FOREIGN AFFAIRS

It's interesting how quickly one's best intentions can go awry in so many unpredictable ways. 

At the behest of the State Department's Cultural Emissary Program (SDCEP), my good friend David Schoffman was sent to Asia to conduct life drawing workshops at several appropriate venues.

Leaving aside Schoffman's questionable credentials, his amiable, easy going California style seemed, on the surface, like the perfect diplomatic fit.

Things went reasonably well, even in Bahrain where it was tough to parse a pectoralis through the intervention of a blackened veil. David unquestionably has a way with people and can usually charm his way out of knotty social blunders.

Which is why it was somewhat astonishing that in one communist country, (which for security reasons must remain nameless), David ran so afoul of his hosts that he was arrested and tried as an American provocateur.

It seems that for some obscure doctrinal reason the government insists that forearms and hands should be rendered with robust proportional exaggeration.

They say it has something to do with promoting the noble virtues of manual labor. 

Inadvisedly, David drew a few innocent corrections on a sketch by the son of some well-placed party functionary. He may have even raised his voice a bit though on this point the witnesses at the trial were divided. He was found guilty of "pedagogical intimidation," a serious offense in some parts of the world, and was sentenced to 14 years in prison.

Luckily a friend of mine is a big time vinter and well connected with some of the party elites. Two cases  of Ducru-Beaucaillou 1988 (€7078) later, Schoffman was flying business class to Hanoi trying to sell his story to HBO.

Artists are always misunderstood.

IMMUNE SYSTEM

When was it that the appearance of stress - an undeniably unfavorable mental condition - began to bestow upon the sufferer a mantel of prestige? 

These days one boasts of stress the way one gloats over luxury purchases, extravagant tasting menus or large losses at the baccarat tables of Monte Carlo. 

It's telling that the most common word in French for stress is stress. Its etymology suggests its foreign provenance but now even in Paris the furrowed brow has come to bestow a kind of backward right to brag.

Nowhere, however, is this perversity more prevalent than in the great urban centers of the U.S.A. Among the professional classes, quality of life is typically measured by the absence of leisure and the eager collation of superfluous responsibilities.

There's no greater expression of noble grandiloquence than the solemn locution "I'm too busy."

And so it is with my dear friend David Schoffman who never misses an opportunity to remind me how much, as he puts it, he has on his plate. The fact that the image of the plate - une assiette - suggests to me the rituals of alimentary repose, is enough of an indication that David and I differ greatly on the definition of "the good life."

He eats - when he actually finds the time to do so - standing up and typically from a styrofoam take-out box. He counts his calories and rations his carbs like a fifteen year old ballerina. He wears a fitbit, a bluetooth earclip headset and an Apple Watch and if he's not in the act of texting or talking it would a good idea to check his pulse.

At one time David was an interesting artist, now he's merely successful. I remember him fondly as the well-read sybarite who knew his way around the washed-rind cheeses of Burgundy and the complex Gamays and Pinots of the Mâconnais.

Now he has joined the distinguished ranks of the tired and the stressed and has little time for the trifling and unprofitable pleasures of the senses. 

But that's okay for in California all social commerce is conducted online so unless you're sharing your laptop it's now possible to live your entire life practically germ-free!

BON VIVANT

My good friend David Schoffman is a man about town. Myself, I'm more of a homebody, preferring to experience the rattle of urban life at the remove of my fifth floor flat in the 10ème arrondissement. David, on the other hand, can't sit still.

On most nights you can find him perambulating from bistro to jazz club to after-hours speakeasy to an all night caucus of penny ante, former comedy writer pinochle players in Echo Park. 

I guess that comes with bachelorhood. 

He usually sets out at dusk, preferring the ebb of Los Angeles' ubiquitous sunshine to the coarse perfect beauty of the temperate midday glare.

He prefers to walk, something only fools and the indigent do on a regular basis. "I like the loneliness of it all," he explained to me one day as I accompanied him on a trek from the downtown Central Library to Musso and Frank on Hollywood Boulevard. "It's the ultimate expression of defiance."

(Or madness)

Even the rain fails to deter him. 

He'd rather get soaked then be driven in a car, (Schoffman lost his license several years ago after being diagnosed with ODS or ocular deciduous syndrome). He claims he knows the city inside and out - a justly marginalized talent in an age of bite sized mobile global positioning systems.

All this eccentric solitude has turned my once lively friend into something of a bore. It's no longer uncommon for him to literally put a dinner companion to sleep with his monotonous recitations of street corner arcana and trigonometric traffic pattern trivia.

This is not to say that Schoffman doesn't know how to have a good time. 

I just received this video from his last astonishing stroll in Beverly Hills!