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.

TRACTATUS FURIOSOS

While the reveries of most rational men dissolve into the ash of bitter experience my good friend Currado Malaspina continues live in a state of hopeful anticipation. The shale and bog of middle age have yet to dampen his fanciful dreams. Though fame has always been within his easy reach, success or the kind of success that Currado finds meaningful has not.

His eccentric notebooks are full of the jottings of a madman. Incoherent scrawls in a motley tapestry of crude miscellany allude in a host of languages to lost opportunities, abandoned plans and bitter jeremiads against named and unnamed adversaries alike. He seems to have forgotten nothing and what may appear insignificant to others loom in the foreground of Malaspina's imagination like a limestone cenotaph.

 

But through it all there's a strong thread of buoyant optimism within the pages of his frazzled pads. Encoded in his private dialect are cheerful predictions of personal progress and renovation. Atonement seems to be the most dominant trope and a self-effacing melancholy is braided through his boasts like the verses in a villanelle.

That he has agreed to have his journals published in not surprising in a man whose life has been one of public indiscretion. What has surprised the critics is that he has agreed to have the work edited and annotated by the inscrutably thorough but far from disinterested art historian Orestia Shestov.

It is not unlikely that through it all we may learn the truth behind their tangled tryst of many years ago. Perhaps therein lies the source of Currado's unlikely optimism.  

THANKS FOR SHARING

Some might charitably call it the kinky seams of apprenticeship others would discard it entirely as artistically irrelevant but there's one glorious fact upon which everyone agrees: The early work of Currado Malaspina is at long last a scalding, bullish commodity.

Les serments et des lettres #3, oil on wood, Currado Malaspina, 1977

For over thirty years my good friend Currado has been warehousing reams of his juvenilia in a nondescript storage facility in Nantes. Unbeknownst to just about everyone (including myself), about 50 kilometers from his summer home in Pornic a gold mine lay in abeyance, waiting like a lost key to reveal its forgotten virtue.

Les serments et des lettres #12, oil on wood, Currado Malaspina, 1977

The staggering self-confidence of the young Malaspina is something unfathomable in today's atmosphere of intellectually abnegating social score-keeping. 

From Facebook to LinkedIn, the inflated contemporary narratives of our half cooked professional classes are a living testament to our chronic insecurities. Every minor episode of our pathetic little lives is now duly recorded and promiscuously chronicled as if to say "here are my fears which are touchingly concealed behind the tattered veil of fictitious triumph." Is an anthropomorphic pet or an over-priced poorly prepared meal truly a significant sign of personal achievement?

 Seen in this light, the subdued and gradual nurturing of Currado's gifts appear nothing short of visionary. Abjuring even the reflected light of fame, my dear friend labored silently until the furrows of imperfection began to align and his unique conceptual armature bolted itself to actual, living works.

His ethic is a relic but his market value is as real as a treasury note. 

And now that Currado is finally flush he has even found time to play with his kitten.

 

ART HISTORY - RESET

A small scandal is underfoot. 

The creation myth surrounding Currado Malaspina's internationally acclaimed Palimpseste series is facing a serious challenge from, of all places, the Persian Gulf. 

Palimpseste #3, Currado Malaspina 2012

These familiar images have come to be associated with the very idea of Currado Malaspina. For lack of a more dignified term, it has become, to a large measure, his 'brand.' Despite the intricacies of his highly developed yet personal cosmology, the obscure nature of his far flung hermeneutics and the eloquent expertise of his obsessive yet lyrical execution, the works themselves have become, like Leonardo's Mona Lisa or Carpentier's Song of Degrees, a mere humdrum, misunderstood facsimile and a self-replicating unit of popular cultural significance or put another way, a celebrity.

The plot has now taken an unexpected geopolitical twist with the emergent claims of the hitherto unknown Persian artist, Müshil Mehemrodrageh.

Like many Americans, the French carry a cloying colonial

Müshil Mehemrodrageh

prejudice that claims that only the West is capable of serious artistic innovation. The idea that the Iran of the ayatollahs could produce a painter of merit within its own borders, working within its own institutions is about as likely as finding a decent slice of pizza in Jakarta or a croissant au beurre in Minsk.

And yet, the Teheran-based Müshil Mehemrodrageh has not only been producing a steady stream of sophisticated pictures for the past thirty-five years but he may also be the rightful and legitamite progenitor of Malaspina's alleged chef d'oeuvre Palimpseste. Reviewing the evidence, the conclusion of many specialists, critics and diplomats is both disturbing and rather damning. 

Bildar no. 4, Oil on linen, Müshil Mehemrodrageh 1980 (courtesy of the artist)

The recent tempest surrounding these works has even eclipsed the nuclear issue, at least for the moment. The renewed claims of Persian cultural supremacy have once again taken center stage. The ire against the French has been so caustic that the Iranians are considering ignoring Francois Hollande's offer of relaxing economic sanctions.

"Keep your goose liver and your smelly cheeses," deputy foreign minister Omar Boabache recently said at a particularly bellicose news conference, "between Russia, Turkey and Japan we're doing just fine without all your effeminate exports! Say goodbye to our fancy rugs and delicious pistachio ice-cream not to mention our oil. You can faire le bise my ass mes amis!!!"

I heard that Mehemrodrageh recently hired someone to taste his food and check under his car for funny looking balloons.

I guess even paranoids have enemies.

 

COMMITMENT

Things are looking up for my good friend Currado Malaspina.

The tentative rapprochement with his erstwhile collaborator Dahlia Danton now looks, on the surface, like a fait accompli.  

They have put their aesthetic differences behind them (at least for now) and have decided to resume their artistic collaboration (albeit on a trial basis).

As most of my readers remember, together with the likes of Komar and Melamid, Gilbert and George, Harvin and Fitzsimmons and the Starn Twins, Danton & Malaspina were a fixture in the late 20th century Creative Couplet Movement.

As reported by veteran arts pundit Sergei Sergie in the culture blog Rough Toast, the pair were informally invited to submit a proposal to the forthcoming aRCHIVE (13) exhibition tentatively scheduled for the spring of 2015. 

Few people have forgotten their politically charged pieces from aRCHIVE (12). Casting the leaders of the G8 nations as protagonists in pet portraits, Danton & Malaspina challenged the whole notion of sovereignty, global resources and the so-called war on terror.

Like many simpleminded tendentious works of art, it created a burlesque atmosphere of scandal and recrimination.

Puppy, Danton & Malaspina, 2011

If not for the deft damage control by the two chief curators, Jimmy De Stantio and Marta Castelammuffito the exhibition might have been shut down. The publicity was fantastic but neither Malaspina nor Danton could handle the tumultuous aftermath. They cracked under the strain and ended their partnership amid mutually acrimonious accusations of aesthetic betrayal and commercial capitulation.

Though Danton thrived as a solo act (she has representation in three different cities including Foucault/Hurston in New York), Currado never seemed to recover (he is currently teaching).

I suppose it's just a matter of temperament.

IF YOU'RE A FAMOUS ARTIST IT'S A SMALL WORLD AFTER ALL

Few tourists venture to the eastern Crimean hamlet of Staryi Krym which is precisely why it was there that my good friend Currado Malaspina celebrated Christmas.

Known mostly for the 14th century Surb Kach monastery and the equally ancient Ozbek Han mosque, this Tartar town is the perfect place in which to disappear.

And while he spent a quiet fortnight relaxing at the peninsula's rustic though adequate spa (he loves mud baths, olive branch thrashings and deep intestinal massage), he was nonetheless noticed by some of the area's more internet savvy young people.

Image from the Facebook page of Rusça Sakav whose caption read "the Black Sea darkens under the shadow of Currado"!

It is often forgotten that Currado is a reluctant recluse. He enjoys the spotlight and has spent many years cultivating the image of a bed-hopping, barroom brawling bon-vivant. It is simply that through the years he has grown weary of the constant pressure to perform.

Most people don't realize how hard it is to behave like an artist. 

And so he is always on the prowl for obscure, anonymous places where he can retreat, reflect and decompress from the arduous routine of being a notorious French celebrity.

Maybe next year he could try Orange County.

ART AND POLITICS

The Austerlitz mural project has been a daunting task. Ever since my dear friend Currado Malaspina accepted the commission it has been one misadventure after another.

Designed as a massive 30 foot wide variation on his famous Palimpseste series, Currado has employed a small army of young assistants to complete the picture on time.

The problem is that his heart is simply not in it. He no longer craves the respect and recognition he once did as a younger man. He is also relatively well-off, considering that a typical work fetches somewhere in the neighborhood of fifty to seventy-five thousand euro.

He seems to be just going through the motions and he's consigning more and more of the creative work to his most trusted aids.

As a result the quality of the draftsmanship has markedly suffered but as Malaspina rightly points out, this was also the case with Rubens.

I suppose what is most disappointing is that the City of Paris is equally ambivalent. Commissioning Currado in the first place began as just a political payoff, an act of craven, insider cronyism where some lower-level bureaucrat did some creative accounting in order to placate a government minister who happens to share a mistress with Malaspina. The result is that nobody is happy and for the foreseeable future there will be a large blemish of a picture greeting the innocent commuters of a perfectly adequate though over-lit Metro station.   

DAHLIA DANTON

The French have a nasty, petty way about them. There's a stain upon their collective character that can be summed up in the following famous unattributed aphorism:

  

Il n'y a pas une grande vertu d'être laid. 

And while my dear friend Currado Malaspina is quick to add that while there is no great virtue in being ugly there is equally no great shame in being gorgeous.

Dahlia Danton with Currado Malaspina (date unknown)

 "Je suis un esthète, he declares at every opportunity as if by claiming to be an aesthete he reserves for himself the right to treat people like Ming Dynasty earthenware or rosewood Shaker chairs. "I love to surround myself with things of beauty."

To regard people as ornaments or mere objects for the delectation of the senses is seen in the United States as something uniquely anti-social. No so in France my friend Currado insists. To use human beings in order to inspire and add refinement to one's life and to advance one's personal artistic enterprise has, to me at least, a uniquely feudal feel. But this is precisely how Malaspina operates.

And as such he insists on surrounding himself with beautiful women. 

It is highly questionable whether he is capable of treating any of these women as equals.

There is however one notable exception.

Dahlia Danton

And she knows it!

THE DIGNITY OF AGING

Freud correctly observed that man's imagination fails while trying to imagine death. My good friend Currado Malaspina reached a similar conclusion after recently undergoing a medical procedure to remove a benign skin lesion below his left ear.

Lesion of Honor, watercolor on paper, Currado Malaspina, 2013

A fleeting glimpse of oblivion can result in several outcomes. Slapped with the realization of inevitable decay can be a deeply humbling experience. A realignment of values in favor of the ethical, a tilt toward selflessness and gratitude is a typical reaction under these circumstances.

This, of course, was not Malaspina's response at all. For Currado an epistemological approach toward rectitude is a non-starter. He wears his reputation as a trou-du-cul with great pride. His brief brush with mortality only amplified his narcissism.

"The brilliant flame of dissipation"  (la flamme brillante de inconduite) is how he puts it, a life illuminated by sin. Nothing animates Malaspina more than the wretched glow of excess. Now that he has received his clean bill of health he is determined more than ever to satisfy his Caligula-like appetites in full.

"I am a monster," he told me the other day on the phone. 

Yes, Currado but how's your prostate?
  

TAEDIUM VITAE

The illusion of election is not something unique to artists - most religions contain a clause to that effect - but my good friend Currado Malaspina has taken this fantasy to an alpine extreme. His business card for example is a glossy self-portrait with the caption "Currado Malaspina: présenter une demande à Google."

That such a search would likely yield about two dozen pages of results should not in any way elevate the Internet into some sort of arbiter of high-cultural currency. Think for example of searching the name Lorena Bobbitt or the phrase "recipes with frozen vegetables" and you will see my point. 

Malaspina 2005

His work, though far from uninteresting, ranks well below that of his much younger contemporaries. On any given day, a leisurely stroll through the galleries of Williamsburg, Beleville or Brunnenstrasse would quickly disabuse any baby-booming nostalgic of the antique perception of Currado Malaspina as a cutting-edge or 'cool' artist.

Curators continue to insist upon his relevance but that has more to do with the average age of the museum trustee (62) than with the enduring nature of Malaspina's minor triumphs. 

Malaspina's arrogance, to be fair, is simply a mechanism for his spiritual survival for how else does one justify a life of abject selfishness. How to explain the four wives, the countless mistresses, the neglected children and the infinite injury imposed upon friend and foe alike? 

 I pity the poor guy because I'm sure that in his heart of hearts he knows his life has been one long bagatelle of imperiousness and boredom.

Maybe with his last remaining years he could divert his ennui into something more benign.

Like getting a pet.

A FATEFUL MISDIAGNOSIS

Currado Malaspina's unlikely interest in Hebraic orthography is quite accidental. It began at Paris Sportif the posh central Paris health club where my friend Malaspina gallops on the elliptical with chubby government ministers and not a few former 'vedettes de cinema francais.'  

While rifling through a pile of damp and salty smelling gym shorts in the lobby's perdus et trouvés (much to the consternation of the Police Nationale, the French have an unusual custom of placing a ragged lost and found box in conspicuous corners of a public buildings as if the nation were one big kindergarten classroom) he found what he thought was an innocent shopping list. 

In fact, thinking at first that it was Arabic, he showed the paper to the weight coach Yazid, a Berber from Mauretania by way of Madrid whose knowledge of Semitic languages was less than perfect. 

"C'est amharique," he helpfully said, inflecting his voice with the swarthy authority of the whole of Africa. And with that he roughly translated the text as "two baguettes, 100 grams of sliced ham, four bottles of Côtes de Gascogne ...." etc. etc.

It wasn't till much later that Currado learned that his crumpled sheet of paper was a lovely little lycée exercise of rhyming Hebrew couplets describing the traditional fast day of Tu Bishvat. 

By then Yazid's deception was of little import. Currado was irrevocably smitten by the naked graphic power of the flexed square lettering.

And this was the genesis of Palimpseste, Currado's great, enigmatic ouevre which has managed to simultaneously enrage la communauté Israelite and excite la communauté des collectionneurs.

Tant pis.

LA FONTAINE/NOW AND THEN

Just like here in the U.S. there is a lively debate taking place in France on the cultural and behavioral effects of social media. Neuroscientists, intellectuals, politicians, educators and artists have all weighed in on the subject. Concerns about the re-wiring of our nervous systems, the perceived diminution of our attention span, the impact on language and our relationship to imagery are all vital elements of this dynamic debate .

My dear colleague Currado Malaspina has some significant thoughts on the matter and has tested his theories at a recent symposium here in Los Angeles. The Conference on Unified Neurologic Technologies, an annual gathering of researchers, medical ethicists and moral philosophers invited Currado to deliver a paper on the evolution of poetic diction, specifically in regard to the expansion of our collective vocabularies.

He raised several important aesthetic issues such as whether words like tweet, ping, hashtag or byte could ever be rendered beautiful while under the jurisdiction of poetic intent. He spoke about the possibility of odd verb forms like to google, to IM and to Skype being used by poets without irony. He questioned the future of the pathetic fallacy when its objects become things like computers and phones. The viability of metaphor is in a state of uncertainty and Currado hoped to address the issue free from ideology or cultural critique. 

As a thought experiment Currado challenged the audience to compose sonnets whose descriptive tropes were limited to the world of IT.

One researcher from Tuscon came up with this clever couptlet:

"Your grace, your charm, your every facet
My life, my love, my visual asset."

Lyrics of love seemed to dominate. An engineer from the the Environmental Protection Agency began his poem with this wonderfully disorienting play on words:

"We're linked in love while inked undone
Linkedin a knot of Drang and Strum.
Linked to a page as grand as Cyrus,
Sublime and free of any virus." 

 It's hard to exaggerate the varied 
nature of the submissions. 

An anonymous bard delivered this gem:

"My love exceeds the bandwidth of a NASA- based mainframe
A passion that is Kindled by the sound of your screen name." 

It was interesting how meter and rhyme were adhered to by the majority of the participants and how skilled they were in its application (no pun intended).  

Even Currado tried his hand at it and had his colleagues scampering through Google Translate in order to parse through his cryptic imagery.

"Ton souris doit être mes couilles 
Ça-va ça-vient
l'ordinateur se plaint
ta chatte ronronne
Facebook, quel con." 



The debate rages on. 

 

THE NEW (OTHER) GULF

The grim business of setting up appointments, meeting curators and collectors, answering queries from curious graduate students and granting interviews to journalists who would be more at home writing for the Food Section of their local tabloid is the part of the art business that my good friend Currado Malaspina loves best.

Dahlia Danton at the Doha Women's Conference, 2013

Unlike his much younger colleague and former maîtresse primaire Dahlia Danton, Currado does not approach the task with any resentment or reluctance. Quite the contrary, Malaspina moves effortlessly from the quaint ignorance of the rich to the craven sycophancy of the critics to the earnest entreaties of aspiring young acolytes looking to advance their careers by simple propinquity. 

It's all the same to Currado. It's attention and he's addicted to it like a dog is to dirt.

And so when Abduhalikh Göktürks, Royal Sharid of Aqaba commissioned Currado for an unofficial court portrait he was tickled by the opportunity. 

Portrait of Abduhalikh, oil on canvas, Malaspina, 2013

As is well known, Aqaba's growing community of art collectors has shaken up the market beyond recognition. The recent opening of The Sovereign Jordanian Museum of Contemporary Art has signaled nothing less than a sea change in the dynamics of Middle Eastern patronage.

With the opening of a satellite campus of Somerset Lucknow University just outside the town of Kanafeh (which offers programs in Computer Science, Accounting and the Fine Arts), the area is quickly assuming a hipster desert caché. Currado, always alert to unusual opportunities is happy to be one of the first on board. And while most would balk, seeing only political instability and unsettling flux, Currado see's it raining dinars, dirhams and qirsh.

He's even learning how to snorkel! 

THE MOVEMENT TO TRADEMARK THE WORD "FRENCH"

Self-congratulation is a universal vice but no one exceeds the Americans in their inflated sense of self.

So claims my good friend Currado Malaspina, a man known for his blunt candor and blanket generalizations. He was visiting the U.S. recently, taking part in a three-day conference called "Clarion Toward the Future." Held on the campus of Jack Feld Christian College in Savannah, Georgia, this broad-brushed symposium of writers, athletes, artists and mental health executives presented panels and forums where leaders in their fields could expostulate on the present and prognosticate on the future.

There is no atmosphere so electric as one where pessimism and hope mingle like dinner guests desperate for a ride home. Insights and ideas circulated like second-hand smoke as the conferees hopscotched from meeting to meeting to redundant meeting.

Currado presented a sound and light Powerpoint presentation on the recurring theme of the Madonna in western culture. From Duccio di Buonisegna to Lady Gaga, Malaspina breathlessly touched on a myriad of unrelated themes and stunned the assembled crowd with an off-key rendering of Material Girl while accompanying himself on a toy accordion.

Strangely enough, the strongest impression he received revolved around diet and nutrition. "Americans," he told me, "love their food dripping in oil. They spend lavishly on sneakers, golf clubs and mobile phones yet skimp on something so simple as oil. They incessantly fry most of their under-seasoned, over-cooked foods in something vaguely resembling huile moteur. They have even audaciously renamed les frites as if to flippantly absolve themselves of their heedless, criminal, culinary irresponsibility."

And Currado ... what about your own melodic malfeasance!??

Cio che era pagano ora è l'emblema della cristianità

One man's rummage is another man's jewel. What seems flighty to some may be weighty and thoughtful to others. Brainy is in the eye of the beholder.

These are the tenets of a uniquely American understanding of culture. It is a democratic, pluralistic, utopian view. It is also extremely destructive. 

Or so is the opinion of Vengalu Ophir, dean of the French Institute of Higher Learning in Paris' affluent 6th arrondissement.

Portrait of Professor Vengalu Ophir, conté crayon on vellum, Currado Malaspina, 2010

 Ophir, now well into his eighties, has been for many years, a mentor to my good friend Currado Malaspina. He is universally esteemed as an uncompromising scholar whose principled approach to learning has served as a beacon to an entire generation of artists and academics.

His book on Marsilio Ficino Les âmes rationnelles repentir (Éditions Tacheur, 1979) remains to this day the most comprehensive and authoritative biography of the great early Renaissance humanist.

Ophir is known for his virulent disdain for almost everything American. From speed dating to fast food, reality television, paper cups, Halloween, the Huffington Post, baseball, Costco, frozen vegetables, the eminent professor finds it all extremely dégoutant. 

However there is one venerable exception.

Forty years ago, Currado Malaspina managed to persuade the notoriously inflexible pedant to accompany him to a concert by a famous American rock band. In addition to it being loud, the performance was incorrigibly vulger, yet the music was unexpectedly complex. 

And so to this day, The Mothers of Invention remain the anomalous aberration, the grudging exception for France's most petulant aesthete.

A NEVER-QUENCHING REQUIEM

It's already an acknowledged fact, one that has already entered into the ranks of rank platitudes, that the forces of technology and popular culture have wrung the resinous glow of language's lyric potential into a tripe-heap of transactional clichés.

Take for example the fetid phrase "bucket list," an image that sooner evokes the daily droppings of a dairy farm than the ominous epiphanies of near-death. My good friend Currado Malaspina, from the safety of his Rue Pinel atalier in the 13th arrondissment, has the proper perch upon which to comment on our pre-mortem follies. He has suggested a more poignant list, one with a pressing agenda of greater cosmological urgency.

Currado's Dream of Heaven

Currado has suggested that we begin to compile a "post-bucket" list, an afterlife agenda with plans that exceed the temporal trendiness of skydiving and cruises to Antarctica. He imagines a list of demands and complaints that one might present to a committee of deities. He dreams of meeting the expired artists of antiquity, the poets, dead and damned and luminaries like Napoleon, Tallyrand, Mendès France and Madame Curie. 

He wants to fly saddleless on Pegasus or on a sun-chariot á grande vitesse or even in the unlikely event that such creatures exist, on the fluffy white wings of beatified angels.  

As for his immediate present, while tranquil drafts of oxygen still flow frictionless through his nicotine-stained windpipe, Malaspina is happy to eat rich foods, make love, drink wine and pierce our fragile complaisance with works of art of celestial and blissful beauty.

Palimpseste Trente-Deux, Currado Malaspina, 2012

UNETHICAL FATHER FIGURES

Faceless, nameless anonymous sex. Exchanging partners like changing socks. A dissipated life full of momentary gratification but little happiness. A world of wealth but a poverty of well-being. Suffering in the classic sense. A man defeated by his own fame, carried off by the ether of his uncomfortable acclaim.

Such is the myth surrounding my friend Currado Malaspina.

Is it a self-inflicted wound or a carefully orchestrated campaign of marketable misinformation? I know the man well and I confess that I too am unsure.

It is true that Currado has the oily temperament of an unrepentant roué but it is equally true that his business acumen is as sharp as his wit and that he suffers none of the scruples that hinder his moderately ethical peers.

The French are a forgiving lot and so my friend Malaspina has had to set the transgressive window toward the highest rafters of raffishness. His sins are those of a Sardenopolus and the hurts that he has inflicted upon his fellow man (and fellow-woman) have been biblical in scale and diabolical in scope.

And yet, the French eat it all up like a giant stinky wheel of fresh brie. His celebrity and notoriety rival the worst of the American rappers and make your average Russian oligarch look like Albert Schweitzer.

As the French cultural historian Professor Ayn Analie-Meelee wryly pointed out not too long ago in a piece in Paris Hier, "If not him, whom? If not now, when?" (Si ce n'est pas lui, qui? Si ce n'est pas maintenant, quand?). She went on to explain that what seemed unconscionable in the recent past is practically de rigueur today. She claims that in the arts we are in an end of history moment (un épisode du fin de l'histoire) where ideas are merely synopses of narcissism (synopsis du narcissisme) and the formerly menacing cults of personality are now the stuff of quaint trending topics of Twitter.

To be on top one must remain on top and in Currado's case this means a ragged course of constant self-debasement and a relentless supply of oxygen for the engines of infantile public curiosity. 

But for the love of Mike, what the heck is a "synopsis of narcissism??"