TOUS LES VINS COULAIENT

There's a house on a hill somewhere in west L.A. where all hearts are deceptively open and all the cheap wines incessantly flow. It's a community like no other or at least there is none like it in France or to my knowledge, anywhere else in Europe.

Behind a travertine wall baked in the lead white glare of the Californian sun is the home of the Celestial Masters, a loose federation of miserable poet/sorcerers who, in their words, are "armed with sand and blood against Justice" and who are dedicated to the bizarre ideal that women were treasures to be entrusted only them. It's a strange secret society whose members' nostalgia for Prussian chivalry and the Rat Pack have turned their Los Angeles life into a poisoned feast. To them Beauty is bitter and reviled and they have created an anachronistic, remedial valhalla full of misogyny and malice.

The Executioner's Summons, oil on silk, David Schoffman, 2013

Next door to the Masters was the studio my good friend David Schoffman rented last August in order to complete his monumental series of paintings dedicated to the memory of Rosa Luxemburg. His many interactions with his eccentric neighbors could fill the hideous pages of a fabulist's notebook and David describes last summer's odessey as his own personal season in Hell. 

He told me about waking up in the middle of the night to the dreadful and terrifying cackles of an idiot. His life was strangled of its every joy and each day his intractable predicament played ever finer tricks on his impending madness and palpable misfortune. 

There were days when he would find stretched out in the mud alongside his fragile ginko trees a Celestial Master literally gnawing on a gun-butt like some wild enraged beast. 

Then, when he found himself on the point of uttering what he describes as his 'last croak,' David strangely discovered a renewed appetite for Charity. It was an inspiration that turned his entire misadventure into a dream.

And though Satan still lived next door he was a little less inflamed. Schoffman was ultimately able to ignore their deadly sins and cowardly deeds and lacking the descriptive skill to adequately render their egoism into words, charcoal or paint, returned to his Luxemburg project with a renewed and profound respect for women and the crucibles of their daily struggle to be assertive, powerful and strong.

Could he still be dreaming?