.

To Tzara it meant that pain was the ultimate aphrodisiac.

To Carpentier it meant that the asshole had it coming.

WHAT GOES AROUND COMES TO NOTHING

When I set out to write what amounted to a glorified chapbook about my odd friend Currado Malaspina I had to do a tremendous amount of research.

First I had to convince Currado to give me access to his voluminous archive of drawings. I spent three weeks at his rue Fénelon studio poring over one ratty sketchbook after another. I don’t think Malaspina himself knew how much work he had stuffed on his shelves and buried in his drawers.

He must be one of those obsessive/compulsive types because unless he’s eating, drinking or attempting to inveigle some comely admirer into his pathetic and filthy little bachelor billet, he’s typically sketching away on some crazy project or another.

I chose about twenty drawings that seemed to have some sort of rough coherence. We argued for days but he finally agreed to allow me to present them as a series with what seemed to me an appropriate title:

 PALIMPSESTE

When I got a proof of the book back from the printer I invited a few trusted friends over to give me their honest assessments.

Nearly everyone, including my mother, thought I was crazy.

First of all, There’s no love lost between Currado Malaspina and the art insiders of Los Angeles. Most people here are tired of his snobby dismissal of anything having to do with California. He has spent years making it abundantly clear to anyone who will listen how he disdains what he calls le frivole Hollywoodienne.

Nobody understands why I have anything to do with him, especially after he pilloried my first and only exhibition in Paris in a review so odious, so gratuitously negative, so loathsome and base that La grande écrevisse, the magazine that published it, felt the need to add a conciliatory editor’s note, distancing itself somewhat from what it feared some of its female readers might find offensive.

But I’m a Buddhist and I can forgive, plus I’ve learned the hard way never to burn a bridge while you’re on the greasy way up. (full disclosure: Currado has arranged for me to interview Hisedea Yokidoki for a long-form essay that I’m pitching to Harper’s on subversive ceramics ) 

Anyway, even though my colleagues here are completely nonplussed, when I finally got the actual book in hand I was thoroughly and completely excited!

… and it doesn’t hurt that I’ve already sold 1500 copies in the States alone!

I’ll have a book signing soon, probably somewhere in Culver City so please stay tuned!

DUH

Before the ubiquity of smartphones I used to grind my teeth and play with my hair.

The sad truth about all this new technology is that it hasn’t merely taken over our lives but it has also displaced all the other things we did to distract us from what Parmenides neatly called our “being.”

Let’s finally face it, the one aspect of human endeavor that separates us from our pets is that we alone among the species contain the infinite capacity for self-hatred. The reason why cat videos are cuter than human videos is that cat videos are completely void of irony.

How else does one explain our collective infatuation with the selfie. No, it’s not a crush we have with ourselves but rather something violently antithetical to that. The act of photographing oneself is a desperate attempt to plead, against all evidence, for personal exceptionalism.

After all, what does one do with all these digital micro-bits of narcissism? Are they archived in a vault or arranged neatly in leather-bound selfie albums so that our grandchildren can admire them in the future.?

No, they’re thoughtlessly thrusted upon the vast ether of the Internet and in their promiscuity lose all purchase on any claim of singularity.

But how fitting! What better way to express our self-disdain then by chronicling it with the fugitive medium of the byte.

If my assessment seems cruel, think again.

The other day while waiting for a friend at my local coffee and accessory chain store I spied a harmless insect of a young man staring at me as if I were Pamela Anderson in a soaking wife-beater This happens all the time and if I weren’t so consumed with self-loathing I would have been flattered. Instead I started scrolling down Facebook taking inventory of all the vapid aphorisms and Xtreme sport photos of my friends. It suddenly occurred to me that I hadn’t taken a selfie all day and I was feeling a bit disoriented and disconnected. With this uncomfortable feeling came a vague sense of exhilaration and for a few short seconds I felt fully and autonomously alive.

My face must have registered my confusion because about a half hour later and with great embarrassment my gnat-like admirer approached my table and wordlessly placed this awful picture squarely in front of me.

When I recovered from my shock a thought occurred to me with a clarity so acute that I am convinced of its insight.

The selfie was invented by Rembrandt!

WAYLAID IN MALAYSIA

Here is a picture of me from a few years back, taken by my friend Manon Ovidier. I was living at the time in Kuala Lumpur, working as an assistant executive consultant for a very powerful multi-national pharmaceutical company.

How I ended up in Malaysia working a straight job is a longer story than I have time for but suffice it to say, it was a mess.

Kuala Lumpur can be a really cool place if you forget the climate, the crowds, the food, the architecture and the institutional corruption that stretches all the way from the highest government officials to your street vendors and dry cleaner.

I was in my late twenties and had this irrational infatuation with money and prestige. A lucrative corporate job seemed at the time to be the perfect antidote to the thankless, theoretical shill game that was the MFA painting program at UCLA.

Don’t ask me how but somehow I deluded myself into thinking that peddling antidiuretics to the third-world medical mafia was, in some twisted way, a nobel way to “serve.” Looking back I realize that my only asset was the eye-candy I provided for our politely oily clients. The truth is that to this day I’m not 100% sure whether I am pro, anti or agnostic about diuretics. (Though I am sure that I am allergic to egg yolks and cheese).

I pretty much wasted three precious years playing this straight-job charade. The only good to come out of it was an abiding respect for Islam and a bunch of cute little watercolors of an Asian urban orgy of contemporary architecture.

ACHSENZEIT – GESUNDHEIT

There’s a funny trick I do with my eyes that never fails to freak out my little nephews and nieces.

I can’t really describe how I do it but the effect is one that gives the appearance that my lids are simultaneously opened and closed. You can see how creepy that can look to a kid. Hell, it looks creepy enough to an adult! It’s sort of like a physical, visual expression of duplicity.

My favorite character in all of Shakespeare is Iago. I don’t think he gets a fair shake. I think I understand him pretty well and I admire the way he is able to think, like a good chess player, several moves in advance.

He was very clever in anticipating how completely bat shit Othello could get. He played the Moor like a kazoo.

To be a successful artist these days you have to be very lucky and very calculated. You have to model your foreign policy not after some namby-pamby Jeffersonian democrat but after something like Uganda’s Idi Amin or Romania’s Ceaușescu . You have to be paranoid, despotic, strategic and supremely anti-ethical.

Not unethical, anti-ethical.

I literally lay awake at night designing elaborate stratagems in order to advance my ambitions and confound my foes. I watch old reruns of Dynasty and Dallas and carefully observe the cold impassive expressions that mask the characters’ flagrant assaults on human decency. I meditate and concentrate, training my mind on the time-honored Machiavellian tactics of ass-kicking and back-stabbing.

While my earnest colleagues collect inspiring quotations from Deepak Chopra and Camus I plot like Picasso with the single-minded goal of achieving my mild form of greatness. I know I don’t have talent but I certainly have the looks.

And let’s face it, with Candy Crush, Hot Tub Time Machine and the Twerk this ain’t exactly what I’d call the Axial Age.

BULLYING: THE COUNTER ARGUMENT

I don’t mind a glass of wine now and again and I’m sick and tired of those who find my behavior objectionable. I’m mystified by the puritanical American habit of glorifying moderation. The Aristotelian mean was never meant as a cocktail calculator and I dare say saucy Dionysus presided fairly well over the not-too-shabby Athenian theater.

I got my first inkling of the magical grape when I was a young art student in Paris studying printmaking with the great Bernice Bêtise. The class could have easily been called Limestone with Lafite because of all the fancy collectors who milled outside the studio waiting to chat with the beautiful Bérri. They came bearing extravagant gifts – rare bottles of Petit Verdot, cases of young, inky Merlot, even a few insanely expensive jewels from Château Rothschild – and we, her students used to crack these babies open over our runny brie and baguettes.

Those were the days before Diet Coke and potato chips colonized the world’s rude and unworldly pallet.

To mistrust the senses, as most Americans do, is to contemptuously turn one’s back on God herself. The priggish hoi polloi who pooh pooh the bloody meats of indulgence are a sorry lot of damp, churchy reactionaries. Their chaste abstemiousness is based on ignorance and fear and nothing short of a lobotomy is likely to change that.

Artists are the worst of the lot, especially here in Los Angeles. The greasy, opportunistic pole does not cotton well to fireplace pissing to say nothing of flaming impassioned polemic. It’s the land of the nice, the mild and the kind of mannered artsy fartsy behavior that make art schools so insufferably predictable.

Where have all the great arguments gone?

Here we value consensus, harmony, collaboration and kismet. Don’t these people realize that good karma equals bad art?

Where there is renunciation there inevitably lies caution and where there is caution there is always inexorable compromise.

So yes, I drink wine and other delicious spirits as well. Pot is too lovey-dovey and dulls the already dulled senses. It’s a feel good high that surppresses the ego and drowns our natural and mandatory petulance in a gelatinous compote of Jah love.

Can’t we just not get along!

CRUSHING NUTS

Somewhere between the Via Dolorosa and the Boulevard of Broken Dreams there is a lurking state grace that the holiday season has the potential of bringing out.

I’m not one of those sentimental centurions of custom and hearth who look forward to the festive good cheer of late December like a hobo on a bread line. Quite the contrary. If a surge were called for in the War on Christmas I would be the first to re-enlist. But the winter ritual that never fails to move me and the one I partake in without the slightest reservation is the annual Los Angeles Artist Cookie Bake-Off.

Started over thirty years ago by the doyenne of Southern California post-feminist theory, Shira Hadasha, the event has evolved into something like the Burning Man of the chocolate chip. From the pink-haired post-grad party chicks of Echo Park to the humorless academics of Santa Clarita the whole range of eccentric artist types show up to participate. Within the past couple of years we started including gallerists and curators as well, turning the thing into a shmoozy, boozy networking shangri-la.

As one would expect with a group of creative, high achieving professional women the competition is backbiting and fierce. Vying for the distinction of Best Cookie has turned into a venal blood sport where nascent animosities blossom into full-blown vendettas over issues like gluten, lactose and the prohibitive cost of saffron. For the past few years we’ve enlisted a couple of pajama-patchoulied blissed-out urban orphans from Hare Krishna to act as our impartial judges but even that fails to mollify our most militant competitors.

I love being around women or more precisely, I enjoy the absence of men. The best and the worst of us comes out in an uninhibited, unrestrained way that would be impossible if there were guys present. I’m certain that if we’re not the smarter sex we’re at least the better dressed. We have a lower incidence of bad breath and body odor and when we’re drunk and belligerent we seldom resort to physical violence.

I made a batch of double-baked oatmeal cranberry biscuits this year from a recipe I stole from a woman who moved to New Haven to teach at Yale.  They were a bit too buttery and I ended up feeding most of them to my dog.

He couldn’t tell the difference. He has no taste. He doesn’t care. He’d eat anything. He’s just a raging, slobbering sequence of unreflective appetites and impetuous impulses.

Like most guys.

SCHLOCK AND AWE

Like bullying and carbs, for some inexplicable reason passive aggression has gotten a bad name. I’ve often wondered what art history would have looked like if our great masters were free of resentments.

“Hey Buonarroti, I really like what you’re doing with that ceiling” 

“Thanks Ray, and your School of Athens really rocks too, man!”

“Hey, we should trade studio visits!”

Yeah man … sounds great!”

Can you imagine a worse nightmare?!!

Visiting the studio of David Schoffman

I remember back in my callow days of shameless shmoozing  I would find myself struggling to find cheerful equivalents for words like interesting, powerful, dynamic and the most vexing of all, original. I gushingly submitted to paying studio visit after mind-numbing studio visit while climbing the buttery steps of Los Angeles’ hierarchical art world.

But the worst indignity was enduring the unsolicited critiques of my “betters” as they made their reciprocal call on my atelier. Look, I’m not an idiot, if I didn’t have a vagina none of these eminences, grey or otherwise, would have braved the depraved L.A. traffic to get to my shabby work space in Silverlake.

But come they did and in droves.

In order to maintain the pretense of professionalism these pompous middle-aged mediocrities always felt obliged to offer insight. They spoke elliptically, constantly using metaphor in order to soften their judgements into more digestible digs. Their evasions were comical because the diaphanous veil behind their courteous obfuscations was so patently obvious.

And me, I would feign feminine resignation and self-effacing awe, the absolutely perfect seduction.

Fraudulently reverential with Los Angeles painter David Schoffman

Thank god I’m passed all that now but from time to time I still suffer these pangs of reflexive obsequiousness and I’m back to being that supplicating coquette. I hate myself when that happens but I’ll be damned if it doesn’t always get the desired result.