NEW WORK FROM AN AGING GENIUS

If not noir there's something rather gris about my good friend David Schoffman.

He's a lurker, a shiftless flâneur, a peregrinating urban nomad who's more comfortable shivering on  a dark street corner than he is watching Netflix with his arm around his latest girlfriend, sipping pinot noir and drifting into a honied catnap.

People unfamiliar with Los Angeles picture a place where the streets are an empty cathedral of clumsy city planning and where the car rules like a coughing, wheezing, four-wheeled potentate.  

And while it's true that the honk and hiss of constant exhaust perfumes the air with the fine particles of a slow death there's also an exuberant pedestrian culture if only you know where to find it.

Schoffman loves that part of L.A. and it informs his work in unexpected ways.

The barkers and street prophets, the dealers and skaters, the workers and drifters, the moms without bus fare and the dawdling teenagers looking for something a little less than trouble, the scavengers getting by on cans and plastic, the exercise freaks white-wired like science projects in bright, skin-tight velour, the nodding dope fiends leaning like old lumber in darkened doorways, tourists on i-phones wandering like ghosts. These are the people that clutter David's dreams and his new sculptures are a record of his quests.

The critics think he's lost his mind and perhaps he has but he's true to his vision and the love he feels for his unlovable city is genuine and touching.

INNOCENCE IS AMISS

My dear friend David Schoffman is to character what Kabuki is to song. Though one is contained within the other and though they are folded neatly together like dinner napkins and though they are interdependent yet vehemently autonomous, their relationship is fragile and subject to the desperate balances of perfect form.

In other words, though David can be a nice, reliable and honest guy, he can also be what we call in French un connard.

Think for a moment about how he expresses himself. Have you ever wondered why his sentences are as long as winter weather forecasts and how he avoids monosyllables as if they were beneath his grandiloquent dignity?  Have you ever listened for his sneaky alliterations or his innocuous puns that are meant to convey how clever he thinks he is.

Even the way he stands, with his feet wide apart and his hands buried in his pockets as if his scrotum was buttressed by a scaffold that stretched from hip to hip.

He's awfully strange in the way he has curated a Byzantine body language trying to communicate an unearned yet aspirational authority.

But the thing that really kills me is the innocent way he sits in a chair with that surly belligerence of 17th century cleric. I'm on to Schoffman's bullying theatrics and that's why we're friends to this day.

I know that he knows that I know that he knows that I know just what kind of schmuck he really is.