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.

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!