LANGUAGE IS A VIRUS

My friend, the director Itai Mosconi, recently set me up with his girlfriend's cousin. Let's call her Penny.

We met for coffee at some chalkboardy joint in Greenpoint and the first thing Penny says to me is "Are you on WeChat?"

"What's WeChat?" I ask, confident in my easy assimilation of everything techie.

"What's WeChat!?" she virtually hollers, turning every I-Phone in the place in my direction hoping to record an epic argument to post on YouTube. "It's only the biggest stand-alone messaging platform in the world!"

Who knew?

Penny is sweet.

No, sweet isn't the right word. It's actually the wrong word. She's anything but sweet. She is smart, she's pretty, she's fit, she's even nice but she definitely is not sweet.

She's one of those girls that says aww alot, lifting her inflection upward and squeezing an extraneous syllable out towards the end. She usually does this when she sees a puppy or a toddler wearing a hat. I've actually witnessed her talking on the phone to one of her friends where she offered a dazzling seven consecutive aww's in a row!

Penny and I have had some really good times. I've taken her to a Mets game, Shakespeare in the Park (I waited six hours on line in the rain for tickets), a couple of art openings and even a poetry reading. She does a lot of texting when we're out but so does everybody else so it's a bit silly to complain.

Now, I don't want to sound like I'm carping or anything but when she isn't saying aww, Penny begins every, and I mean every sentence with the word so followed by you know.  (actually, to be fair, sometimes she reverses the order)

Each plodding thought prefaced with what amounts to an intellectual disclaimer fills me with such confusion and casts me into such a somber state of cognitive isolation that I feel abandoned and distraught.

I made the mistake of sharing this with Penny because, like I said, she's smart and she's nice but she completely took it the wrong way and called me an 'elitist f*ck.' (Did I mention she's is a native New Yorker?)

  

We haven't spoken or seen each other for about three weeks but she did text me the other day and told me I was cute and that she missed me.

Aww!

THE HARD CHOICES OF AN HONEST CRITIC

Malaspina

There's a great line from Currado Malaspina, the whimsical, somewhat marginal contemporary French painter that goes something like this:

"We extort from the man the child within only to badger the man with childish false tribute"

(I think I got that right. The original reads "Nous extorquer de l'homme dans l'enfant que pour harceler l'homme avec un faux hommage enfantin" and that's the best I could do with three years of high school French.)

I think what he means (and one is never too sure what Malaspina means) is that when we become adults we foolishly wager on a sagacity that rarely ever arrives. (Case in point: Currado Malaspina).

Palimpseste (Le livre), Currado Malaspina 2014

I'd like to think that I will remain open to wisdom and radical revision when I'm as old as Currado. Unfortunately, the world of art journalism frowns upon openness and intellectual reevaluation.

Typically a critic stakes his or her ideological claim and never dares budging from it. It's a matter of paycheck versus dispassion, a steady byline versus purgatorial obscurity. Let's face it, there's not a lot of work out there for art critics so it's wise to find one's niche and stick to it. 

My parents always warned me that the adult world was one of compromise and accommodation. I guess I'll just tuck myself in as the "curious curmudgeon with a soft spot for kitsch."



Promiscuous mercenary and humorless purist  were already taken when I got into this business and the fallback friendly philistine just seemed way too easy.