I COULD HAVE BEEN SOMEBODY

There's no denying the fact that my good friend David Schoffman has sorely missed his calling.

Never much of a painter, David, a gifted raconteur, well-intentioned writer and sublime tenor seemed to have picked a vocation in which he was destined to fail.

The Body is His Book #50, oil on linen, David Schoffman

He was told as a child that there was no hope in the life of an entertainer - his father's cousin, Moishe Kotutchky was a third-rate character actor in the Yiddish theater who ended up hanging himself with a tefillin strap after reading a scathing review in the Togblatt - and so his nascent ambitions were smothered in their cradle.

He has spent the better part of his adult life trying to prove to his long deceased parents that they were wrong. (Of course to his Depression era parents the antidote to the thespian's fate was not the life of a blighted visual artist).

So to this day whenever David happens upon one performance or another he is swept like a gust of bitumen and sulphur into the past and into the dregs of shame and regret.

But David, you live in Los Angeles!

It's never too late!

ORIENTALISM

There's an old French maxim that dates back to the Third Republic that says "if you're out of ideas go the the Middle East." (Si vous n'avez pas d'idées allez dans le Levant).

I was reminded of this the other day when I happened upon a reproduction of one of David Schoffman's paintings in a fashionable French magazine that focuses on what the French call "style."

Imazighen, oil on canvas,  David Schoffman2002

There's a bit of irony here in that of all my good friends who are painters, the one I associate least with the idea of style is that California klutz with the bald head and the mismatched socks.

In any event, David has spent a fair amount of time traveling and living in the Arab world. In fact, his passport is such a hodgepodge of exotic stamps and seals that whenever he tries to get on a plane he's detained for at least a half an hour by either Homeland Security or the TSA.

It's either really worth the trouble or he's suffering a very fallow middle age because he's back in the region once again, this time living in a small, family owned pensione in downtown Ouarzazate, Morocco.

He spends his days in what he describes as "creative idleness," sleeping late, enjoying long walks along the Draa Valley and making elaborate rubbings of the rich architectural details that are found on almost all the public buildings in the area.

"I envy these guys," David told me the other day on a very shaky Skype connection from the Abu-Shwarma Internet Café, "they really know how to make a day seem long."

The whole world wants to be like America and here is Schoffman in the middle of the desert struggling to go native!

And come to think of it, maybe the guy has some sort of unique and interesting style after all.

FICKLE FRIENDS

 The restaurant trade is a violent affair full of cutthroat competitors and palate-blind critics eager to pick at what to them is merely food.  Like many artists before him, my good friend David Schoffman, fearful of the vegetative indolence most common at mid-career, has tossed his tattered apron into this tasteless ring of flames and opened up a bistro of his own.

Though he labors in earnest, Los Angeles tends to greet much of what David does with an undernourished apathy and a bitter, hostile extravagance of dismissive inattention.

This was not always the case.

There was a time when Schoffman was Southern California's darling, a spaniel among the curs, a toasted garnish on a glamorous gourd. 

Feted by the famous and fetishized by the rich he was a bohemian trophy mis en bouteille in the chateau of grand celebrity.

It would have been nothing spotting him with some starlet on Opening Nite, flashbulbs bouncing off his bald head like fireflies in summer.

The cult of the artist maudit is all fine and good so long as the artist in question remains obedient to the proscribed règle du jeu. As soon as said artist sheds his gloomy hide and joins the well-adjusted he is no longer of any use as a bangle or a beard.

Unless of course his work is durable, strong and speaks for itself.

Which, of course, has never been the case for David.

ONE MAN'S DUMB IS ANOTHER MAN'S DHARMA

To my good friend David Schoffman the blunted knife cuts both ways. 

In order to produce powerful works of art David needs to claim a cloud somewhere north of Olympus far from the human stain. However, in order to dwell in the world of men he also needs to scrape his knuckles across the trough of the mundane.

He sings with the angels in a crazy chorus of cerebral dissipation yet, in the world of men he must pluck at the gloomy finger-food of ordinary intellectual bric-a-brac.

For years friends and wives, scarred by his hallowed halo were left like road kill along his path to self-anointed virtue. Nobody, it seems, was capable of keeping up with the velocity of his metastasized ambition. Books, ideas, passions and speculations were the octane that kept him ahead of the heap but those same intolerable obsessions only served to thrust him into that lonely diaspora of one.

He has always worked by exclusion - identifying the dross and consigning it to the smelly slag pile of the superfluous. Anything that slowed the pace of his strident domestic pilgrimage got thrown to the dolphins.

But north of Olympus, though sweet with perfumed erudition remained way too remote from the hardscrapple ass-scratching that makes the world-go-'round. While exiled from the slow and the dim David lost touch with the bloody mess the rest of us call democracy. 

But I hear a change is afoot.

Rescued from the talons of his highfalutin tastes, David has now moved from the City of God to the interconnected City of  Men. He has traded his pager for an I-Phone, opened a Facebook account listing his preferences for women, cable and Independent Film, bought season's tickets to the Best of Broadway, bought a brand new grey car and started binge-watching Netflix.

He's now the toast of the milquetoast finding new friends both real and imagined and is as content as a quahog.

I hear he's even got a new lady-friend who works in a bank in Pasadena.  

The new normal David Schoffman with friend

THE NEW CAMP DAVID

As an artist and as a human being my good friend David Schoffman is a man of honor. To claim his companionship one must undergo a cold introspective trial  that will inevitably highlight a deficit of virtue. Next to the halogens of David's lofty ideals we are all dimmed in decrepitude.

His moral compass is unforgiving. His aesthetic standards insulate him from the vicissitudes of popular taste.  He is a fortress of consistency and a dull, grey edifice of rectitude and refinement.

His hobbies include parsing Latin prosody and restoring antique lamps.

He rises before dawn and works an unwavering ten-hours a day in his studio.

He does seventy-five push-ups each morning (down from 150, before he incurred an inflamed pectoralis minor) and remains glutenrein  and lactose free in an organic diet of unspeakable self-denial.

He hasn't watched TV since 9/11 (reluctantly) and still uses the word text as a noun.

In other words, he's a world-class bore.

Though life demands of its participants the capacity for negative capability, David has quieted his inner dissonances with equivocations and rationales. His cosmology resists the chaos of ambiguity and the ethical deliriums of doubt.

That is, until he found himself tempted like poor Anthony by a panoply of vices even the Saint would have found impossible to abjure. 

First came bacon whose scintillating sizzle and sweet gamey aroma demands crisp consummation by a moistening palate. His first crucible came at a faculty brunch, a meal he never fully accepted as legitimate or justified. He found watching his colleagues fully absorbed in this greasy delicacy oddly moving. Instead of consulting his watch as is typical for him during these mandatory meetings he sat bemused and a bit disoriented by the simplicity of pleasure. 

Though he didn't eat any of the bacon himself that day, it did, so to speak, give him food for thought.

He soon started toying with the idea of acquiring an extra pillow. "A good night's sleep," though something he always considered as a birthright, now appeared like an experience he could induce and improve upon. This led to reading mystery novels, first on airplanes and then on hammocks strung between indolent fruit trees. The slope soon slipped into binge watching on Netflix, full-fat yoghurt, Bruce Springsteen records and figure skating.

It was all so gradual and benign that no one took notice until he was seen on Venice beach kissing a woman who wasn't his wife.

And though it was remarked upon that his eyes remained open, the idea that David was now grazing in a neighbor's meadow was welcomed by acquaintances who always felt cheapened by his righteousness.

He tells me he is enjoying his new uncertainty. After decades of practiced orthodoxy he feels suddenly lighter, freer and capable of guilt.  

"Though I waste a lot of time these days I feel more fully human. I have finally entered the stream of the world and it ain't so bad after all."

(Note the colloquialism ain't)

I heard he's even questioning his convictions on the Middle East!

NATURE OR NURTURE

After a few drinks my good friend David Schoffman is always good for a wild yarn or two.

Get him going about life and love and you can sit back and listen to a breathless performance of a peerless raconteur.

There is one subject however where he is sure to be as tiresome as a fundraiser. 

His childhood.

To hear him tell it you'd think he was raised by Mother Theressa and Gandhi. Every day was an unearthly feast of joy and warmth and affection. Never did his innocent ears endure the afflictions of acrimony and strife. All was a constant, blissful summer carnival of slides, Ferris wheels and merry-go-rounds.

It was only as an adult did it dawn on David that virtue was a punishable offense. When he struck out on his own in his early twenties he had the street smarts of a ten-year-old. He trusted everyone and simply didn't understand the simple concept of strategic self-interest. 

For years while his colleagues were making major strides in the art world he recused himself preferring to devote his time to the perfection of Chinese calligraphy and brush painting.

Now, I'm relieved to report, Schoffman is in the throws of a wildly self-destructive mid-life crisis. Gone are his annoying scruples, his cloying sense of loyalty, his unflappable diligence and his conceited perceptions of morality. His long deferred rebellion against the wholesomeness of his upbringing is a welcome retreat from the stuffy self-denial that decency always brings.

The cold fact of mortality and the waning vigor that comes with age has pushed my friend past the edge of needless caution. His fading respectability is of little concern as he dissipates with the abandon of a frat boy on Jägermeister.

 And while he's dating starlets half his age and hosting wild parties for strung out venture capitalists and overweight movie producers his career has suddenly blossomed like a lotus. Despite (or because) of a spate of disorderly conduct arrests and convictions the smart-set has gravitated toward David like mice to brie. He's become an L.A. tabloid staple and as the current AARP "it" bad-boy he's getting more free publicity than ISIS. 

I suppose the lesson in all this is that while raising children take care to sign them up for tennis lessons and soccer.

Just make sure they learn to how to cheat. 

IMMOBILE

Here in Paris it is said that on any given day the average man entertains conflicting thoughts approximately 92% of the time. This, of course, renders decision making rather difficult.

 We call it Bousqué's Paradox after the famous French chemist who invented artificial sweeteners in the early 1920's. The story goes that Professor Bousqué was so torn between his wife and his mistress that after the age of 33 he became completely impotent for the rest of his life.

I too suffer from this dilemma but not nearly as much as my good friend David Schoffman.

Dissonance simultanée or what is known among American psychologists as synchronal dissonance is a very common condition among Jewish men. The dialectic tradition of the Mishna and the Talmud has hard-wired Hebrews into a permanent state of what is called "multiple empathic cognition."

On the one hand this - on the other hand that. 

The sad consequence of all this is that Schoffman is so paralyzed by indecision that he hasn't been able to paint a picture in over 15 years.

David Schoffman's last known completed painting. Oil on linen, 1998

His inactivity however does not occasion any sadness or regret on his part. Rather he finds in his indolence a tremendous source of comfort and an exhilarating sense of relief.

So what does he do with all his time, you may reasonably ask?

He's doing what every other person with a pulse is doing ...

He's screwing around with his laptop, his I-Phone and sharing every loose stool that comes into his ever-shrinking head on social media.

FRUITCAKE

Franz Schoendt, date unknown

Friend of Freud and intimate confidant of Cassirer, Franz Schoendt knew a thing or two about the lively life of the mind. Largely overlooked today, this giant of Jewish Mittleeuropean culture
 was a highly regarded feuilltonist in his day.

The scope of his concerns seems staggering today. In our age of hyper-specialization Schoendt seems much more than a third-string polyglot. He hovers like a dirigible looming from an Olympus of staggering erudition. He was a cerebral man at ease in worlds as diverse as the intricate stratagems of three-player Korean mahjong, the declensions of disabused, semi-deponent Latin verbs, post-Mishnaic agrarian litigation and the Russian Orthodox impact on sound pairing in early Zaum poetry.

(He has written extensively on all the aforementioned subjects.)

The most unlikely object of his sweeping inquiries (considering the fact that he was a lifelong diabetic), was the social and political history of candies and sweets. 

His seminal essay on the subject, Trockenobst ist wirklich Süßigkeiten? which appeared in the penultimate issue of the Hessian periodical Überflüssig Wissen was a dialectical tour-de-force and is still debated by confectionists on both sides of the Atlantic.

My dear yet strange friend David Schoffman has taken it upon himself to create two-hundred short video vignettes illustrating Schoendt's most important essays. After tackling the 1924 article Andalusischen Pfeifer and the 1931 prose poem Mythischen Aromen, David has just completed a personal homage to Schoendt's daring speculations on the taxonomies of dessicated apples, pears, apricots and grapes. 

SKITTISH FETISH

Fear, like most intense and irrational emotions, can be a source of intense erotic opportunity. My dear friend David Schoffman is afraid of most things but he reserves his greatest terror for flying on commercial airlines.

Gripped in a paralysis of calamitous foreboding, Schoffman pleads with flight attendants for extra pillows, stiffer cocktails and if possible, an exit row window seat which might afford him a small degree of illogical comfort.

At the prospect of becoming choked with panic, David suddenly experiences a kind of corpuscular lift. Reality melts away into an oily mush of sensuality and a feathery trill of anticipation floods what can only be described as his 'inner Tantric soul.' 

"The problem," he explained to me with mock innocence, "is that I simply don't know what to do with all this strange and powerful energy!"

Such foolishness would never  be tolerated even in the most mordantly sentimental adolescent but somehow Schoffman's stature avails him an undeserved immunity! 

America's fascination with famous artists is something that is beyond me. That he goes around filming young women's toes with his I-phone - all under the protective aegis of aesthetics - is a scandal that would bring down even the most insulated French politician.  



But I suppose at the end of the day it is all rather harmless. The painted female toenail - an undeniably lovely phenomena- is an unworthy catalyst for any man's demise.

On the other hand, there does appear to be a pattern.

 

WHEN IN DOUBT, BE HONEST

Uniqueness is a modern malady and those who suffer from it are condemned to a life of loneliness. We in the West work hard but we are torn by our troubles given the emptiness of our rewards. We are prosperous and educated but we have mortgaged our individuation and consigned our distinctive fingerprint to the fanciful reliquaries of quirk.

I know exactly three people of unimpeachable integrity. Unfortunately, one is dead, one is mad and one is a world class trou de cul. 

Hélas, it is better than nothing.

Let's leave aside for now the first two and focus on the third: My good friend David Schoffman.

You may wonder, how can I classify Schoffman as a rare man of honor and yet describe him with that classic French profanity?

Simple.

Men (& women) of virtue earn their stature by the transparency of their character. With Schoffman one always knows where one stands and it's usually in the gutter of disdain. To say he suffers little foolishness in others is to tame his wicked stridency to the stature of a hood ornament. To Schoffman the only things that matter are ideas and in typical Manachian fashion, for him there are only two kinds:

Bad ones and questionable ones.

And herein lies the true definition of integrity.

To observe the world as closely as one can, alive to its warmth, its depth and its contradictions and to express ones relationship to these circumstances with complete intellectual brutality.

What is the definition of a
trou de cul?

Someone who expects and demands the same fidelity in others.

I'm honored to call him a friend.

Despite the fact that I can't stand him.

REQUIEM FOR A LIGHTWEIGHT

I have a vehement distaste for what is called in the U.S. the "coffee table" book. These biblio-monstrosities are invariably too unwieldy to hold, too heavy to read and too large to store on a bookshelf. In France we call them portes de granit or granite doors and to own one is to announce that one is an intellectual arriviste.

To write one is even worse.

 Marta Shayn has contributed mightily to this pulpy tradition with her new doorstop The Vertical Life, an allegedly scholarly study of my friend David Schoffman's work from about 1998, the year he painted the Cassirer mural, to the present. The volume is voluminous in every sense of the word.

At 479 pages and measuring a regal 60 x 71cm it's a tome fit more for a tomb than for a functioning library. David seemed embarrassed when I asked him whether it was fitting to claim so many scarce natural resources towards a scholarly study of his unremarkable career. 

"It doesn't matter what I think," he deadpanned, "it only matters what they think."

Who the they in question were remains unclear.

I've always admired David for his false humility, it's a quality that despite my best efforts has eluded me my entire life.

So until they back the truck up my alley and forklift some fresh-faced professor to summarize my illustrious efforts I'll continue to express my covetous resentments without any of the ritual self-abasements, false or otherwise.

Did I mention it lists for €120?!

CONFUCIANISM CONFUSED

When my good friend David Schoffman told me he was retiring his paintbrushes and moving to Silicon Valley I thought he was kidding. When he explained why, I knew he had lost his mind.

 

"The alleged ugliness of office parks is a 20th century bias rooted in the discredited aspirations of Romanticism."

That's how he explained it to me. He describes the architecture and the landscaping as "man's ultimate repudiation of the anarchy of nature." He insists that Silicon Valley is the perfect environment to put the final kabash on the European tradition.

"Painting and all other forms of static representation are now the derelict remains of a failed utopian vision. Beauty and the sublime are frivolous self-indulgent luxuries of a bygone era and an artist must respond with vigor and alacrity."

The Body Is His Book #67, David Schoffman, oil on panel

This from the man who has spent the past fifteen years working on The Body Is His Book, the 0ne-hundred paneled polyptych.

It was only through a third-party that I found out that the real reason David moved was that he sold some sort of food/mapping/chat app to Zorintech for an undisclosed and presumably obscene pile of cold cash.

I hear he's going to China soon.

LE FEUILLETONIST

When he's not beating his head against the tarmac or coiling himself into an embryonic crouch my good friend David Schoffman enjoys a minor side-career as a freelance investigative journalist.

He skulks around Los Angeles like a gumshoe, burrowing about for something that might be juicy enough for publication. Too cowardly to write about crime and too dim to diagnosticate corruption he keeps his radius within the provincial ambit of the art scene.

Few remember that it was David who uncovered the ignominious double dealing of Bamber Turkic, the former chief critic of Orange County's Studio Gazette and host of the popular reality program What Next, America? In a business where conflict of interest is seen as a necessity, the fact that Turkic was privately selling the work of artists whom he had favorably reviewed barely raised a pimple. The scandal was that it turned out Turkic was actually producing the work himself under a score of carefully organized aliases! 

Wine's Moisture, Lacquer on copper,  Reggie Reynolds ( aka Bamber Turkic ), 2009

Another notorious story uncovered by Schoffman was that of the underground black market for diplomas and degrees. Though not completely eradicated, at one time it was both easy and quite common to be able to purchase a bachelors or a masters degree without doing any course work. The going rate for an undergraduate degree was just shy of $75,000, which made it considerably cheaper than attending a four-year program. Masters were a bit more pricey so they never really caught on.

The problem was especially acute in art schools. It was so widespread that to this day when scrutizing a résumé at an art gallery one can never be completely certain if the artist is legitimately credentialed! 

This kind of journalism is extremely important and I hope David continues to act as the conscience of the creative class. Politics, such as it is, has poisoned Schoffman's reputation as a painter. For now he occupies his time sitting for hours in neighborhood bistros with his ear to the ground and eyes agape and attentive.

AGE IS WASTED ON THE OLD

The stiff brackets of professional ruin barricade my friend David Schoffman behind an impermeable wall of waste. What began in gladness may not have ended in madness the way Wordsworth might have predicted but potential was left to decay and talent, once so bright, was ravaged by vanity and missed opportunity.

Urim and Thummim, oil on wood, 1987

The early work was mired by good intentions. Though far from tasteful, David's paintings from the 1980's were rife with compliant hesitation. With their rough handling and cheap materials they pretended toward mutiny but with little commitment. They were paintings that "worked" and nothing more.

By mid-career he had slid into a cesspool of intellectual quiescence.

 Like a broken promise, rows of paintings and reams of drawings bore savage witness to forgetfulness and compromise. With each passing year his tepid exhibitions dazzled the innocent while disappointing the astute.

And now we are told to wait.

David insists on our patience. He vows to return and to surprise. He pleads for our indulgence as he prepares what he claims will be his ultimate tour-de-force - the 100-paneled polyptych putatively titled The Body Is His Book.

 

The Body Is His Book #67, oil on panel (in progress)

What has already been seen of this grand project does not bode well for the future. Trickles and fragments have surfaced over the years and nothing to my eye merits either optimism nor even curiosity.

The Body Is His Book #33, oil on panel (in progress)

If we give David the benefit of the doubt and he gives us nothing in return he'll deserve more than our contempt. He'll deserve our mockery.

With competence comes the worst kind of decadence. The mildewed decadence of regression and blight. David Schoffman has one last chance at redemption.

I'm not holding my breath, 

WHAT IS HIP?

Glamorous, articulate and almost always controversial, my dear friend David Schoffman has always given great interviews.

Starting in the 1970's with his notorious tête-à-tête with Le Monde's Sascha Izit all the way to last year's ridiculously candid entretien with Dahlia Danton of The Harps of Heaven, Schoffman is reliably prepared to stir the broth with his unique blend of amiable quips and contentiously divisive insights.

Few followers of the art world's inside game will forget David's appearance on the Mick Teagling Show where in a bright orange shirt and burgendy scrubs he jumped on the studio couch and started chanting wildly "Je suis Ubu Roi, Je suis Ubu Roi."

Equally memorable (or lamentably indelible) was his interview with the late Canadian poet Guido  Cezzho. Published in the Sunday Supplement of Montréal Philologique David apparently answered every single question (according to Cezzho they spoke for nearly four hours) in a falsetto voice using a sock puppet.  

Now, if Schoffman is to be believed, all those antics are over. As a result of his recently becoming a paid spokesperson for Noitanbreh, a Los Angeles urban clothing line featuring bright, colorful t-shirts, rugged basketball jerseys and sensible yet savage looking bucket hats,  he is contractually obligated to tame his public persona.

Now that's a scary prospect ...