The Sweet Guide - La Dolce Guida. Dante & Malaspina

BEFORE IT IS TOO LATE

 

Unlike many of my New York colleagues, my good friend, the French artist Currado Malaspina loves Los Angeles. He visits the city religiously twice a year (though he rarely lets me know he's in town, preferring to spend his time with a bevy of sycophants, art collectors and Hollywood B-listers).

Knowing that both California and his native Paris are doomed to climate catastrophe, he has taken it upon himself to chronicle every detail of each city with some form of visual representation.

The video above is just one of the hundreds of sketchbooks he has devoted to this sanguine lamentation.  

THE SWEET GUIDE

 

I've often wondered what animates my dear, eccentric comrade Currado Malaspina. He has many strange habits and obsessions. He wears scarves in summer, he collects wind chimes and garden ornaments and he reads and rereads Dante in Italian without understanding a word.

His latest folly is imagining Beatrice Portinari as a celestial seducer luring an earnest and vulnerable Alighieri into spasms of desire. His illuminated Paradiso which he impishly titled "La Dolce Guida," is weird and beautiful.

Though still far from finished, we can get an idea of what it might look like by this misleading video:

Paris and Los Angeles: Sister Cities Not Exactly On Speaking Terms

My good friend Currado Malaspina loves to walk. In Paris, this is not unusual. It is not even unusual to interrupt a walk in order to make a few sketches. In Paris, Malaspina is a sparrow in a tree.

Los Angeles is something else. Walking in Los Angeles, though far from a felony, is still something rather freakish. Combine that with squatting on a curb with pen and ink, and you've got yourself an anomaly.

Luckily, squatting on a curb in L.A. is a commonplace and as long as Currado is not publicly defecating, folks leave him alone.