SPEECHLESS

The Podcast is an interesting hybrid between yodeling down a deserted canyon and sleeping naked with the blinds up. I suppose that's precisely why it appeals so much to my good friend David Schoffman.

Every Tuesday evening Schoffman takes to the airwaves (yes I know it's not the airwaves but alas, my lycée English was formed in the sixties) and spreads what can only be described as his unholy gospel of eccentricity.

No two broadcasts are alike.

One week he interviewed the psychic Dietrich Goulwasser who apparently sat beneath an orb and predicted who would be included in the Whitney Biennial for the next 15 years.

Another time he read the menus of six of his least favorite Los Angeles restaurants and spent the duration of the broadcast suggesting recipe adjustments. In my opinion, removing the olives, anchovies and capers from a puttanesca would not only be unforgivable but might also subject a restauranteur to serious criminal charges. But then again, I'm French.

But such whimsical speculations are exactly what makes the Schoffman podcasts so entertaining.

His ratings went through the roof last week when he hosted the now infamous Czech performance artist Brichacek Breza. Breza, as most of you know, ran afoul of the authorities when she crashed a meeting of the G-7+2 and loudly read the first three points in her feminist manifesto Us Chicks Want This (My ženy chtějí tento).

In what was probably a podcast first, Breza performed a 40 minute mute pantomime of Vladimir Nabokov's classic Lolita. The ambient noise and the recording crew's muffled gasps were apparently enough to captivate David's avid listeners and the show was subsequently re-aired in fourteen different countries.

I'm far from intimate with these new technologies and I suppose that pegs me as an irrelevant old goat consigned to the past and ready for pasture.

Unless, of course, I could write an entire novel using only emojis.

A SLIPPERY SLOPE

Schoffman with Dahlia Danton, Geneva

DuMartin famously wrote that "if you can't fall in love in Paris then you might as well bicker in Geneva." ("si vous ne pouvez pas tomber en amour à Paris, alors vous pourriez aussi bien se quereller à Genève." from Point de repère 1942).

There was a time when my good friend David Schoffman and I shared everything. We shared a studio, a broken down Schwin 3-speed vélo, a winter coat, an umbrella, a transistor radio and a girl friend.

Or two.

Or three.

The problem with sharing women was that it required more finesse than generosity and as such, was rarely worth the effort.

Despite what they say about us Europeans, we are just as inept in matters of love as the Americans. We are neither more amorous nor less monogamous than our cousins across the Atlantic. 

We just have better literature. 

When Schoffman recently met up in Switzerland with my former fiancé Dahlia Danton I admit I was more than a little bit peeved. The one souvenir that I so jealously protected and here was Schoffman fouling further a memory that I had carefully fouled myself all those years ago. 

What happens in the Alps should rightfully stay there but here was David acting the lapdog, continuing his humiliating folly back in L.A.

Danton is a vixen, a tormentress and a third-rate painter who has no business lifting a brush. In a way the two of them deserve each other.

All the same, the whole bloody thing just sticks in my craw.

I knew I never should have lent him my bike!