INTERGALACTIC GRATIFICATION

Like most of his contemporaries, my good friend David Schoffman is a well-travelled cosmopolite. Summers in Sierra Bermeja, winters in Hemsedal, no place is dearer to David's heart and closer to his eerie imagination than Roswell, New Mexico.

Did I say "cosmopolite?"

I meant crackpot.

You see, David insists that UFO's regularly appear on earth and appear with the greatest frequency in and around Roswell. Actually, like most devotées of the twilight David prefers to call these apparitions unexplained aerial phenomenon though no linguistic neutering will make me sympathetic to his hallucinations.

Knowing me to be a skeptic, David sent me a picture the other day claiming it to be incontrovertibly hard evidence. Now, I'm not accusing my friend of being a liar but I too use Photoshop and I know what it's capable of.

To make matters worse, he insists on this improbable anecdote about art and abduction:

Schoffman tells anyone who will listen that twenty some odd years ago he was forcibly strapped into what he describes as an "incandescent dentist's chair" and was summarily whisked on some strange galactic cruise ship to a far off planet just outside of Jupiter.

Always the artist and always prepared, David claims further that he had with him his Sennelier travel watercolor kit and two medium-size pads of cold press Arches paper. In between his intensive interrogations he was permitted to walk around the landscape and make small descriptive sketches.

He also says that he had the best sex of his life up there, something so disturbing and odd that even I fall short in imagining it.

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!

IN PARTIBUS INFIDELIUM

There's a place in our collective imagination that we reserve for our cruelest fantasies. Vengeance and criminality, taboos best breached within blockbuster movies and cable TV dramas, are delightful flights of the imagination that, once made vivid, leave our pulse racing and our temples damp with sweat.

In the Land of the Infidels, Los Angeles, California where my good friend David Schoffman resides, there's a special place in hell for those considered omnivores. Status is regularly conferred upon those who most militantly demur.

Vegans are the vicars of nutrition. Their list of forbidden foods would make a Hasidic Passover shopping list look like a Caligulian bachannal. Denial is the realm of the elected and every day a new edible allergy is announced to an increasingly credulous yet eager public.

One could easily feed a small nation with the interdicted table scraps of your average L.A. yoga fiend.

And it is from this unfortunate backdrop that Schoffman has entered into the fray with the latest of his remedial artworks.

With his paintings long since dismissed as hopelessly hermetic, David has retired his brushes and has tossed his beret into the already cramped arena of performance art. Part reprisal, part farce Schoffman has set his wry eye on those digestive ascetics who eschew all things wheat.

In The Gluten Glutton, David, with the generous support of the Sydney Twa-Shaine Foundation and the avant-garde, new genre collective Amastar, has planted himself at the window table of Benny's Bagels in Sherman Oaks, "enjoying" shmear after shmear after shmear hoping, in his words, "to deconstruct the sitophobic discourse into new morsels of unanticipated meaning." 



He's hoping the critics will soon stop by for coffee.

PROFESSIONAL DEVELOPMENT

Bushy eyebrows are like small pets grafted to a reluctant face. In a world that insists upon defensible physical adjuncts my good friend David Schoffman is at a distinct disadvantage.

In David's mind, most of the odd circumstances surrounding his career can directly or indirectly be attributed to his supraorbital hedges. He credits his appearance to the fact that he has never sold out an exhibition on the day of its vernissage - a yardstick comparable to the arc and reach of a middle schooler's piss.

He blames his tufts for his misbegotten marriage - arguing that had he been more elegantly manicured above the eyes his ex-wife would not have seen him as a worthless, bald-headed, artsy-fartsy clown.

That point is debatable.

The larger point in that genius is often dormant in people who suffer from healthy social adjustment. The true fruits of unusual talent are typically expressed by those with an axe to grind. It's the angry, the resentful, the hurt and the disenfranchised who have the most to prove. My dear friend David might never have embarked on his insane campaign to produce a polyptych of one-hundred oil painted panels had he been tamed and bred with flawless social skills.

Eyebrows aside, Schoffman also suffers from sloppy hygiene, a grinding stutter, eczema, irritable bowel, night sweats, clammy hands, legal blindness and shameless hypocrisy.

And therein lies the true secret to his great success!

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.