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!

SEA CHANGE

 If life were a bluefin tuna, then my good friend David Schoffman has just swallowed his last taste of Otoro.  Found on the very underside of the fish, the otoro is like a waterbed - fatty and soft almost to the point of falling apart - but when it reaches your palate it melts in your mouth like butter. The juicy part of David's life will soon be a thing of the past so he's living the moment hard and fast as if he were on borrowed time.

Schoffman is having a pretty good run, or so it may seem on the surface. He never misses an opportunity to be seen in the company of some glamorous woman even if the connection is tenuous or even hostile. Long before branding became something other than the painful mortification of cattle and sheep, Schoffman was careful to curate an image of the artist as roué. Now, as his stock declines like brent crude I see his future as a struggle after some new, novel form of self-definition.

One option, of course, is the mad, mercurial éminence grise, but I think that might take too much energy. They say that about 80% of Los Angeles artists under the age of thirty view Schoffman with little more than ambivalence. The remaining 20% regard him with outright contempt. (Interestingly, this particular poll, first published in ViralArt.com claimed no margin of error).

Another option is that of the recluse - the mysterious eccentric who surfaces from time to time and captivates the public with visionary and provocative insight. Unfortunately, David has been spitting out the same type work for years and intellectually he seems to be clearly out of gas. 

I think it would be best if he just joined the rest of us old guys and simply took it easy for a while. There are things a lot worse than slipping into obscure irrelevancy. I say, save your energy - eventually this love affair with technology will ripen into contempt. When that happens they'll be banging down the doors at all the senior centers looking for the last few remaining pencils. 

By then Schoffman will be as fermented as unagi and may even have enough left in him for one last victory lap.

HAVE A WONDERFUL DAY!!!!!

Gustave Flaubert

Excuse my French but no other language will do:

"Être stupide, égoïste, et avoir la bonne santé sont trois conditions pour le bonheur, bien que si la stupidité manque, tout soit perdu.”  

Could it be that my poor friend David Schoffman has lived in California far too long?

When we were students at the Beaux Arts in the 1970's he was a wonderful anthology of irritable anxiety. His moods went from crepuscular to wine-dark cataclysmic but to describe him merely as an artiste maudit would be to completely overlook the unique subtlety of his pessimism. Back then he was interesting and complicated and maladjusted. He was a chorus of contradiction and was deeply troubled by the twin poles of faith and doubt.

We all were. That was the age and such were the times.

Today homiletic certainties are expressed with the cynical smirk of the carny barker. We all agree to greet each new wonderful day with unfailing hopefulness and mirth. If the daily newspapers mock our aspirations we are told to ignore the news and listen to life-affirming, self-help podcasts instead. If we insist on clinging to the messy reality of human fallibility we are scolded as scourges mired in negativity.

Nowhere is this institutional denial more prevalent than in the American state of California. With savage hubristic zeal social media companies promise redemption and bliss in exchange for simple submission (and personal information). Like the vicars of the Church who created a god in their own image our silicon prophets have fashioned another false idol wobbled in a warped reflection called "the online presence".

Our blessed avatars are always successful, always hygienic and always very happy.

Which brings me back to Schoffman. His curated self has leached into his brick and mortar sweaty-self. When he's asked in all seriousness how he's doing he typically replies with a grin as wide as a football pitch "awesome!" or "never been better!!" 

If corporate, institutional happiness brings such misery I think I'll remain in the grey dismal France of Flaubert.

“Le bonheur," he warns us, "est un mythe inventé par le diable pour nous désespérer”

HE CAN'T TELL HIS LEFT FROM HIS RIGHT

For as long as I've known him, my dear friend David Schoffman has never made an important decision that he didn't later regret.

Forever looking over his shoulder and neurotically questioning the purity of his intentions, David is the classic dialectical ditherer. 

Like the time he went to Germany to take part in the now infamous Suntanned: Painting in Los Angeles exhibition.

No sooner did his plane land in Frankfort that he started worrying whether his decision to withhold from the show his best work was a good one. He reasoned that if he put in a few second-rate pieces and get away with it he could at least claim some small victory over what he saw as the post-war teutonic pretense of contrite entitlement.  

Or the time, on a bet, he had himself tethered to a cable and while jumping off a 35 story ledge he hollered for the benefit of an awaiting camera crew "Vive Yves Klein!"

He also soiled himself in the process and for nearly two years afterwards he avoided elevators, large crowds and kites .

 

I suppose the decision that David may regret the most is his alleged entanglement with the erratic Saskia Goncourt-Delcourte.

Linked by casual circumstance to several extreme right-wing European nationalist political movements, the beautiful Goncourt-Delcourte is also an avid collector of contemporary art. Despite his repeated denials, she and Schoffman are rumored to have sustained a discreet liason which, if true, would completely discredit David's carefully curated progressive bona fides.

It's hard to feel bad for the guy since his lifelong misdirection seems to follow some preordained and willful pattern. 

The good news is that as his own worst enemy the dagger precariously poised at his throat remains forever ambivalent, irresolute and irrevocably torn.

DAVID'S LONELY PLANET

Dinner parties in Paris can be dreary affairs full of bombast and xenophobia. All reasonable efforts are made to conceal these ugly traits but no one is ever fooled for long.

With that said, I would rather endure a month of Sundays with a table full of Frenchmen than an hour breaking bread with North Americans.

The politeness is enough to make you wish you were sitting next to a skinhead with bad teeth.

I don't know how my dear friend David Schoffman does it. He must have the patience of a snail.

At a typical French dinner party there is rarely any music playing in the background. If there is it is typically something either lugubrious like Shostakovich or jingoistic like Debussy. In the States hosts always feel obliged to soften the atmosphere with some barely audible jazz, typically something canonical and old. It's as if the musical clock stopped ticking after A Love Supreme. 

 Then there's the small matter of the food. Let's just face it: Americans have little respect for crustaceans, butter and beef and too much respect for the Food section of The New York Times. Their tin, tone deaf palate for wines only compounds the offense but that's an entirely different indictment.

But getting back to Schoffman, whenever the poor guy finds himself at a table with people he hardly knows his foot invariably lands in his mouth. He once told a Los Angeles collector of "a certain age" that her taste had atrophied with her surgically frozen face. One hostess was asked why she let her 19 year-old daughter dress like a prostitute only to learn that the young woman in question was unrelated to her, had come to the dinner as her brother's date and that in fact she was a prostitute.

Schoffman is extremely maladroit around people and I suspect that if he could live his life again he would have been happier as a thief.

Or if not a thief than a recluse with a tidy little trust fund.

THE TONGUE SET FREE

My brilliant friend David Schoffman can be so dumb sometimes.

Here's a man who spends most of his time either painting in his studio or buried in a book and yet when it comes to the practical side of life he thinks like a child.

Take pets for instance.

From my understanding of American culture most people give their dogs cute names like Buddy or Charlie or maybe even Ziggy. 

Not David.

He named his dog Jihad.

And if "here, Jihad" and "good boy Jihad" wasn't bad enough, imagine the day, not too long ago when the poor Boston Terrier tore loose from his collar and started dodging midday Los Angeles traffic. The way David tells the story, he ran after the dog frantically screaming through the hectic city streets "Jihad! Jihad! Jihad!"

Sure he eventually got his dog back but not before being pulled over and subjected to a thorough grilling by a battalion of alarmed and heavily armed LAPD Homeland Security specialists.

What a simpleton.

Or how about David's amorous misadventures?

For some odd reason this leathery-skinned bald-headed Semite attracts the fairest of the fair sex like fly paper dripping in molasses. He claims to be something of an athlete - a limber lover with an uncanny sensitivity for what every woman wants. And yet I have heard from reliable sources that much of his bluster is unfounded.

On one particular occasion, something of an "event" if you are to believe David, he found himself drunk and in flagrante with the runner-up of the Miss Aquitaine competition. 

While love is the universal language, words if properly purred, can be easily decoded by their context.

"Doucement, doucement, doucement," whispered Miss Reine de Beauté Manqué. "Doucement," she tenderly breathed into his ear. "Doucement mon amour, doucment ..." 

Rather than calming the avid artist, the unhurried chant filled my dear friend with a deep performative anxiety.  

As you would guess, the evening unraveled unfavorably and it was only much later, after referring to his Larousse, that he realized that it was not that he was too small, only a wee bit too quick.

WHAT IS THAT SUPPOSED TO MEAN?

What are details to some are consequential to others. Small yet puissant components can trigger in the specialist insights inaccessible to the casual glancer who glides distractedly and cheerfully moves on.

My fine comrade David Schoffman is precisely the kind of annoying pedant who plants himself in front of works of art and ponders them interminably in a silent aura of elitist entitlement.

Wherever he goes he follows the scent of excellence and genius. He values the intimate experience of being with great works so much that he can barely tolerate the presence of well intentioned culture vultures fouling, what he sees as the sacred perfumes of timeless mastery.

At one point he seriously advocated for the restricted access of artistic monuments to specialists and scholars alone. "Why must I be forced to listen to squealing kids and cell phones while studying the compacted space of a Carracci altarpiece or the elegant calligraphy in a 9th century Tang manuscript"?

I'll tell you why David: Because you're not the only pebble on the beach! Art indeed has a civilizing effect on the ignorant and the unlathered and if an accountant cares to see a rolodex in a Rothko, who are you to quibble?

Do you supply liner notes every time some schumck wants to buy one of your precious painterly enigmas??

The Body Is His Book #64, Oil on linen, David Schoffman 2015

PLAYING POKER WITH POLITICS

To call my dear friend David Schoffman ignominiously mercenary would be to expend way too much syllabic energy in expressing the patently obvious. With the pluck of the doomed, David's je-m'en-foutisme in the face of what others might call "ethical challenges" is rather impressive.

A recent trip to North Korea will serve as a case in point.

At the behest of the U.S. Department of Treasury, David, together with about a dozen other representatives of the arts community visited that notorious hot bed of dangerous eccentricity in an effort to establish some sort of fig leaf of cultural rapprochement. Aside from getting a blistering sunburn David learned that for some strange reason the CIA likes to recruit men with comb-overs and acne scars.

 

Anyway, while in Pyongyang David discovered that the North Korean military elite had developed a taste, not only for Soviet lapel pins, 30 year old single malt scotch and the complete film history of Julie Adams but also for 20th Century American modernist painting.

 Say the names Arthur Dove, Faun Roberts or Charles Demuth to anyone within the relative orbit of influence and you can watch a pair of cynical eyes grow moist with real emotion. David saw in this unlikely attachment a rare opportunity.

During a festive moment of inebriated intimacy he offered his hosts that if given two hours and the appropriate materials, he could reproduce an impeccable, museum quality facsimile good enough to pass for the real McCoy.

In the Soju charmed atmosphere of bilateral cooperation and unbridled greed, anything, I guess, is possible. It seems that David walked away from the trip fatter by about a million won.

Schoffman is known as a lowdown, self serving, prevaricating fabulist but if even half the story is true, (which is usually his average), it's one of his strangest adventures yet.

I wonder if his computer has been hacked.

FINDING HIS GOOD SIDE

A lapsed Buddhist, my good friend David Schoffman could never really master the reticent art of detachment.

I once rather naively proposed that together David and I could relinquish the respective authorship of our best works and cast them like foundlings upon a grateful and unsuspecting public . What, I mused, would be the consequences if we had decided to leave ambition out of the equation and allow our ideas to float autonomously without motive or yearning. 

Free from desire both of treasure and renown, could we possibly stumble upon some newer and purer form of motivation?

"I'd sooner wax a camel's balls than make my art in a vacuum of obscurity," he belched, "do I look Amish to you!?"

Lack of ego has never been one of his problems.

Begrudgingly I've come to realize that David is quite right. If one were to compare the profile of your typical artist with that of the Buddha one would find a severe and irreconcilable lack of compatibility.  

An artist must be a striver, a hip-checker, a narcissist, and an egomaniac. He must be nimble in his animus, fluid in his hatreds and fascistic in his intolerance of all opposing ideas. He should be an ideologue ready to pounce on his adversaries using eloquence and wit like mortal weapons. He should be an aesthetic sadist, a perverse mirror image of conventional civility and an intellectual bully quick to intimidate and verbally assault.
He should be talented, of course but also raw, de-skilled, primitive and rough. He needs to be uncompromising and didactic with an impatient air of inspired entitlement. He must be an asshole, a scumbag and above all, fatally insecure.

Fortunately, David Schoffman is all those things and worse.

SLOPPY SECONDS

When my ageless friend David Schoffman turned fifty his putative American friends surprised him with a party.

Why they committed this unforgivable assault was easily enough explained.  It's what we French call pour étudier un adversaire or in English, "opposition research."

It was Schoffman's first real marking of his accidental date of birth since his besotted bar-mitzvah and the trauma of that cheek-pinching, schnopps-filled day was still as raw as a tuber. 

Schoffman and Boulbec in Beirut, 2006

He was married at the time to a saucy Lebanese wench named Samira Boulbec who took it as her life's work to subvert and distort everything Schoffman valued, particularly his privacy. It was her malevolent idea to allow Schoffman's peers access to his sacred and secreted studio and garnish the joint with festive bunting and heliuminated balloons.

Predictably, my dear unsuspecting friend was furious. The sight of so many of his devoted rivals in one room - his room - was a massive, destabilizing blow the magnitude of which even David could not accurately assess.

Within weeks a riotous miscellany of Schoffman knock-offs were popping up in studios, art schools and galleries throughout southern California. From Santa Barbara to San Diego small colorful panels ornamented with Liiliputian detail were exhibited and critiqued with little or no mention of their intellectual progenitor.

Such is the nature of promiscuity. Such are the consequences of ulterior kinship. 

"At any given time our culture allows for only five original ideas," Schoffman is fond of proclaiming, "and fortunately I have one of them."

Not anymore ...

Wildflower, acrylic on wood, Dahlia Danton, 2015

PAYING FOR ONE'S SINS

I've always considered David Schoffman to be mon meilleur copain - my very best friend - but the sentiment hasn't always been repaid in kind. To expect meticulously calibrated reciprocity in matters of amitié corrupts the clarity of tenderness with the arithmetic of peddlers and so I've learned to detach.

And yet it still unnerves me to think that within that cultural wilderness called southern California, a place where the intelligentsia concerns itself with things like rainfall, property taxes and leaked executive salaries, my good friend David is marinating like a cornichon in sweet brine.

His latest "inspiring colleague" is a fellow named Harry Cohn, an unpublished poet of book length parodies in iambic verse. They met at a self-help seminar ostensibly devoted to what the organizers described as "the odysseys of older men," a euphemism for diminished virility. Seeing the sunset of sex is a terrifying vision and as misery of that sort abjures the company of unsympathetic youth, the old codgers get together twice a month to cry on each others bifocals.

I suppose I can't blame David for preferring dear Harry to me. Those who follow my work realize in vivid color that I've still got plenty of foreskin in the game. It must be hard to watch but he only has himself to blame. What did he expect with his meatless diet and endless exercise?

It's already been established that after the age of 55, low cholesterol and low libido are linked like mountaineers. Forget oysters and kelp, cognac and marijuana are the proven aphrodisiacs. And take it from a Frenchman, nothing beats dark tobacco non-filtered cigarettes to keep the southern circulation flowing. 

But I can't expect to convince Schoffman of any of this. He eats more kale than a fatted calf. And if I'm destined to pay for my nutritional infractions I'd rather suffer without the help of a support group in a conference room.

I too have learned how to make new friends.