My innocent, foolish friend David Schoffman has a weakness for cranky, crackpot, paranormal street prophets. Some who find the temporal world unsuited to their temperament find the consolations of philosophy and art adequate surrogates for their metaphysical urges. Not so my transcendent colleague David. He's always on the hook for some astral eccentric, some empyrean swindler or some sacerdotal grifter.
Hence his fascination with the beautiful and clairvoyant Dahlia Danton.
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| Schoffman and Danton at the Fénelon Seance, 2010 |
It started many years ago.
As a young, inexperienced artist trying to make his way in Paris and New York, David visited 'Betina,' the famously beguiling reader/advisor whose small studio on Cour du Commerce St.-André was a favorite refuge for the rudderless and homesick. Tucked away between rue Saint-André des Arts and the boulevard St.-Germain, Betina's had everything one might expect in a soothsayer's lair: crystal balls, wicca sticks, tarot decks, runes, ouija boards, show globes, Hessian crucibles, pendulums, mystic oracles, scrying mirrors, inlaid mother-of-pearl divining rods and scores of other obscure and beautiful objects.
The proselyte Schoffman was always powerless to the seductions of paraphernalia.
He put great trust in Betina and when she predicted in 1979 his future mid-career retrospective at the Musée des Objets Oubliable, he became a life-long dewy-eyed disciple of augury and the occult. (The show, in fact, did take place, though not exactly at the predicted location. In 1998, Schoffman had a fairly comprehensive exhibition at Milan's famous Museo delle Palline da Dimenticare).
Many years have past and Betina has long since retired to her ancestral village in western Romania. Schoffman replaced her with a series of equally charismatic and equally counterfeit heavenly hucksters, the latest being the wily Los Angeles artist, Dahlia Danton.
A skeptic may attribute his newfound affiliation to this relative novice in the art of strange sacrament to Danton's soft, spectral skin, her dark hair faintly scented with saffron and rose petal, her moist pink lips which she always keeps slightly ajar, even when silent and her rough throaty voice suggestive of mutual conspiracy and unearned intimacy.
The skeptic would probably be right.
As a young, inexperienced artist trying to make his way in Paris and New York, David visited 'Betina,' the famously beguiling reader/advisor whose small studio on Cour du Commerce St.-André was a favorite refuge for the rudderless and homesick. Tucked away between rue Saint-André des Arts and the boulevard St.-Germain, Betina's had everything one might expect in a soothsayer's lair: crystal balls, wicca sticks, tarot decks, runes, ouija boards, show globes, Hessian crucibles, pendulums, mystic oracles, scrying mirrors, inlaid mother-of-pearl divining rods and scores of other obscure and beautiful objects.
The proselyte Schoffman was always powerless to the seductions of paraphernalia.
He put great trust in Betina and when she predicted in 1979 his future mid-career retrospective at the Musée des Objets Oubliable, he became a life-long dewy-eyed disciple of augury and the occult. (The show, in fact, did take place, though not exactly at the predicted location. In 1998, Schoffman had a fairly comprehensive exhibition at Milan's famous Museo delle Palline da Dimenticare).
Many years have past and Betina has long since retired to her ancestral village in western Romania. Schoffman replaced her with a series of equally charismatic and equally counterfeit heavenly hucksters, the latest being the wily Los Angeles artist, Dahlia Danton.
A skeptic may attribute his newfound affiliation to this relative novice in the art of strange sacrament to Danton's soft, spectral skin, her dark hair faintly scented with saffron and rose petal, her moist pink lips which she always keeps slightly ajar, even when silent and her rough throaty voice suggestive of mutual conspiracy and unearned intimacy.
The skeptic would probably be right.
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