AMERICAN RENAISSANCE

Like many obscenely successful contemporary artists, my good friend David Schoffman hasn't touched a paintbrush in years. Instead, he sends a few digital images, some vague directions and a handful of clumsy sketches to his two top lieutenants in Shenzhen, boards his internal propulsion bowrider and waits.

Having his work fabricated in China has many obvious advantages. For one, the art schools over there churn out incredibly well-trained draftsmen with little or no prospect of monetizing their talents. All David has to do is send a short text with the words "pink," "red" and "pattern" and within a few days he receives a jpg of this:

With labor, shipping and tariffs the mark-up on a painting like this is typically around 2900%.

To consider Schoffman a sellout is like longing for the days of internet dial-up. Only graduate students do their own work now and within just a few years of earning their degree they're either teaching, painting someone else's paintings or if they are among the fortunate few, sending their own vague directives to artisans in the developing world.

Fortunately, all this is about to change. President-elect Trump has announced that his daughter Ivanka will no longer have her clothing lines manufactured overseas! As a Wiccan, a religious denomination that punishes duplicity by instant damnation, he is committed to avoiding even the slightest expression of hypocrisy.

Schoffman now faces a stark and cruel choice. 

Does he continue with business as usual, pay the usurious import taxes and reduce his profits? (Art market analysts estimate the mark-up to diminish to 1900%). Or does he shift his operation to the United States.

Time will tell but one thing already seem apparent. Donald Trump will soon make American Art Great Again!

BEWITCHED AND BEWILDERED

I recently read an interesting piece of investigative journalism that advanced the well-substantiated notion that the Trump family are Wiccans. This wasn't published on some clickbait gossip mill but in the extremely reputable Journal des planches, the news and culture quarterly that comes out of Paris' prestigious PolyScience.

I mention this not because I feel that Wiccans are less equipped to govern our cousins across the sea but because my good friend David Schoffman, an artist of no small influence, has done a considerable amount of design work for the Wiccan church.

He told me that the Wicaan elders are a very reasonable lot and the fact that the Trumps value the counsel of witches should in no way alarm the general public.

Of greater concern, he went on to explain, is the fact that the Trump family is heavily leveraged with the Crown Prince of North Staakijian, a small, mineral rich monarchy that claimed its independence after the fall of the Soviet Union.

The Staakijian Fresco

By a not so strange coincidence, my good friend David has just completed a monumental fresco for the Staakijian House of Parliament, an architectural fig leaf where semi-annual meetings take place for the benefit of YouTube.

The fact that my colleague finds little or no conflict in working for religious cranks and despots is upsetting but not surprising. He's always been a social climber. What troubles me are the small degrees of separation between he and the Trumps.

I've always suspected Schoffman of subtle forms of aesthetic compromise. But here we find evidence of something much more flagrant.

There's a rumor circulating that David is hard at work designing the new Trump coat of arms, a royal tradition that the President-elect hopes to revive in order to make America a bit more European again.

At least he's not working for Gadaffi anymore.

INFLECTION, INFECTION ... IS THERE EVEN A DIFFERENCE?

My good friend David Schoffman has done it again! He has read the pulse of his adolescent country and has turned his despondency into cash. Having long abandoned his frivolous hopes of correcting the world through ideas, in pure, gung-ho American fashion he has turned foolishness into an active and potentially lucrative enterprise.

Schoffman has taken to the airwaves!

His podcasts and audio books have brought his gravelly baritone into the cars and earbuds of thousands of listeners. Capitalizing on his countrymen's insatiable appetite for carefully curated self-esteem, David has culled the collective idiot wisdom typically found in your average, large-type, pop psychology, trade paperback mash-up and has packaged these platitudes into neat half hour digital hors d'oeuvres.

But allow me to digress.

As a child in the turbulent 60's the 19ème was a place far removed from the rage of Nanterre and the chaos that followed. Instead of burning cars and hurling cobblestones at policemen, I spent most of my time smoking Moroccan hashish in the Buttes Chaumont and writing bad poetry about unrequited, bisexual love.

 And yet one could never fully escape the feeling that something radical was changing in French culture. Les idées reçues were not only questioned but rejected outright. "Received wisdom" was by definition suspect and as a result le bébé a été noyé dans le bain. Much that was valuable was jettisoned into the general rubble and only in retrospect did we realize that the baby had indeed been tossed out with the bathwater.

Simone de Beauvoir

Who would have imagined that almost 50 years later the banality of 'received wisdom' would experience such an unexpected renaissance.

And who would imagine that the anarchist gadfly David Schoffman would be turning this turn of events into coin.

Reading, as we all know, is an active engagement between the writer and the reader. This dynamic has produced a fabulous tradition of what Dr. Richard St-Gosse called "skeptical empathy." Gosse writes that when a person approached a page the text becomes propriété communale or communal property. Implicit in the relationship is that the book can never be a commodity but rather a conversation.

In contrast to propoganda, there is little desire to persuade and more of a need to pick a fight. We love our books even as we debate with them. The reason early education specialists emphasize literacy is that they consider small children capable of critical thinking.

Which, of course, gives children a massive intellectual leg up on their Facebook/FakeNews elders.

In any event, having failed to fix this mess during the first half of his ineffectual life, my dear friend David is intent on exploiting technology in order to infect the world instead.

Or to put it in Schoffman's own blunt language, "it's not my fault everyone has become so fucking stupid!"

REQUIEM FOR AN UNREMARKABLE CAREER

Like most liberal sophisticates, my good friend David Schoffman was a skeptic. As a native New Yorker of a certain age, David's dyspathetic attitude toward the meditative, medicated cult of the feel-good had been an article of reliable faith.

At least that was the case until he moved to Los Angeles and started hanging out with the lovely but kooky Dahlia Danton.

Almost overnight, Schoffman went from a hard scrapple, sarcastic, chain smoking curmudgeon to a shaved-headed, juice-fasting lover of cats. And what some might consider even worse, he moderated his opinions into equivocal, milquetoasted, pre-diegested evasions that granted gentle amnesty over anything likely to be deemed judgmental.

In a word, David went native.

He even developed a reputation for possessing what they call in Santa Monica, "second sight." By this I think they meant that he acquired such a piercing intuition that speech was no longer necessary. In order to maintain this luster of incorporeal premonition David proclaimed himself a living oracle and began to offer workshops on what he called "the accessible cultivation of the real powers of prophecy."

And truth be told, he both anticipated the Cubs winning the World Series and the election of Donald Trump. He uses a strange graphic system of mapping where probabilities are delineated with obscure pie charts on smudge-proof white boards.

He puts his findings and speculations into a cognitive cocktail shaker and has an uncanny ability to be consistently right!

Needless to say, all this has proven to be remarkably lucrative and as a consequence David has given up painting for good.

Which brings me to a prediction of my own:

No one is going to notice.

STRUCTURELESS ANTHROPOLGY

As an amateur ontologist, my good friend David Schoffman has spent a lifetime thinking about thought. 

Unlike myself, he is anything but a roustabout bohemian and as such his daily contacts are with what we call in France les gens raisonnables - the ordinary folk of the professional middle class . 

He's often puzzled about why simple acts of inspiration are so inaccessible to his friends and neighbors on the west side of Los Angeles. What is it about creativity that is so elusive to the hybrid-driving, chia seed chewing smart set of southern California?

Suddenly, this past summer, he had an inspiration.

Maybe it is precisely privilege, education and ambition that are the impediments to poetic thinking. Maybe with professional accomplishment and wealth come psychic atrophy and whimsical constipation. Maybe an overactive ego results in an underactive imagination.

Maybe, maybe, maybe ...

All this led to some serious field study into the bowels of Trump's and de Tocqueville's America. He decided to treat the midwest like Levi-Strauss treated the Amazon. And so my good friend David hardened his R's and loosened his belt and armed with a scythe and a pocketed flak vest went native into Fox Country to see how the other half lived.

What he found was astonishing! These kind, eccentric reactionaries bathe in the balladry of magical thinking. They talk in tongues and trade in visions. Uninhibited by fact or reason they drift like children from fantasy to approximation. Like true poets they treat words like weapons and distill their impulses into metrical slogans worthy of the great masters of Haiku.

These serious surrealists have ordained their president an imam and have free-associated their way toward believing in their ineluctable right to get fat and die angry.

At last Schoffman found the true American artistic vernacular! Invention lay in the heartland and not in the man-bunned barrios of Brooklyn or the food allergenic bungalows of Santa Monica and Malibu!

Oh André ... where are you now that we need you most ...?

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.