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?!

AWARDS AND REWARDS

Currado Malaspina may be a wonderful artist – or so we’re led to believe by his pushy public relations team – but as a person he’s as damaged as a dented fender. I remember years ago walking with him through a Barnes and Noble in Manhattan looking to see if his graphic novel, Le Frisson Abattu was carried in their foreign language section. He didn’t believe me when I told him that Barnes and Noble didn’t have a foreign language section and with the exception of a few paperback dictionaries everything else would be in english.

I think he said:  “nom de dieu … quel bête pays … ça me fait vachement chier cette connerie de merde”, or something to that effect.

I don’t exactly remember. In any case he was very mad.

It wasn’t so much the fact that we couldn’t find his book, he never really expected to find what amounted to a glorified  pornographic comic book on the shelves of a store owned by Rupert Murdoch. What got him mad was the fact that in a major cosmopolitan city like New York, a large, exclusively monolingual bookstore was a sign of wretched barbarity. I tried to explain to him that in the United States people don’t read for pleasure anymore but only to gain tactical advantage at the workplace.

Currado wasn’t familiar with runaway bestsellers like The Seven Rules for Ruling, Corporate Crushing Tips, The Ancient Art of Dominant Leadership, Truth or Branding: Pick One, I’ll Be Sensitive When I’m Dead, Reasoning and Resolve in Effective Team Management, You Are Capable But So Is She and No Survival For The Flimsiest.

He was equally oblivious to the bloated market for self-congratulatory chapbooks. I guess there were no French equivalents for titles like You Are Awesome!, Daily Affirmations of Excellence, Happy, Happy, Happy, Make A Wish – It’s Already Granted, Pat Yourself On The Back and Visualize/Manifest Be Great, Yo.

I suppose what made matters worse was that my latest literary tour-de-force, I Took It, was doing moderately well and was tabled next to a Dr Oz book on prostate care. I caught Currado scowling at the back flap, slowly mouthing  the text of my brief and modest bio.

Luckily and quite by accident we were right next to the very impressive Mixology section. There Currado was able to calm himself by staring lovingly at the large glossy photos of gimlets and mojitos.

We later went out for beers at Finelli’s.

I suppose he deserved it.

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!

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?

TOLLE, LEGE

My friend, the enigmatic French painter Currado Malaspina had something of a religious conversion in the most unlikely of places. Currado, the consummate cosmopolite who is equally at home in Rome as he is in Istanbul had his unlikely Milvian Bridge moment in the cramped, damp guest house behind my two-bedroom Spanish in Silverlake.

He was here last summer, somewhat in hiding, though it was an open secret among his friends back in Paris. Reeling from a series of bad reviews, bad romances and bad weather, Currado came to L.A. to take the cure.

He spent most of his times indoors – he finds neither the sun nor the ocean particularly salubrious – listening to Schubert and painting small watercolors of endangered fish. He would surface in the evening only to retreat a few hours later after polishing off a bottle of wine with a few crusts of coarse black bread and a thimbleful of imported cheese.

His self-imposed exile, like all attempts at purgation, was an unnecessary exhortation of homeopathic magic. Only through wounds, the theory goes, could one summon the messengers of atonement. (It’s no small irony that my next door Rastafari neighbors, finding no truck in torment, manage the same result using homegrown Big Bud marijuana).

Like a bereaved boulevardier he would roam the early morning avenues of L.A. muttering to himself in Corsican. No matter which direction he took he could never find that elusive boulangerie with the flakey warm croissants that would almost certainly make things right again. Instead he passed tire shops and hair salons and the deficit of pedestrian traffic only added to his already crippling sense of alienation.

And then it happened and everything changed.

On one particularly desperate morning the pursuit of breakfast pastries found Currado lost and disoriented in one of those nondescript ethnic enclaves that freckle our sprawling grid of relentless urban iteration. Stopping to ask directions from a young bearded man whose cheap suit and fedora reminded him of the London ska bands of the 1970’s, he was drawn into conversation by the promise of hot coffee and the hitherto unfamiliar bagel. I’m not exactly sure what nerve was hit and how but before you could say Chi Rho Currado was wrapped in leather straps praying not to collapse into a hypoglycemic coma.

Malaspina now goes by the name Carmi ben Abraham and like Cat Stevens before him, it wasn’t the wisest career move. He seems to be happy and his work is still progressing though it has taken an iconographic shift I still don’t quite understand. I’ll never know what transpired that morning in L.A. but since then whenever I see a big van parked on the curb I make sure to quickly cross the street to the other side.

CONNECTIONS

A ringing truth more resonate than revelation, more terrifying than prophesy and more damaging to one’s ego than the caustic reverberations of a bad review. I’m referring to the many oracular pronouncements that come from the mouth of a beloved mentor. For years I was enthralled by the slanted wisdom of Currado Malaspina.He coaxed me into questioning my rigid and and constraining orthodoxies and shamed me into a lassitude of careful, obedient compliance.  What I thought I knew I questioned and what I questioned was reduced into marginality. Currado’s charisma and sheer persuasive bellicosity had me cowering like a kitten.

Currado Malaspina, Istanbul, 2006

I didn’t know who I was anymore. I lived like a dull reflection of myself buried beneath the shadow of an acclaimed master. My friends envied my privileged position as the amanuensis and lady in waiting to one of France’s most famous contemporary artists.I was Currado Malaspina’s assistant, his lover and his confidante and I was miserable living the dream in the City of Light.

Danton and Malaspina, Paris, summer 1999

Be careful what you wish for. Enthralled to a living legend locks the normally creative mind into an aurelian shackle of diffidence and servility. I put Currado above all else, above my needs, above my ambitions and worst of all, above my work. I was a cog in the enterprise of furthering the career of an already inflated vedette de la monde artistique. I worked night and day on curating his image, burnishing his reputation and creating a climate of constant anticipation.

Untitled monotype, Currado Malsapina, 1998

At the time his work was a boilerplate of cheap scandal and facile provocation. That it was also demeaning of women was a fact that conveniently eluded my besotted inattention. In retrospect it’s hard to believe how blind I was in my compliance and capitulations.

Such is the predicament of the young, grasping artist. In a field crowded with identical aspirants the conditions for success are a vague blueprint of strategic compromises, ethical lapses and a muddled pub crawl through the anuses of the famous and the well-connected.

In today’s lexicon it’s called networking.

Back then it was called prostitution.

POLITESSE IS FOR LES OISEAUX

There is something so exhilarating about indignation. Feigned, righteous or otherwise, being pissed is good for the circulation. Having grown up in the midwest it took me a while to figure this out. Meeting the French painter Currado Malaspina teased the corn husks out of my hair and turned me toward the true path of artistic ire, resentment, petty rivalry and professional wrath.

“There’s nothing like a good, mean-spirited intellectual brawl full of ad hominem attacks, libelous invective, empty threats and punishing assertions bordering upon the precipice of conventional civility.”

That’s how he put it to me years ago after he took me to a party at the studio of one of his oldest friends, the sculptor René Lacarte.

He and Lacarte were old school chums with as many shared memories as shared mistresses. Their friendship was as durable as one of Lacarte’s monumental cor-ten steel sculptures and it allowed them to communicate with a callous and sometimes brutal candor.

Currado had just completed an exhibition of large-scale works on paper, the subject of which, many critics observed, bordered on the gratuitously sleazy.

Currado vigorously defended his work claiming that considering the contemporary absence of any normative taboos they were as innocuous as a pastoral vista of Ruisdael and as void of provocation as a Madonna by Zurbarán. Lacarte countered that Ruisdael was far from innocuous and Zurbarán is as highly charged today as he was in the 17th century. He called Currado ‘un mauvais menteur‘ a French insult that is far more wounding than calling someone in English a bad liar.

The party ended with blows, broken bottles and dramatic declarations of permanent war.

I was shocked.

The next morning René joined us for croissants at Café Procope as if nothing had happened.

And in fact, nothing had.