THE YEAR IN REVIEW

My dear friend Currado Malaspina lives in a dream.

From his idyllic balcony in central Paris the world is a fresh inspiriting bouquet of fresh pommes frites. On the page Currado is forever virile and dubiously desired. He draws an improbable version of himself that pretends toward a strapping indestructibility and a measureless erotic ingenuity. 

I personally don't buy it for a minute.

First, let's consider his age. I know for a fact that he's older than me but even considering a lifetime of daily doses of resveratol the dude can't still be a stud.

Second, how about his arthritis. Some of those moves are straight out of Cirque de Soleil and all the yoga in the world couldn't get Currado to bend again like a rubber band.

Besides, at this stage of the game I know for a fact that when it comes to super-sex my friend Currado would almost always defer to the soup.

But I won't spoil the party. Let him pretend all he wants. The drawings are fine and it keeps him in the studio but as far as I'm concerned, I like the dog pastels the best.

EXPERIMENTS WITH TRUTH

The only one of Currado Malaspina's five adolescent children to rebel against him was his fourth wife Simone. 

My good friend Currado is an elusive target for teenage insurrection. An apostate by nature and as forgiving as a Christ, his family cherished his eccentric neutrality. Even when his kids toyed with their minor expressions of social insubordination it was hard to press against their imperturbable papa.

Except of course Simone. Batting clean-up in his pantheon of committed female companions, Simone was young enough to be Currado's niece yet old enough to know better. 

At first she was attracted to his genius. She saw in him an older man steeped in the hopelessness of unprofitable scholarship. She admired his capacity for insolence in the face of sanctimony. She loved how he greeted the calculated reverence of his faithless admirers with the canny percipience of a lama. She even adored his wily sense of satire, especially when the farce was directed toward her intimate circle of coquettish friends. 

But soon her high regard turned like an old camembert into a quiet repugnance. 

Simone had an unremarkable childhood. The second among four siblings, she was what the French call un loup sans baiser - or what we might describe as an "an unlicked cub." As is often the case with people given short shrift in the birth order she had an insatiable demand for validation. To visit Currado during the Simone years was to witness a constant chorus of c'est géniale ma chérie! and formidable ma poulette! or, (I kid you not, I actually heard this), tu es un cadeau de Dieu à la planète Terre et il n'y a pas d'égal à ta beauté et intelligence! If an hourly paean was not forthcoming, Simone would withdraw into a hushed and despairing pout.

She started reading books with titles like Les pouvoirs de la confiance en soi and Pensée positive: Comment stopper les pensées négatives et réduire le stress.

What she found was a blueprint for everything Currado was not. These books presented templates for effective, passionless living, void of irony yet full of plainspoken benchmarks for the complete avoidance of dissonance and conflict.

Everything was always laid out in clear, bold-faced bullet points. Apposite excerpts from the roster of inoffensive sages were typically scattered throughout the text hoping to lend a patina of cerebral legitimacy to the flavorless stew.

The one thing more obnoxious than a distressed teenager quoting Gandhi is a distressed middle-aged woman doing the same.

Currado and Simone didn't really grow apart. They more or less imploded under the extreme pressure of propinquitous intellectual torpor. The more intensely Currado engaged in the ambiguities of art the more 
Simone retreated into the anodyne world of self-improvement.

A serial monogamist, the ripe Malaspina is now actively auditioning applicants for wife number five.

By all accounts, it seems like he's enjoying the process.

Gâcher sa fête

As if the indignities of aging were not quite enough!

A brutal confirmation visits daily in the form of aching joints, recalcitrant bowels, failing eyes and evanescent gums.

My poor but hearty friend Currado Malaspina doggedly perseveres despite his pitiless decay.

His physical putrefaction, however, is a minor hiccup compared to his professional obsolescence.

At one time the name Currado Malaspina was synonymous with radical, avant-garde, fringe artistic insurrection. His work was seen as representative of the seemingly insatiable French appetite for garish libertine exhibitionism.

Now, much to his astonishment, he is regarded as a national embarrassment!

At the peak of his foie gras years his work would attract the grasping, greedy attention of sheiks, curators, speculators and all manner of cultural traders and hangers-on. Now he's lucky if he can peddle his pictures at the marché aux puces!

Bitterly, he points his incriminating finger at the global reach of American political culture. In his twisted rendering, France enjoyed centuries of delightful sensual consent between the sexes. In the United States by contrast, a pall of prudery stiffens the rituals of courtship into a blustering pragmatic negotiation between potential litigants. 

And so with Big Macs, superhero movies and the longer work week, Currado sees another disfiguring import messing with his chill.   

TROMPER MONSIEUR TRUMP

My good friend Currado Malaspina submitted himself to a full medical examination today and his physician, Dr. Philip Soupoualt, ignoring his hemorrhoids and his episodic onychocryptosis, pronounced him "the fittest artist in all of France." (l'artiste le plus sain dans la République).

This has come as something of a surprise and many of his detractors continue to insist that a psychiatric evaluation should be included in the assessment.

They point to his age, his work and his ardent attachment to the Catholic Church.

But Currado sees no contradictions and is offended by the insinuation.

His ego is an echo of the size of his hands.

His sagging, puckered skin is as thin as a post-it and the most innocent innuendo can trigger the vindictive instincts of a slandered pubescent. 

He's boastful to the point of parody yet remains oblivious to the mockery his hubris consistently summons among his peers.

His rivals think he's crazy but of late this aspersion has evolved into a palpable fear.

You see, Currado Malaspina has recently been shortlisted as a prospective Minister of Culture. It's rumored that if Sarkozy's UMP succeeds in the next election my good friend could find himself in the position to settle some unsettling scores, ruffle some colorful plumes and basically upend any semblance of propriety within the ranks of the Parisian intelligentsia.

But maybe that's a good thing.

INNOCENT FRAUD

When I asked my good friend Currado Malaspina how his kid sister Beatrice was doing his eyes began to swell like a sponge.

"I've gone from bad to worse to total resignation and all I ever think about is the tragic loss of lovely promise."

I'm not accustomed to Currado being so sincere and emotional but the subject of his sister had hit a nerve.

Currado was 14 when his father Sordello disappeared for good. His mother was what we would call today an ICD-10 294.11 but in those days was referred to simply as "batshit crazy" (fou comme le merde d'une chauve souris). Together with hustling tourists for chump change, learning to draw and seducing immigrant shop-girls at le Printemps, Currado spent his adolescence raising his younger sister under a stern, over-protective umbrella.

"I imagine her now as this beautiful, angelic and brilliant woman, prone, face down in a pile of  debris and all I can think of is that someone is throwing away a perfectly good human."

"A crumpled, trampled 100 euro bill can still buy some wine and paté but once you rip it in half, it becomes worthless. That's my sister - a soul  seized by good people with bad ideas. 

"It's sometimes known as 'la corruption de bonnes intentions' (noble cause corruption), when people with the most forthright motives do unconscionable things."

I have to confess that I had no idea what the heck Malaspina was talking about. Then, a few days later I ran into Beatrice by the canal de l'Ourcq. She smelled like a punchbowl of patchouli and printing ink and was handing out flyers announcing a soirée spéciale at some office complex in the 19th.

Beatrice had apparently become an itinerant pitchwoman for Point de Repère©, the recently rehabilitated pop-psyche ponzi patter-fest that has transformed perfectly maladjusted bohemians into minor corporate shills.

They mean well ... they really do.

Life is brutal and if your mother was mad and your dad was a cad and your brother was the country's most famous and most puerile artist/pornographer you too would need a psychological amphetamine.

So Beatrice drank the pastis (i.e. Kool-Aid). 

Through a fixed and freaky stare she asks passersby if they are ready to "créer la possibilité pour une percée incroyable" and then proceeds to press a glossy prospectus into their unreceptive palm.

Yes ... she's that woman!

But please, if you see her, don't hasten your step or cross to the other side of the street. All she's doing is looking for love. 

Have compassion.

Even glassy-eyed evangelists deserve our pity.

CUSTOMER SERVICE

Now on the seeping, leaching bleeding edge of art marketing technology comes a brand new and exciting venture - the step-brainchild of my good, ambitious friend Currado Malaspina.

Imagine this: You walk into your favorite coffee shop and innocently order a low-fat (dry) iced cappuccino and a quinoa-cranberry scone. You swipe your phone across the sensor and while nine dollars and forty-five cents are immediately charged to your caffeine-credit rewards card some invisible algorithmic alchemists have entered your purchase into their vast and comprehensive database. So while you think you’ve just bought a snack for the price of a pair of guppies what has actually happened is that Starbucks just sold some of your personal consumer history to Pepsico who are relieved to learn that though you’re still overweight you’re not quite yet diabetic.

Lovely, right? So why hasn’t the artworld figured out how to monetize your privacy as well?

The answer is … it has!!

Or at least Currado has and he has patents in sixteen countries to prove it!

Taches EURL is a matrix driven silo structured, limited partnership, offshore company that is tasked with providing top-flight viewer-friendly museum and gallery experiences to the moderately affiliated cultural tourist and prospective mid-scale, hobbyhorse collector.

OK … I didn’t exactly write that - I cribbed it from Currado’s new website (and translated it myself into a tamer, friendlier siliconish prose).  But to be fair and honest, his idea is as brilliant as it is diabolical. He basically offers a free smartphone and Android app that’s designed to give short, coherent commentary when a user visits a museum, gallery or art fair. Essentially it tracks which works of art the user looks at and measures the duration of each interaction. By these metrics Taches is able to compile a fairly reliable profile of the user’s taste in art.

For example, a person goes to the Museum of Modern Art in New York and briskly waltzes past the Kandinskys and the Mondrians but lingers over the Bonnards. Then, while visiting an exhibition devoted to the the drawings of James Ensor bypasses a retrospective of paper bag drawings of Micah Carpentier. A profile is created on the user based on the amount of time spent in front of each piece thus reliably assessing both affinity and aversion. This information is then sold to art dealers who can refine their targeted marketing based of the confirmed tastes of the consumer!

The idea is to use the gentle surveillance of smartphone tracking in order to reach potential consumers of not only original works of art but also what are now called in the industry “art accessory inventories.” These include books, posters, greeting cards, ties, t-shirts, broaches, kerchiefs and toys. 

Even pet stores can use it to identify the fans of Jeff Koons. 

The user experience is about to get friendlier - so long as you consider the constant sticking of one's intrusive, unsolicited nose into your business a fair measure of genuine friendliness.

THE GENTLE SIDE OF CURRADO MALASPINA

When idle, bored and without my cell-phone I often find myself wondering why so many adults are so disconsolately messed up. Why do citizens of the prosperous West dwell so habitually in dissatisfaction and angst.

I recently learned that my good friend, Currado Malaspina, a friend who shares with me a near permanent state of perplexity and disappointment, attended a seminar at the Paris Center for Intentional Living (Centre de Paris pour l'existence intentionelle) in order to see for himself what it is that is eating all these fortunate people.

Aside from the typical poverty of juvenescent hugs, it seems that regular honest and well meaning folks are simply bored with their prosperity. There seems to be a universal craving for programmed disobedience. Living by the conventional rubrics of work, love and leisure, by the time a person reaches the age of about 45 they begin to realize that they are singularly unexceptional.

What makes things worse, these same sad civilians lack the imagination to find the easily accessible consolations of great art and literature.

At the Center for Intentional Living dentists, career office workers and accounts managers are regularly told how génial! they are. Currado tells me that they often actually use the word 'awesome' in English as if this all purpose platitude finds greater potency than all the available French equivalents.

This stubborn hunger for salvation is a cash cow and although the French government has effectively banned more than a few so-called 'personal actualization' outfits in the past, they keep springing up like truffles after a summer rain.

The typically skeptical Malaspina was so moved by what he saw that he has completely changed the nature and purpose of his work.

His new theme comes with a simple, urgent message:

Love your kids and do everything you can to make them confident, independent and above all, mutinous and willfully defiant!

Conjugating in the Visionary Passé Composé

There's a hideous beauty behind the tasteless work of my good friend Currado Malaspina. It holds the interest like an irregular heartbeat - it's far from fatal but it surely can't be healthy.

At a time where in all likelihood we will be electing our first woman president, Currado depicts his female accomplices as if they were mere accessories. Is it a last, desperate gasp at les temps perdu or is there laced between his puddles of color some vague irony or social commentary?

At times his women are delicate and lovely. At other times they are monstrous and grotesque. Is he evoking the fleeting melancholy of Villon's famous Les Regrets De La Belle Heaulmière?

Or the degrading braggadocio of H. Hefner's Little Black Book?

The critics, splayed into predictable factions, are unhelpfully inconclusive. Like most things Currado, a morass of divisive speculation only serves to obfuscate his true intentions. In interviews he remains coy, engulfing himself in a highly marketable ambiguity where any given statement could be subject to a myriad of interpretations.

In the end it really doesn't matter. Despite his fame in France, Currado will remain a marginal figure in our hyper-sensitive, politically correct contemporary American art scene. I will leave it to the next generation and its inevitable sexual grievances to evaluate my friend's work with greater insight and objectivity.

AN ARGUMENT FOR LITERACY

Though my base and depraved friend Currado Malaspina is no stranger to a Lothario's divan, it can also be said that he succeeds rather handsomely in attracting the most intelligent, literate and articulate of mistresses.

This is no small accomplishment, for his conquests are uniformly gorgeous and to find looks and brains within the same gentle specimen is no meager feat.

Of course, this is almost certainly a byproduct of his scrupulous methodologies. Your average rake may wine and dine, flatter and flirt, cajole and caress and shower in gifts but for Currado seduction always begins with books.

What woman could possibly resist a first edition of Coindreau's translation of The Sound and The Fury, (La bruit et la fureur, Gallimard 1938)? And is there any greater aphrodisiac than Antonin Artaud's rare 1947 masterpiece Artaud le Mômô?

Short of a 40 foot yacht and a romantic penthouse pied-à-terre on the Île de la Cité, I can think of no greater lubricant to love.

My old bones grow weary just imagining the rigor of his amatory appetites. The reading alone would exhaust my endurance.

But to Currado sex is sport and though Sade can be found among his folios and tomes, he regularly refers to the tamer treatises in steering his roaming shaft.

Breton's Nadja, Souppault's Les dernières nuits de Paris, Miller's Quiet Days in Clichy and Carpentier's La viuda domesticado.

He's a relic and a knave that Currado is but somehow he manages to live in a fictive world unchanged since the twenties when artists were feared and esteemed and lived poorly and free.

IT MUST BE TIME TO EXHALE

How does one begin to explain an artist, a man, an intellectual of the traditional French Left who spends the lion's share of his time passing off trifling doodles depicting himself in his trademark white blazer and Christmas green woolen scarf standing in the company of young, naked, beautiful women?

Surely these little cartoons aren't meant to be read as a chronicle of actual events! And if they are, why is a man, formally esteemed for his urbanity and discretion, displaying such a coarse disregard for his female protagonists?

Are we to conclude that these trifles now constitute the sum of Currado's current oeuvre? Has he slipped and descended into the tedium of memoir? Have his pictorial skills declined to such a degree that all we can expect are insipid fantasies and monotonous aggrandizement?

Or could it be that these graphic bagatelles are meant to be ironic. More than one critic has advanced this far-fetched thesis.

Georgette Octave as recently as last week wrote in the arts journal  Compte vraiment le quotidien that Malaspina may be the strongest feminist voice within the contemporary discourse.

Invoking an archaic metaphor from the Second Republic she proposes that "his old coffee seems strangely new." (Son vieux café semble étrangement nouvelle). She goes on to describe how 'nimbly' Currado deconstructs the threadbare, formulaic conceptions of droit du seigneur. 

Maybe yes, maybe no but one thing is certain. If the infamous roué, Currado Malaspina can persuade radical and strident women within the academy and the press that he's on their side of the barricades then he more than deserves his legendary reputation as the consummate charmer.

TOUGH GUY SHOWS HEART

"In a world of increasing ambivalence, why do we persist in making art?"

That was the question, practically barked from the back of the packed auditorium, that put my friend Currado Malaspina into a meditative trance.

He was delivering a lecture as part of his responsibilities as a visiting artist at The School of Visual Arts in New York and though the question was pretty boilerplate art student fare it provoked in Currado a momentary regression into genuine introspection.

I know for a fact that he has been asking himself a similar question after suffering a prolonged drought in motivation. "The days just seem to repeat themselves," he recently complained to me in a rare text message, "studio, sex, food, drink, studio, studio. I feel like a grazing buffalo growing lecherous and lethargic with empty habit."

Poor guy.

After a few long, uncomfortable minutes he looked up at the crowded room and with what seemed to those in attendance as an uncharacteristic moment of sincerity he came up with the following answer.

"We persist in making art for the same reason why we continue to fill our nights with dreams. For if we didn't we would most certainly descend into a state of despondency, madness and grief."

ROMANTICISM IN THE AGE OF MECHANICAL SOCIAL MEDIA

My friend Currado Malaspina surrounds himself with a militia of wily women who, through an asymmetrical and difficult to describe kinship, deploy a malevolent force that share many of the same characteristics as electrical storms and storm drain floods.

I realize right away that I have not really shed any light on anything. An electrical storm and a storm drain flood seem on the surface to have only the word storm in common and therefore the analogies are, if not misleading then at least sloppy and over-written. But I can do no better than this and from a compulsion that I don't wholly comprehend, I insist upon these analogies.

I suppose the motif of mild disaster is what I have in mind. A man his age has no business getting involved, much less falling in love with these young beauties and one would think that after a few torrid trysts and wretched break-ups the man's stamina for pain might ebb. But no, we're talking here of an eternal man-child. The birds peck at his sleeve and he remains aloof to his own suffering and exposure.

Like an electrical storm there is volatility, excitement and the thrill of immanent danger that surround his dalliances. And like an inundated drain, there's filthy muck that the deluge must drudge up.

His muddled addiction to beauty is intoxicatingly toxic and if one reads carefully the cryptic annotations on his Baba Kama Sutra drawings it becomes clear that he himself is as addled as the rest of us.

I can no longer count how many times Currado, with tears in his eyes, returns to the refrain of our forsaken fate."Nous sommes seuls au monde," "the universe has disowned us and through its renunciation we are left to drift in misery and permanent exile."

This is how he explains his preoccupation with sex. "There are many worthy subjects but only two that are of any interest to me: Death and duress."

I can't decide if what he's saying is creepy or profound.  What I do know is that Currado Malaspina is uncomfortably raw and brutal in his honesty. To me, that is what is redeeming in his fatally grotesque work. 

These latest drawings are no doubt a requiem to a fading hope. They are neither wistful nor mournful but merely a gentle token from a lost time when people still had the ability to be physically, sensually and meaningfully connected.