i don't LIKE

I have to admit I love Facebook.

It's petty, it's trivial, it's intrusive and above all, it's addictive. It lures the wise and the dim-witted alike. Highbrows and housewives find common cause in their compromised time and looted privacy. The trivial normally celebrated by Tweeners is now attracting the intelligentsia while our new lingua franca has become the profoundly predictable shared link. Even my good friend Currado Malaspina has been caught in the clutch of this invisible community.

He spends hours examining photos of friends whose children seem to be living in a perpetual state of curated ecstasy. He composes pithy quips and engages in clever repartee with near strangers whose abundant free time is matched only be their poverty of meaningful insight.

But what is important to me in all this is not what he is doing on Facebook (full disclosure: I don't have a Facebook account so don't bother looking me up) but what he is not doing, which is, of course, his work.

Here in Los Angeles the competitive atmosphere among artists is as mild as a young camembert de Normandie.  Not true in other places and I find no worthier antagonist than the formally fierce Currado Malaspina. 

He recently spent two months in a rented Spanish cottage in the Echo Park district of Los Angeles courtesy of the French Ministry of Culture and Anthropology (yes, such a governmental body exists!). He was commissioned to study the various sectarian communities in the area and in addition to filing a detailed report, create a body of work in response to his findings.

I believe he spent most of his time texting, drinking bad wine, chasing a combative Dahlia Danton and bantering with his new friends on Facebook.

To my great relief the work he completed on his stay was nothing short of abysmal.

North Kings Road, mixed media on paper, Currado Malaspina, 2013

TILTING CONTRARIETY: A MAN AT WAR WITH HIMSELF

More than midway through life's journey, my good Gallic friend Currado Malaspina finds himself at a crossroads. He feels the frosty augury of death with an immediacy bordering on fear. The snowy down that coats his wrinkled face belie his still vigorous  constitution. At yet he's obsessed with the idea of an impending infirmity. That he still frolics with damsels half his age changes nothing of his gloomy foreboding. He sees the Book of Revelation as his personal talisman and he reminds anyone within earshot that "the Lamb has opened the seventh seal ..."

On the other hand, there is a competing force that guides Currado like a divining lodestar. He explains it with a famous French syllogism: All men are dogs - Malaspina is a man - Malaspina is a dog.

The pleasures of the flesh are never far from Currado's mind and it is this very tension between the sybarite and the sinner that tears his mortal soul apart. He wants desperately to be at peace with his god before he dies but in his recognition that life is fleeting he needs equally to bathe in the corpuscular present. The sad truth is that the deadly trespass of fornication is a venal kindness he simply cannot do without.

Not too long ago Currado began to track his urges in a notebook complete with strange little drawings. He annotated those drawings with cryptographic jottings
whose specific meanings even he sometimes forgets. His struggle with the antagonistic clash between religious redemption and sensual satisfaction is his defining motif and his markings betray the seriousness of his ambivalence. Through logarithmic calculations and pictorial juxtapositioning Currado has reconciled the opposing forces of his nature in a jarring display of graphic rationalization.

His message is clear: If I can draw my way through the torment no ill can ever befall me.

It is completely idiotic but that's what happens when you've gone to a Catholic school in France with a fairly decent art department.