ROOTS

Austerity and pleasure deferred have been the twin pillars of David Schoffman's tantric behavior. My good friend has spent the better part of his life in a state of perpetual abjurement. As our existence is one of inevitable suffering only in renunciation can one reconcile the lure of our fleeting appetites.

Or so David explained to me many years ago under the awning of Le Crazy Horse de Paris, just a few doors down from my old studio on Avenue George V.

To David the world of the senses was the egoless world of aesthetics and unlike most artists - or most people for that matter - he deferred personal pleasure for some distant, chimerical future. Free time as an idea was useless in that time was seen as an adversary and anything that was free could not possibly be of any value.

And so it went for many years. Schoffman, moored by ambition and tethered to the studio, did nothing but read, write, draw and paint. He embodied little of the common American identity and was excluded from even the most basic conversation that referenced shared popular experience. 

He never knew who won the World Series, who shot J.R. or who unraveled the trousers of the leader of the free world. To him a Soprano was a coloratura, Seinfeld was the name of his accountant and The Boss was something he thankfully never had to endure.

All this changed of course once David started dating a woman thirty years his junior. Suddenly names like Jay-Z and The Arctic Monkeys rolled off his tongue like shaved ice. He now breaks bad under a house of cards and gleefully dances with the stars while keeping up with the Kardashians.

Schoffman is now officially unbuttoned and the former abstemious courtier of refinement plays the hammy hipster in search of that very lost time.

 
I hear he's even thinking of moving back to Brooklyn.