A LONELY (AND FUTILE) CRY FOR YELP

Always a keen observer of contemporary life my good friend Currado Malaspina is not as aloof from popular culture as one might have assumed. Currado stays keenly abreast not only of uniquely French societal shifts but also trends and inclinations within the rest of Europe as well.

His current hobby-horse is the so-called smart-phone addiction.

The commonplace and primitive understanding of human potential limits our capacity to performing one task at a time. This formulation, as anyone under the age of thirty-five will tell you, is a relic. An entire generation has acquired the deft, practical skill of eating full meals, talking on the phone, checking the internet and texting all while expertly navigating a mid-sized car through complex urban traffic. The occasional accident or fatality not withstanding, most of the time this practice is carried off with routine efficiency.

What Malaspina doesn't understand is that the smart-phone is a modern miracle and ignoring its potentialities would be like ignoring similar technological advances that have markedly improved our quality of life.

Where would we be without automated telephone responses when calling our doctors, utility companies and customer service departments? Remember those bleak years of being connected to breathing human beings whose limited empathy only served to exacerbate our stress?

And how about those dreary trips on public transportation before the age of the ear-bud? The buses and the trains were filled with people reading the newspaper and you know how depressing that can be. As if knowing about some war or natural disaster in some remote part of the world  could actually change things.

 Malaspina, with his characteristic penchant for exaggeration, sees all these high-tech developments as signs of dire intellectual decline and artistic decay. When he sees people sitting around a dinner table scrolling through their Facebook feed he sees only rudeness while most of us simply see boredom. 

Physical social interaction does not, by definition, necessitate total cognitive or emotional engagement. That idea is as antiquated as the 8-track!

What porn has wrought to sex, a subject dear to Malaspina, social media has done to intimacy and most people see that as a good thing. Thanks to the internet our cities and suburbs are no longer blighted by XX rated movie theaters and bookstores. And thanks to the smart-phone no one is expected to even feign any uncomfortable expression of interest or warmth.

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ORIGINS AND INSERTIONS: AN ANATOMY LESSON

That which begins with infatuation ends inevitably in repulsion. No one knows this golden rule better than my wounded friend Currado Malaspina

 But he has only himself to blame.

If one claimed the right to successive grand passions it would seem like an act of emotional avarice. Complete love visits a man but once if it deigns to visit him at all. Most of us are fools who spend their lives ignoring the stars until finally settling on a mate out of simple fatigue. A few of us stay keen to the senses and with generous hearts find the imperishable romance of fairy tales.

Luckily, this last group is so rare it spares us the agony of our envy.  

Malaspina met the love of his life either too early or too late.

Aimée Bûcherie on the rocks, date unknown

Twenty-two years his junior, Aimée Bûcherie was a dazzling beauty. When she stood beside the grizzled Malaspina she was often mistaken for his niece. As unlikely as it seemed on the surface, their relationship was a locked room of perfect compatibility.

Those of us who indulged the needy, neurotic French artist did so out of loyalty and rarely out of affection. None of us in our small circle of friends could quite fathom what this brilliant and vivacious young woman saw in our old petulant painter.

But love is blind, or some other equally annoying cliché must have accounted for his incredible good fortune.

Maybe we were simply jealous for in Aimée we all recognized our own unrequited fantasies and with a degree of meanness only artists seem capable of achieving we all secretly hoped for disaster.

Our prayers were soon answered.

As is well known, the imagery in most of Currado's work is completely void of subtlety.

It is less well-known that Currado, despite the awkward, cartoonish nature of his drawing, always insists on working with live models.

 
He rarely uses professionals preferring to harvest compliant women through chance encounters in barrooms and cafés.

Aimée worked full-time as a coordinateur de projet in a mid-size government department in the 7th arrondissement. She was known for her diligence and dependability and always put in her full 35-hour week. Currado could set his watch by her comings and goings and always made sure to wrap up his work by 4 o'clock so he could go the the vegetable market and the butcher shop before Aimée returned home. 

On the one day - feeling the early symptoms of what later developed into a nasty grippe - that she returned home early, Malaspina was working on the very piece that had made him the bête noire of polite French society.

La visite de la Plombier, Curado Malaspina, 1994

... and was using himself as the male motif.
 

NIGHT GAMES

As most people over the age of forty know well, sex is incompatible with marriage and the fault, according to my good friend Currado Malaspina, lies typically with the wives.

"Inside every tender beauty is a dormant Lady Macbeth," claims the notoriously misogynistic painter. "Within the first few years of matrimony the blood begins to thicken until all that's left are a few drunken memories, a scattering of hopeful toys and half-a-dozen badly illustrated books showings poorly foreshortened positions demanding the nimble agility of a yogi."

And this he told me well before the era of the personal computer.

Here in the States, Johnny Carson was considered one of the most effective means of birth control. In the old days most couples accustomed themselves to a fusty bedroom ménage that invited all manner of late-night TV hosts to drone the unamorous toward their wilted somnolence. Now of course, midnight is when our bone dry fingers scroll the surfaces of our blathering tablets as we examine the equally sexless status of our middle-aged peers.

Currado, who owns neither cat nor cell-phone, is having nothing of it.

He still believes in romance and its resurrective capacity to combust through variation.

His omnivorous appetites are legend and if his biographer Jean-Claude Démoutriade is to be believed his drawings are a living document to his ideals. "There has never been a more autobiographical European painter in history," claims Démoutriade, "including both Faun Roberts and Picasso."

"Monogamy is for seahorses and dreamers," insists my dear friend Malaspina, "and life and love are things to savor and grab for they are as fleeting as the indifferent winds." 

A lofty sentiment for someone who has obviously never played Ninja Chicken.