THE DEFINITION OF MEN

Every winter my fortunate friend David Schoffman ties a tray of cheap watercolors to a rickety French fold-up easel and acts the gentleman amateur. While some seek summer respite under the blesséd skies of the South, my contrarian colleague chooses January to move his steaming, over-cooked kettle from the California flame. Like Bowles and Burroughs before him, David has found a small slice of paradise in the northern Moroccan port town of Tangier.

Schoffman in Tangier, 2014

He rises each day at dawn when the grey peaks of Andalusia are barely visible over the Strait. After a strong cup of Turkish coffee and a warm fresh sfenj from the local makhbaz he begins his trek through town looking for the perfect painterly motif.

Some say it's a sign of waning ambition, others are less charitable, seeing it as an augury of imminent instability. I see it as merely a tepid tribute to a middling talent whose promise was betrayed by the misfortune of unearned and premature professional preeminence .

How else does one explain the reams of unresolved doodles that are perennially tacked to the walls of his Los Angeles studio? Why is it that when quizzed, as he was recently by the Guardian critic Shoshana Temehu about the small scale of his recent work his stock reply was "even Ezra Pound had trouble with the long form?"

When one makes the simple calculation it becomes glaringly evident that save for a few eager years early in his career, David has been most comfortable making pretty little pictures whose commercial accessibility can only be matched by their conceptual irrelevance.  

Don't get me wrong. I love the guy and I deeply respect his work ethic and admire his formidable intellect. It's just that it is simply undignified for a grown man to devote so much effort to painting lovely little watercolors and then attempt to dress them up with some fancy theoretical shroud of academic dissimulation. 

When I hear him describe his work as "disruptive analogs of taste," or "flagrant assaults upon visual intersubjectivity," I feel a throbbing, woozy jolt gnawing within the viscera that can only be described as sea-sickness . 

 When he tries to pass off a darkened view of the Gibraltar port, as he recently did in a CBC interview, as "a cautious gaze at the unanalogous," my throat tightens and my breathing becomes labored and dangerously uneven. 

Why, you may ask, do I let him get to me in this way?

Simple.

Naked, unabashed, chest-thumping, ball-scratching rivalry.