PRAGUE

My infrequent trips to Prague are almost always unpleasant. I find the beautiful cityscape bleak, cloying and quaint. The intersecting chimneys that line Kaprova Boulevard reflect a sickening sapphire light that tint the clouds with dread. Lazarska Street, where common life bustles with resignation is like the filthy tail of an elegant animal. And the much-admired view from Strelecky Ostrov is simply a postcard from Purgatory.

The one shining light, the landmark that makes any trip worthwhile is the small, smoky jazz club across the street from the Mustek metro station known to the locals as Veleslavina’s. Every Thursday night the place is packed to hear Guido Tocca’s resplendent redefinitions of polymodal chromatism. This cat can play.

I am bitterly envious that the cover art on Tocca’s last CD’s is a painting by my friend and rival David Schoffman. Schoffman has a tin ear and such primitive tastes that his idea of good music are bands like the Sonora Seven and Darba.

I recommend to any serious listener any and all of Tocca’s discography. My personal favorite is the 2007 recording “Dazzled by Dawn: Live in Antibes.”

what once I was, and what am now

With John Milton turning 400 and with the popular noise of the deadly swarm having far from abated, David Schoffman has returned to Samson Agoniste for guidance and inspiration. As a Nazarite is separate to God so too is David to his art. His childish optimism still pictures his work as the seal of silence that corrects the world. As a bondslave to painting, he spends his light in his cramped atelier, far from what Milton called the “daily fraud.”

What a fool to think the sun is speechless beyond his studio walls. What arrogance to assume that upon drawing his tools he has made himself exempt from our collective culpability. His adamantean nobility is ill-fitting and ridiculous. His work is simply not that good.

What! You think I should dull my spear just because his wife just delivered a son?

THE SONGS OF THE HEART

David Schoffman's beautiful bride, a magnanimous and sublime woman whose many virtues highlight her husband's dim pessimism is on the verge of birthing a child. I find few things more sensual than the naked body of a woman in full fecundity. I flew in from Paris for two reasons.

One, to initiate litigation against my former dealer Byron George of the now defunct New York gallery Sardanapalus Modern and two, to draw David's darling mate in her lovely morning dress.

Tempests come and go but the hushed air that precedes birth is a cherished field of bliss.