THE THIRSTY FARMER

Regardless of one's age one never ceases to see one's parents as somehow exempt from the pale of human passions. To imagine a mother parched with thirst, singed with regret, exhilarated by the prospects of circumstantial renewal or deflated by the disappointments of unrequited dreams would be to diminish her to an inconceivably approachable minor key.

To imagine a father's erection would be even worse.

In a farmhouse in the small Provence village of Brue-Auriac, a place known more for its vineyards than for its deviance, my dear friend Currado Malaspina inadvertently unzipped the filial veil and was shaken to his very core.

On one of his semi-annual visits to the family estate, Malaspina, more out of boredom than out of curiosity, started rummaging through the musty neglected barley field grenier. Buried under a bale of moldy boxes and antiquated hand-tools Currado discovered a small cahier d'esquisses that was both astonishing in its variety and shocking in its content.

It seems that Malaspina père, the great stride piano genius known simply by his forename Sordello, had kept a diary of sorts, chronicling his various infidelities. Like Jun'ichirō Tanizaki's classic novel The Key, the sketchbook, rather than being some secret trove of conquests and perversions was meant to be discovered and examined in depth. Sordello hoped to use the carelessly concealed journal in order to communicate to his indifferent wife the range of her husband's appetites.

After his initial revulsion - the drawings all depict Sordello wearing the very same green hat that has become Currado's hallmark - my dear entrepreneurial friend saw a wonderful opportunity.

Why not package a new, digitally remixed anthology of Sordello's studio recordings (never a big seller in France or anywhere else) with a posthumously collaborative sex manual! Compiling the most inventive positions and assigning them clever new names, the book has become a son's homage to a revered father.

It would be fair to say that papa's priapic prowess, though impressive, is nothing like his decidedly European rendering of Willie The Lion Smith's Fingerbuster.  

But of course, he was known as someone who never missed an occasion to practice.

 

BEHIND EVERY GREAT MAN IS A SCREWED UP WOMAN

With the unfailing clarity of hindsight it now seems fairly obvious that the sacred matrimonial covenant struck between Evelyn and Currado Malaspina was doomed from the start. One retrospective look at their faded wedding pictures and the grassy edifice upon which their union was built begins to look more like a landfill than a potential garden of eden. Like an epic tale told in verse each photo depicts another unfailing prognosticator of the disasters that awaits. 

We'll launch our deconstruction with the march from Lohengrin.

Notice the bride Evelyn as she carefully navigates the step from what appears to be a country cabin or dacha of some sort. The man to her right upon whose arm she leans for support is not her father, though her father was very much alive and quite well at the time. The man, in fact, is Evelyn's physician, a strange choice for such an auspicious occasion.  

This kind old man has since passed away and buried with him is one critical key to understanding the inevitable events that followed.

Now consider this next photograph where an unidentified gentleman stares at the camera with a vacant grin that only could be described as bemused. I was recently told by someone who attended the wedding that the individual in question was a local ferry captain who by French law had the legal jurisdiction to perform the ceremony. Note too that a much slimmer and younger Currado seems vaguely indifferent, even somewhat unfriendly and in his suit and tie looks more like a maître d'hotel than one of France's most controversial artists. 

All this could easily have been ignored had not a prying, young provincial journalist discovered this odd image in the municipal district Department of Records.

In this photo we have a striking assembly of what appear to be family members. But whose family one could reasonably ask. By all accounts the families of both the bride and the groom boycotted the wedding out of principle. Malaspina's mother - his father being by that time long dead - violently objected to the union based on the suspicion that Evelyn was a practicing Freemason. Evelyn's parents by contrast, were put off simply by Currado's profession. 

So there you have it. Presumably the most important day in a couple's life together and their wedding is attended by near perfect strangers. Not a single individual depicted in the photographs can be reliably identified. It was as if they had staged some sort of Potemkin wedding only to be followed by a flimsy marriage made up of silt, sand and sticks. 

Is it any wonder why Malaspina's work is so bitterly cynical and misogynistic?  

LET THE SPINNING WHEEL SPIN

Like most of us, my good friend, Currado Malaspina carries a painful atavistic legacy that has left an indelible spiritual laceration upon his sensitive soul.

Call me perverse, but I find the whole thing hysterically funny.

I wouldn't necessarily be going out on a limb by describing Currado's work as flat-out deviant and borderline sick. He has made a name for himself in his native Paris and beyond as a graphic purveyor of infantile erotic parodies and mawkish mockeries of carnal calesthenics. It's almost as if the poor shmuck never stopped snapping his wet towel in his middle school's vestiaire des garçons.

But upon closer examination of his ignominious obsessions we find a more complicated genesis, one stemming from an inherited infirmity that is both shocking and embarrassing.

You see, some time in the late 1950's, Currado's father, the late, great jazz pianist Sordello Malaspina was struck with what today we might euphemistically call a "penile dysfunction." Blessed with a beautiful and devoted wife - Currado's dear mother Evelyn - Sordello made a solemn, catholic vow never to betray her with another woman lest he forfeit his near magical command over his music.

Like a character out of Marquez, no sooner had the oath been made that Evelyn ceremoniously proclaimed in front of a congregation of family members assembled to celebrate the baptism of Currado's younger brother Marcel, that heretofore she would sanctify her commitment to the Lord Jesus Christ by entering into a convent!

From that day on, or so legend has it, Sordello went irreversibly limp.

Such tragedy could have easily been privately laid to rest had not Currado's brother Marcel unearthed a curious document found in the family grenier.

It turns out that Sordello, in a desperate chaste attempt to prod his uninspired prick back to life compiled what might be referred to today as a sex manual. Lushly illustrated (one must assume by Sordello himself) and annotated with titles, notes and detailed instructions, this awkward little volume presumably did nothing to emancipate the pianist's penis. 

  As a comic coda to this tragic tale it turns out that Malaspina's lovely wife Cecile confided to her spouse mere minutes after their nuptial vows that she was a full-on lesbian and had not the slightest intention of ever sharing his bed.

As Tacitus remarked many centuries ago, "Alas how what befalls the elders is visited upon their progeny with an even greater vengance."

Or as we say here in the States: "What comes up must go down."