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.   

IS THERE SUCH A THING AS BAD PUBLICITY?

My good friend Currado Malaspina is no stranger to controversy but each time he runs afoul of the custodians of good taste he reacts with the stupefaction of a waif tugging on Santa's beard.

Improbable as it seems, he thinks of himself as an abstract painter in the tradition of a Miro or a Mondrian or a Pollock or a Still. With all his loaded subject matter, Currado believes that the primacy of form is his only guiding principle.

This, of course, is laughable.

Sure, when his work is flipped upside down and seen from afar through a cloudy lens I suppose the shapes and colors all add up into a coherent whole. But please, if ever there were an explicit narrative designed to offend it's in his gorgeously smutty Baba Kama Sutra.

For all his pretenses and justifications this stuff is denigrating, not only to women but to the basic concept of respectable lechery. 

The work has been widely reproduced and predictably the public's reaction has been outrage, vilification and disgust. 

Strange as it sounds this never fails to hurt Malaspina's feelings. I can't really tell if he's being sincere but he claims that all he wants is a fair hearing in order to explain his ideas. 

Well Canada has come to the rescue and he will finally have a chance to mollify his many bitter critics.

CKCC, as part of its ongoing series of profiles and interviews with international artists will devote a full hour to Malaspina's provocative book. It will be an uphill battle for my besieged colleague since the network, with an eye toward ratings, loaded the dice with this very unflattering full page advertisement.

Having known Malaspina for as long as I have I'm inclined to give him the benefit of the doubt. 

But then again, I love him.

And then again ...  I'm not a woman.

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!

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?

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.