AGAINST THE GALLOP

Like many great artists, Currado Malaspina’s best work comes from a place of profound agony. Beneath the fat-headed grandiloquence is a vulnerable romantic cautiously frisking a cruel world in search of hope. While his public persona might be that of a callous, flashy libertine, his true nature is tender, loving and kind.

I should know because I spent four unforgettable years living and loving this legendary French artist.

One of the rich, corrective dividends of being an ex is that when one carefully tills the furrows of past discord, a true, intimate friendship can develop and grow.

Such is the case with Currado and me. It is my privilege to be taken into Malaspina’s confidence and though I find myself giving much more than I get there is something quite special in having an intimate perspective into the creative genius of one of today’s greatest artists.

As is well documented, Currado Malaspina has (so far) been married four times. Each marriage is accompanied by scandal, prurient speculation, salacious innuendo and idle fodder suggesting all manner of copulatory madness outside the sacred sanctuary of wedlock. The truth, as is often the case, is much simpler.

When Currado decides to love he loves hard and any thought of straying from the orchard is happily obliterated. Take it from me – When it comes to fidelity, Malaspina is a Saint Bernard. Women sense this about him and women being women he therefore gets treated like a dust cloth.

Wife number one gave birth to a beautiful daughter – Sabine Héloïse – and within six months ran off with her yoga teacher to Goa to study Ashtanga breathing techniques from an Israeli guru named Alon.

Wife two, a very talented pastry chef and not-too-talented actress tried to lure him away from his studio with any number of hair-brained, get-rich schemes. Currado has about as much business acumen as a toddler selling lemonade and the two of them got so buried in debt that he was forced to exhibit some of his most unmemorable works. Fortunately the name Malaspina carries enough caché that armies of credulous collectors came barking with euros.

#2 eventually sued for divorce and was awarded more than half of his existing oeuvre.

With wife three came with the promise of blissful tranquility and mutual adoration until she got sucked into a Belgian messianic sewing circle.. The way Currado tells it, she turned forty and decided overnight that the most important thing in life was “personal rapture.”

It was there where she learned how to use the cumbersome neologism ‘defoliating opportunity,‘  (opporunité défoliante).

Forgetting for a minute the sinister connection to clearing  jungle war zones with toxic herbicides, the idea is essentially to annihilate any self-critical, introspective insights in favor of unambiguous affirmation. It’s a clever form of denial which tends to treat psychic pain with a Bugs Bunny Band Aid. To the philosopher in Currado this sort of linguistic floor-bending was maddening.

He left the infantilized #3 the day she took him to her Renewal Assignment Ceremony where each guest was presented with a brightly colored ball of yarn and was encouraged to “exchange anguish points” with the person seated next to them.

 Wife number four, who some say resembles a younger version of me, is an attorney who works in the French ministère du budget, des comptes publics et de l’administration civile. By all accounts she’s a very competent bureaucrat who performs her duties with diligence and integrity. I think that by marrying Currado she hoped to establish her credibility as a formidable woman of culture, a quality of some value among the Parisian haute bourgeoisie. As one might expect, she’s a rather cold fish and treats Malaspina like a household appliance.

I know he’s dying inside – he as much as told me so when I visited him last summer.

Currado is a good man. He’s a man in very close contact with the world of the senses. He values love above all else and celebrates its possibility with childish optimism.

Critics are quick to over-interpret his art, seeing in his lurid images hints of bitterness, vulgarity, misogyny and lust. That was never really the case. Malaspina’s work has always been about humor, poetry and joy. What some see as badly drawn soft pornography he sees as a post-modern exegesis on Ovid’s evolving relationship to the history of painting.

 Perhaps he’s doomed. Perhaps he’s one more reckless romantic, crushed on the asphalt of our age of monotonous velocity. He’s a voluptuary on a vélo while an unreflecting, routinized world is obsessed with the predictable seductions of speed.

I’m waiting till his current bride overplays her precious hand. She doesn’t deserve such a rare beacon of decency. I’m waiting, Currado and I’m ready to give us another chance.

Je t’aime, mon amour …

TRUTH SERUM

It’s been a long time since I’ve seen my erstwhile lover Currado Malaspina. ‘Mali’ and I had stopped communicating shortly after his motorcycle accident in 2002. Some drunken soccer hooligan skidded his sensible Audi 80 S2 smack into Currado’s beloved Moto Guzzi V9 – a bike way too cool for a famous aging artist – dispatching both motorists to neighboring rooms at l’Hôpital Saint-Louis’s ICU.

As soon as I heard, I dropped everything and flew to Paris to keep an anxious vigil by his moldy bed. The whole hospital smelled like mold which at first did not inspire much confidence but later I found oddly comforting. He was wrapped in gauze and looked like a piñata at rest before receiving the final blow. Enjoying a slow drip of morphine he drifted in and out of coherence while I read reviews of restaurants I felt too guilty to visit.

I was fairly certain that he knew I was there. When he looked at me the tiny reservoirs of spittle that traced the wrinkles of his chin would gently shift and the corners of his mouth would lift into a weak smile.

I was surprised when he didn’t receive many visitors. Maybe two or three the whole time I was there. I kept telling myself that it was August and all his friends and family were out of town. But for Christ’s sake, I flew in from L.A.!! Later I learned that word was out that I was there and for some strange French reason people thought it awkward to stop by.

I stayed there for three weeks – long enough to be reassured that the old dog would pull through. On my last days there, perhaps sensing my immanent departure, Currado’s barely audible mutterings gained a measure of intelligibility. My poor French couldn’t get me past a few basic words – ‘encore,’ ‘doucement,’ ‘lapin,’ ‘cherie,’ ‘menottes’ – so I was never quite sure if he was dreaming or talking to me. The nurse asked me who Diatoma was. I told her I had no idea and I still don’t.

All I know is that as soon as Currado was well enough to hold a brush he started on what he later called his Esquisse d’opioïde (“Opiod Drawings”). In several interviews he described these drawings as “les documents de la bouée de sauvetage qui m’a tiré vers la récupération” (“documents of the lifeline that pulled me toward recovery”).

It’s very hard to discern who the woman is who stars in this strange suite of watercolors. The specific features seem to be deliberately obscured. They could be a composite. Maybe it’s the mysterious Diatoma.

I

I prefer to think it’s me.

BRANDING IN AN AGE OF SENSUAL DEFICIT

Seen through a jaundiced 21st Century lens I suppose we’d characterize the Van Gogh brand as Crazy. During a simpler, quainter time when I was studying painting in art school fancy words like ‘discourse,’ ‘dialectic’ and ‘disjunctive’ were bandied about as if their definitions were self-evident. Now the talk is all about marketing.

Maybe the professors are still filling disinterested ears with Laconian linguistics but the students, I can assure you, are just fidgeting with their i-phones.

That said, us oldsters have to keep up with the times and if that means maintaining an Instagram account then so be it.

My dear friend and erstwhile lover Currado Malaspina has always, as the French say, “seen beyond the baguette.” In a very unassuming and innocent fashion he’s been cultivating his own brand for years. Now he’s ready to exploit it to its fullest effect.

So to Caravaggio’s Thug, Modigliani’s Tubercular, Pollock’s Alcoholic and Warhol’s Androgynic we can now add Currado Malaspina’s Priapic Olympiad!

My sister Hope knows all about this stuff. You might say she’s a full-time branding self improver. Her library at home is stacked with books on how to distinguish oneself and get ahead. Leaders Eat Last shares a long, sagging shelf with Principles of Corporate Governance, Executive Power Moves, Time Management for Dummies and Perfect Mindset for Team Motivators.

Why waste valuable time with Proust when you can learn all about the habits of highly effective people between the glossy soft covers of a remaindered trade paperback?

I’m not exactly sure what Hope does for a living but I can tell she really loves it. She gets so animated whenever she recounts some tawdry tale of inter-office intrigue that I truly believe it has a weird erotic effect upon her. She works for a mid-sized corporation whose interpersonal ecosystem has the same sort of social suffocation of a small provincial college. As a result there is never any shortage of fodder for petty, political machination and drama.

Our immigrant parents were world-class lunatics who considered praise an unseemly form of extravagance. I think that’s why Hope is so drawn to the corporate structure of reward and affirmation. Being a manager is very gratifying to her and I know it means a lot when she receives encouraging compliments form her boss and from her peers.

It’s funny because we had the same exact childhood but I guess some people are perpetually triggered by the misadventures of their imperfect past.

Anyway, Currado has met my sister several times and though he finds her insufferably boring he’s at the same time quite taken by her desperate need to fit in and belong. He claims that this fetish to conform is a uniquely American phenomenon but any close reading of European history would strongly argue otherwise.

But Currado being Currado, Hope’s hopeful hopelessness has given him what he thinks will be a million dollar idea. Using my sister as a microcosm of an entire continent’s Calvinist restraint, he’s certain that an urgent craving for pleasure and lassitude lies nascent beneath the surface. Recognizing that there’s a puritanical allergy toward spontaneity he’s devised a codified template to address what he sees as a national spiritual malaise

And so began Currado’s now famous 10 Habits of Extremely Contented and Well-Cultivated People. Focusing on the California model of naive optimism and maximalist aspiration, his gimmick is the promise of happiness through rote. Follow his breezy, uncomplicated steps and you too can enjoy life like a Parisian!

It’s as absurd as it is successful but rather than take my word for it, judge for yourself. What follows, in short form, are his 10 sequential conditions for bliss, legitimized by the imprimatur of notable and respected celebrities:

1. Eat well and in heathy moderation. (Gerard Depardieu)
2. Spend time with friends and cultivate the art of argument and conversation. (Orestia Shestov)
3. Dolce Far Niente. (Albert Camus)
4. Enjoy sex. (Serge Gainsbourg)
5. Drink 0.40 liters of wine a day. (James Mayer Rothschild)
6. Read fiction and attend the theatre regularly. (Micah Carpentier)
7. Pursue sex. (Philippe Soupault)
8. Be honest – there’s less to remember. (Mark Twain)
9. Laugh as much as possible. (Valéry Giscard d’Estaing)
10. Develop a talent for sexual intimacy. (Henry Miller)

Yes, I know it’s stupid and I know it’s a gimmick but I honestly think that Currado is on to something. Americans are addicted to lists. They also easily defer to what they think are experts. In their obedience they will undoubtedly follow his manifesto and just like all good citizens, when they fail they will only blame themselves.

What could be a better brand than blind obeisance?!

CYNIC OR SAGE? DOES IT REALLY MATTER?

There are some for whom flamboyance is a skimpy veil of obfuscation. They behave in ways so conspicuous that their legitimate selves become lost in a tangle of histrionics. Others operate within a humble sussuro of confidence and competence discreetly going about their daily tasks with graceful sprezzatura.

And then there is Currado Malaspina.

With his fustian baritone and his all-weather green felt hat Currado manages to make everyone around him feel simultaneously welcome and degraded. It’s an odd talent and I don’t think it’s anything conscious but when he enters a room the air suddenly thickens with the dread of anticipation.

He’s like two people operating within an elastic dramaturgical derma. You never know which Currado you will get.

This is annoying.

But it’s is also breathtaking, for how many people are there who can captivate and repel you with every single interaction?

Malaspina is just that sort of personage, even when he’s most irritating.

Especially when he’s most irritating!!

But, as he likes to say, fais gaffe!

When you get even the least bit attached to this mercurial Frenchman you find yourself caught within a mesh of his manipulative influence.

Only a Svengali of such exquisite effectiveness, one who can mesmerize even the most jaded and cold, would be capable of producing a body of work so popular and ubiquitous yet so totally bereft of any real meaning.

 As Currado always says “thank god for ignorance!!”

THE FALLEN PETALS OF INNOCENCE

During those two dank Parisian years when, as a besotted young babe I was lured by the romance of acting the muse to a much older man, I learned much about life even as I suffered.

Barely beyond a waif I ventured to the City of Lights in search of an affordable master’s degree in International Relations. My French was poor and my street smarts were abominable.

I said oui when I should have said pas de tout and peut-être when va te faire foutre would have been the wiser choice.

I was what the local wags called a “Gallic trampoline” (trampoline gauloise) and when I finally landed under the scruff of Malaspina I was too worn out to move on.

And so began my life as ornament, the perky American trinket, trimming the already exotic aura of France’s number one art star of the time.

Portrait of Malaspina, watercolor on paper, Micah Carpentier, 1993

I basically put my life on hold in favor of his, in spite of the fact that his was more or less spent. We went to the wickedest parties, ate at the most exotic out-of-the-way bistros, travelled to the most dangerously picturesque places and basically lived the life of extravagant bohemia.

And I loved it!

I loved every spicy speck of couscous, each thimble of pastis, every remote mosquito infested equatorial island and even the never ending international art openings where I was flaunted like a palm laurel.

The only thing I didn’t love was Currado Malaspina.

Oh, those nasty details.

Living under the shadow of a powerful talented man was about as spiritually capacious as a cubicle. I was browbeaten by his bluster, silenced by his self-indulgence.

Creatively, I was a wreck. It seemed like my every thought had already been processed and nullified by the great and wise Currado. His snide, censorious stares quashed whatever agency I thought I had earned as a bright and expressive college student. Did my parents really invest all that money so that I would end up being a comely bauble for a Frenchy-French big shot?

When I finally moved back to Los Angeles it took graduate school and several therapists to purge the fois gras from my Yankee soul.

There’s nothing like hideous urban planning to restore one’s artistic confidence and give a young person the strength to endure.

DIGITAL DIGNITY

How things just pop up on the internet is one of life’s great mysteries.

The other day while doing a search for cotton khaki shorts I came across a photo of Margret Thatcher ankle deep in the Mousam River in Kennebunk, Maine.

I once googled the phrase “best tasting laxative” and I instantly found myself sorting through a fascinating catalog of Canadian holidays.

Who knew that schools were closed on Bobby Orr’s birthday?

But things quickly become less funny when after a periodic self-search (admit it, you do it all the time) I found something  both awkward and embarrassing and what’s worse, after years of meticulous curation and painstaking cultivation, my carefully crafted online brand is now compromised beyond redemption. .

Since I was a child I always dreamed of becoming a glamorous movie star. The fact that I couldn’t act never seemed to deter me. I did nearly everything to climb the oily ladder toward my goal. No audition was beneath my stunted dignity. My standards were so low I even considered video art as part of show business!

And such is the origin of that wicked clip from YouTube.

I was lured into the lurid by none other than the disreputable French impresario of the improper, Currado Malaspina. He assured me it was all under the easy aegis of Art. 99% of that afternoon’s work lay in the digital detritus of the cutting room floor and yet the most incriminating 4 seconds is now available to any imbecile with a cell phone.

How can I possibly scrub this puerile trash from the amorphous online universe where it threatens to scratch the eyes out of my precarious career?

I knew I should have been an actress!

THE CRUEL KARMA OF THE COVETOUS

It’s been years.

Sometimes it seems more like a lifetime.

I fell hard for the French painter Currado Malaspina.

I was young, he was famous … what the heck did I know?

To think I even introduced that cad to my mom!!

But in retrospect, who could blame me. His work was so sophisticated, so wonderfully executed, so rich, so beautiful and so ………. French!

Palimpseste #36, Currado Malaspina

He was married when we met and was twenty years my senior. I was a callow and impressionable American art student whose command of French never got beyond ou est le Métro and laisser vos mains graisseuses hors de ma cuisse.

 I saw in Currado a father figure of sorts and I put my complete trust in him. That we soon became lovers is no credit to my judgment but like I said, I was young and innocent. Though I had no right I was jealous of his wife and I used to fantasize about the buses that would crush her and the vague diseases that would mortally afflict her.

It never dawned on me that my moral compass was spinning out of control.

Then I found his little carnet d’esquisses and my compass suddenly stabilized, pointing due east back to the good old U.S.A.

From Currado Malaspina’s I Modi sketchbook

That salopard was using me. He was drawing us with his voyeuristic Staedtler Pigment Liner sketch pen from every angle in every pose and even adding some positions I can’t even remember and quite frankly seem rather impossible to boot.

Hey wait a minute!!

I was never a blonde!

A SHORT LESSON IN HISTORY

The art of bad photography is a lot harder than it seems. Within the holy trinity of Instagram, Tumblr and Twitter there lies an elusive aesthetic of militant conformity that is easy to see but much more difficult to master.

Beside the boilerplate of nature and food our glutted bank of collective imagery contains shoes, hair, architecture, street signs, headlines, animals, manicures and billions and billions and billions of small children. To someone trained in the visual arts the monotony can be a bit staggering.

To my former boyfriend, the French Marxist painter Currado Malaspina the democratization of photography is a very positive social phenomenon that is well worth watching. To dismiss it all as an empty expression of desperate narcissism is to risk losing a valuable opportunity in studying a societal/aesthetic shift that is practically unprecedented.  Not since the 18th century when Faber-Castell began mass producing pencils have we seen such a massive wave of graphic amateurism.

On a recent trip to to the Bavarian town of Schwanstetten where the first wooden graphite stump appeared in 1646, Currado discovered in the archives of the municipal library thousands upon thousands of crude drawings of precisely the types of things regularly posted on Facebook and Pinterest.

Bratwurst and sauce, pencil on paper, anonymous, 17th century

It seems that various forms of social media image sharing has been around a lot longer than we care to admit. Currado goes even further in asserting that the cave paintings of Lasceaux are nothing more than daily “posts” representing the unsubstantiated claims of third-rate hunters.

To Malaspina the imagery is a form of Paleolithic branding, the sort of reputational inflation one sees on business résumés and Linkedin profiles. Instead of wild claims of fluency in Latin and concert-level musicianship, the artists of Lasceaux were asserting their unlikely expertise in animal husbandry.

To those who ridicule the digital age for its superficiality Currado wags an admonishing emoticon. To make hash of the hashtag is like snubbing one’s nose at 750,000 years of glorious human mediocrity.

SOMETHING IN THE AIR

Rectitude is the sincerest form of treachery.

Currado Malaspina, my erstwhile companion and backsliding swain was fond of enigmatic aphorisms. They would come to him in flashes and once uttered, consigned to the winds of amnesia.

J’ai dit ça? (I said that?) was his constant refrain as if I accused him of some unspeakable intellectual transgression.

Je ne souviens plus  (I don’t remember).

As if he were testifying in front of the House Judiciary Committee.

I regret not taking notes.

He was in love with me and I believe he was constantly posing as some sort of portentous visionary.

To devalue life is to celebrate oblivion.

He said that after they found a pair of nasty follicular cysts in the back his mouth and he thought he might temporarily lose his beloved powers of speech.

To those who know Currado merely by his reputation, the perception is that he is a blowhard and a fool. Though there is a great deal of truth to that there’s another side of him that’s tender and a bit vulnerable.

And if his best work is indeed behind him as some of his critics have maliciously claimed, at least he’s leaving behind something of enduring aesthetic value.

Palipseste 5, Currado Malaspina

I tried my best to love him back but his vinegary breath held a soft dull echo of cheap wine and sage and I couldn’t very well support that.

Maybe it was the cyst.

THE EMPTY HAND OF THE HEART

“The righteous suffer stoically while the vain refrain from all inhibition”

So wrote Alphonse Zhekunin (translation mine), the 19th century poète maudit famous for his light verse on dark subjects. I can’t think of a better summery of the emotional maturity of the well-known French painter Currado Malaspina.

To Currado grief is less a hardship than an opportunity. To be struck by misfortune is to be handed a license for mawkish self-indulgence. When the Parisian paparazzi caught him cavorting with Princess Tzipora Al-Tzina of El Dahfra he responded with a series of histrionic screeds of such venomous proportion even the vindictive Al-Tzina family were shocked in silence.

Princess Tzipora Al-Tzina with Malaspina

His dalliances are always accompanied by drama. A meddling concierge all too eager to stir up a scandalous ragoût positioned a camera across from Currado’s atleier and snapped hundreds of pictures until she landed upon something vaguely edible.

The press would have remained indifferent (this is France, after all) but Malaspina cried foul so loudly they were forced to publish the unincriminating photographs.

I think that at heart Currado is a romantic but within the thick miasma of his disfunction he can only express his longings as melodrama.

After all, isn’t this the same Currado who not so long ago painted this lovely double portrait of the two of us?