Monday, December 7, 2015

BEING ALL YOU COULD BE ... AND NOTHINGNESS


Attention LinkedIn:
God is dead so there's a decent job opportunity out there.



Here in Los Angeles it's a very competitive field but in Paris where my good friend Currado Malaspina lives it's a burgeoning industry and the place is like the Wild West.

Currado has always been a charismatic chap and the prospect of leading a trail of unquestioning acolytes toward an Arcadia of artistic bliss had crossed his mind on more than one occasion. But the grander ambition, the one where legendary heavyweights like Sri Chinmoy, Menachem Mendel Schneerson and Werner Erhard have inked their lithographic plates, was never something Malaspina thought himself capable of. 

Then, on a long car trip to Limoges with his dealer Monique De Stylo, he experienced a small oracular vision. They were listening to some loud meditative EDM on Le Mouv' when they lost their wifi after entering the Eurotunnel. In Currado's telling the ensuing silence became fraught with a mute but unmistakable hostility. Monique and Currado had long since dropped any pretense toward friendship. Theirs was a marriage of convenience and like a tired couple with school-age kids they were deferring their final rupture for a more propitious moment.

To break the spell Monique hastily popped in the nearest CD - an American audio book on something called psycho-cybernetics. As a rule, Currado performed a sort of mental bulimia whenever he was exposed to the numbing claptrap of 'positive thinking.' He often wondered what our intellectual life would have become had Sartre, Beckett and Joyce adapted a "curriculum for living" that emphasized transformation, completion, and affirmative self-image.

In any event, after two droning traffic-filled hours of 'life without limits,' Currado was convinced that he too had heard the call.  What better time than the present for France to hire him, Currado Malaspina, as its new national Godhead!




Saturday, November 21, 2015

RATI


My dear friend Currado Malaspina is a cheerless recluse with a jaundiced perspective on everything but food. Throw him a plate of Spanish gooseneck barnacles in aioli or an andouillette au Chablis and his grimace grows mushy and moist. 

But in matters excluding the palate Malaspina remains the quiet Quaker gently consigning his underworked senses somewhere between annoying and superfluous.

"Man is a rational creature," he would to say while drowning a wedge of Beaufort d'ete in a slow current of Châteauneuf-du-Pape, "the soul is a fairy tale and the heart a pitiable cliché."

I used to hate him for this until I realized that everyone who really cared about him looked past his cold disinterest as if it were an unfortunate birthmark. They all said he was licking some vague emotional wound and like all Frenchmen he would eventually find himself reanimated by the unreliable thrills of amour-fou.

I admit I was looking forward to that moment if only for its entertainment value. Nothing is more amusing than a slowly derailing train wreck when your best friend is riding shotgun with the conductor.

My spirits lifted when he told me he had finally met his Beatrice.

Thirty-four years his junior (about the same age as his step-daughter Anise), by all accounts Malaspina's new muse is a solipsistic slut who trolls the Parisian intelligentsia swapping her swains for the grizzled graybeards with international reputations. 

For her, Currado was a ripe mango dangling from the lowest bough.

Au secour!



While others mourn I watch with amusement for crazy-love is the one hallucination I can fully endorse.

What other emotion gives the intoxicant a reason to get both in and out of bed?






Tuesday, November 3, 2015

FUGUE


Countervailing the cultural currents of French laïcité my good friend Currado Malaspina was raised in rural Roussillon as a Manichean catholic. Taught from a very young age to abide by at least six or seven of the existing ten commandments, Malaspina's early years were defined by selective prohibitions and arbitrary taboos. One needn't therefore be a post-Freudian structuralist to appreciate the provenance of Currado's subsequent libertinage. 


To be schooled by parish deacons, cruel provincial priests and frosty eczemed nuns can prove oddly salubrious to the nascent libido. As has been pointed out by people much smarter than myself, nothing whets the thirst like drought (rien aiguise la soif comme la sécheresse).

His education was anything but sentimental but with his solid grounding in exegetical Latin, Currado became expert in grafting complex meaning to utter nonsense.


Persuading Monique Carcuela to consign herself as innocent muse was easy enough, especially when the enterprise was pitched in the fashionable artist argot of the time. Dragging her through the smutty cesspool of Malaspina's twisted choreography took a good deal more finesse.





Citing Emerson, Locke, Donne and Ram Dass was anything if not a stretch but ultimately what sealed the dirty deal was when Currado promised the ambitious Carcuela that an introduction to his third cousin, Henri-Georges Clouzot, was imminent. That he wasn't even remotely related to the famous filmmaker never occurred to Currado as much of an obstacle.


And so together, with quill in hand, Carcuela and Currado went on to reenact in excruciating detail each charlie-horsed leaf of Vatsyayana's vaunted Kama Sutra.



... while adding a few charming variations of their own.

Thursday, October 29, 2015

WHEN WORDS FAIL


Some would describe Monique Carcuela as the archetypal beauty, a stunning marvel of classic, isometric proportion. Those who knew her before what has been referred to with comic understatement as 'her fall,' describe the ambient peculiarity of her proud, symmetrical bearing. Her stunning intelligence was as crisp as an intaglio. Her superbly toned dancer's body seemed to meld with the wind as she walked. 

People talked of her dignity as if it were a lost set of house-keys, something of consequence transformed suddenly by careless oversight. If she's remembered at all it is for her role as the weary muse behind Currado Malaspina's most controversial piece to date - The Baba Kama Sutra.



In the days when every art student saw themselves as Brassaï's heir apparent, the striking couple were  were constantly caught on film despite their silly attempts at discretion.  


Dressed and outdoors they appeared to be just friends, casual comrades in a gentle crusade against French neo-bohemianism. At the time just a few of us knew what was really cooking behind that threadbare veil of propriety.


Who ultimately rejected whom is still very much a matter of scholarly speculation. There is ample evidence to suggest that their brilliant flame extinguished on its own. 

One thing seems to be certain.

Malaspina is a far better lover than he is a draftsman!

Saturday, October 17, 2015

FROM MEDIOCRITY TO PRURIENCE


They say it happened when his first wife left him for a Malaysian cage fighter. Others insist that it dates back to his student days. From my perspective as one of Currado Malaspina's oldest friends, I always point to his clandestine romance with Monique Carcuela, the wife of the poet and erstwhile Ecuadoran ambassador to France, Manuel Carcuela.

Monique was a dancer, or so she pretended. Lithe, nimble and utterly irresistible. To the ambassador she was a trophy and a glamorous shill. Fastened to his arm she stood as fraudulent witness to his vanished manhood. 

To the young, dashing  and perpetually hung-over Malaspina, Monique Carcuela was low hanging fruit. In those days Currado was a minor master of seduction. He collected women like green stamps and traded them up when they ceased to be of use. When the gorgeous ambassador's wife asserted her near mystical hold on Currado's imagination he became  incurable.

He was her slave and together they built a theology based upon the acrobatics of lust.


That's when it happened!

That was when Currado Malaspina stopped painting third-rate abstract paintings and started to use his graphic acumen to celebrate good old-fashioned rough sex.


What a lousy cheap gimmick!