My dear friend Currado Malaspina has been spending a lot of time in Los Angeles. His rue d'A'bbeville flat is being renovated after a water main burst and flooded his bedroom and library. I feel for him. I have a lot of compassion for him. Nobody deserves that type of misfortune, even if that type of misfortune pales in comparison with other, more dire calamities.
Currado has been staying with me. He's sleeping on my couch and he follows me every day into the studio. He photographs me. He does sketches of me while I drink my coffee and eat my bagel. He rides shotgun in my car and turns off NPR because he claims his English isn't good enough to understand it.
He sneaks into my studio in the middle of the night and turns all his sketches and his photographs into large drawings whose subject is the uneventful nature of my life. He says that a French artist would never live like I live. A French artist, he says, would drink an espresso every morning at his neighborhood Tabac and trade gossip with the locals. He says a French artist would make a bigger production of lunch and not content himself with half a peanut butter sandwich and an apple.
He says that the way I live offends him and that he can't wait to return to Paris.
At last we agree.
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