Category Archives: Bio

The author’s story

America works! 2013.

Bio, Photographs

Do it, and do it fast.

As one who has long made his living navigating the treacherous waters of the securities markets – oceans peopled by the likes of the Vampire Squid and sundry other scum – it’s not lost on me how many macro economics articles hit my RSS feed speaking to America’s imminent failure, China’s rising dominance, our end of empire and so on. I seem to have been reading these for several decades now. Unlike the End of the World nuts, I’m not holding my breath. Invariably these articles are laced with tidbits about our rising inequality, awful healthcare systems, urban blight, collapse of government, and so on.

Arrant Nonsense. Stay with me.

The income and wealth inequality data invariably compare some ratio of the richest to the poorest. You know the sort of thing. Bill Gates versus the dude in the car factory. There is no objective assessment of just how ‘poor’ the poor really are, except that they have a lot less moolah than Bill. The walls of economic academia are devoid of windows, like those of the English prime time weatherman. In the United States, ‘poor’ means your car is ten years old, you use an old PC not a sparkling new iMac, and your big screen TV is under 42″. You may have to supplement your two jobs with food stamps while the economy recovers, but you eat out thrice weekly. Maybe that’s McDonald’s, not La Grenouille, and your iPhone is a 3G not a model 5, but you eat and live better than 99% of the planet. That is not poor in any rational sense. America’s poor are among the richest people in the world. Ask Chinese rural workers who move to the big industrial cities in the hope of a job at Foxconn making your iPhone for pennies an hour. Or ask the African in the bush whose water comes with cholera and who thanks his lucky stars if he gets two meals weekly. That is poor.

Our healthcare system, I am told, is shot, yet every foreign dictator, seeking the best medical care the world has to offer, manages a private jet trip to Johns Hopkins when the going gets tough.

Our educational system is so bad that we boast 90 of the hundred greatest universities in the world with the world’s hordes lining up at the Admissions desk trying to secure a spot. PhD, Havana U? Right. Good luck with your job application.

This is the sort of foolish conclusion you get when extrapolating anything using a straight line. Dow 30,000 anyone? Our great Ivy League thinkers tell us that China will be economically greater than the US in – you name it – 10, 20, 30 years. These are the same people who cannot predict tomorrow. 10, 20 or 30 years during which China has to continue to brutalize its people in the interests of a handful of hegemons who have accrued vast fortunes through corrupt governmental procurement practices. Heck, they are in the midst of a new wave of show trials as I write. Yup, a really stable political system that. Ask Louis XVI, Charles I, Nicholas II, and George III how that worked out for them.

Detroit is an abandoned city, wild dogs roam the streets in conflict with the gangs running the ghettos. Uh huh. And the point is? When something is worn out in America, we discard it. No time to fix it. We are too ambitious and too motivated for that. We hunger to improve ourselves. We do not bother with recycling. It’s yesterday’s world. Move on. We simply abandon the old and move elsewhere. It’s not like we don’t have the space or the money. Be it refrigerators, cars, cities or yesterday’s technologies, dump them where they stand and get the hell out-of-Dodge. Or Detroit. To a better place. Want a job? Get re-educated. America is a business.

America is not finished, other than in the corridors of economic academe, corridors which have given us opinions so muddleheaded since 1776 that there is no earthly reason to believe anything emanating from academic economists. Meanwhile, America’s innovators from Edison and Ford to Ellison and Jobs get on with business, oblivious of the many reasons which dictate they must fail. America is just getting started.

I was reminded of this at the most basic level over the past few days. With city finances rapidly recovering in California, I have noticed that many of the chewed up city streets in the SF Peninsula where I live are undergoing a transformation, and such was the case with mine. Last week saw notices posted on our 150 yard stretch of homes commanding all cars be removed the following Tuesday. On Wednesday the big Caterpillar scraper came in and before you could say ‘we built China’, old layers back to the Great Fire of 1906 were exposed.

A couple of chaps then went to it with jack hammers to clean up the tough spots and night fell. These workers had started at 7am and worked through 6pm. Of the team of maybe 20, 19 were Hispanic. These people are Uncle Sam’s future, as potent a weapon as America’s booming agriculture which already feeds much of the world, and they make for a burgeoning tax base of aggressive consumers. Who needs nukes? And Malthus be damned.

Thursday noon another huge Caterpillar machine was loaded with asphalt and proceeded to lay down the new surface at the rate of 100 feet an hour. Two CAT operators, five truck drivers delivering the raw materials and two heavy roller drivers, making sure the result was billiard table smooth, was all it took. That day’s crew was 100% Hispanic. 9 workers, 4 hours, 130 yards of new road. Done.

Bert the Border Terrier and I caught this on our afternoon ramble through the ‘hood and even the meanest observer would be forced to admit this is a thing of beauty. A chat with many of the workers reminded me again why I am an American. Not one of these hard hats was about to bemoan his lot in life, doubtless much to the dismay of economists. All I saw was optimism and delight in a job very well done.

The machine is loaded up with asphalt and you can see it at work here.

90% of the world craves roads like ours. 100% of that world craves Caterpillar machines and workers like ours to make their roads. But they are truly poor, and their governments are seemingly irretrievably corrupt, which is why a denizen of the prosperous San Francisco Bay Area gets a pristine new road in two days while the poor schmuck in rural China or India will not have one twenty years hence. An Indian friend, no, an American friend who happens to have been born in India, and who chose prosperity and the rule of law, writes:

“In (India) …. there would be a minister and a function to inaugurate
this and the road would be potholed in a couple of weeks.”

And, I suppose one should add, three years late and 200% over budget. Got to pay The Man, you know?

Chinese hegemony? Fughedaboutit. China is our manufacturing subsidiary and will remain so as long as it is a brutal dictatorship. They will continue to dance to the demands of their American puppeteer. You think they are about to dump all those dollars in a fit of pique to send us a message? Some sort of existential threat to the US? And America’s economy will be destroyed in the process? Econ 101 says not. And what else will they buy? Euros? Please. However, they can feel free to buy Caterpillar machines and educations from us. The promises of free speech and democracy we export with those sales are included at no extra charge. China is a captive subsidiary of the most powerful nation on earth, a subsidiary whose monetary policy is administered by the US Federal Reserve. That’s what you get when you tie your currency to the mighty US dollar. The Chinese do not own us. We own them.

Me? I’m off for a bike ride on my nice new American road to the local brasserie. In that restaurant, I will be waited upon by ambitious college students with my food prepared by no less ambitious Hispanics, and any one of these can choose to be President, CEO, Congressman, Senator, Hollywood superstar, you name it. No hegemons will interfere. It’s merely a question of desire. Try that in China.

iPhone5 snaps.

Click here for an index of all the Biographical pieces.

The Old Man – 1951-1966

Bio

Family album snaps.

These biographical columns run annually and you can see the lot by clicking here.

The Polish word for the verb ‘had’ is miaÅ‚, pronounced like a cat’s meow, and gives rise to that old joke that every Pole is like a cat. He ‘had’ but no longer ‘has’. It’s one familiar to my generation whose parents saw WWII take the lives of loved ones and material possessions, never to be recovered. The lucky ones amongst us had Christians for forbears, which improved the odds of birth, our parents enjoying a better chance of being saved from the German killing machine. At the same time, Polish Catholics need to be deeply ashamed of our forbears whose country was by a considerable margin the most anti-Semitic on earth. Why do you think most of the gas ovens were in Poland?

A while back I had taken the precaution of scanning all those fading photo albums – the subject of the very first column here in 2005 – to preserve them for the future, and came across a couple of interesting snaps of my Old Man and I. Now he would shudder at the appellation ‘Old Man’ but it has just the right tinge of disrespect from one who rues his parents’ abject stupidity. Here’s the Old Man, married to my mum the Countess (every Pole has royalty for parents, and you can call me Count), knee-deep in horses, acreage, homes and servants – that was the order of importance then – with an aggressive foe on his border. Not only does that putative enemy announce his intent to rape, pillage, steal and destroy, he writes it all down, broadcasts it loudly and continues to do so for six years before finally invading on September 1, 1939. And my parents do what exactly? Why, they keep all their coin and securities in a couple of banks in Warsaw and Krakow and all their capital assets – the acreage, the homes, the coal mines – in Poland. Not exactly the cutting edge in risk diversification.

Now when the snaps below were taken I was 3 and 9, respectively, so it’s not like my image of my parents was exactly fully formed and well thought out. Heck, I just wanted to read a book and, later, take pictures. But they are interesting.

The first, and I have no idea who took it, is at Lyons’ Corner House in Marble Arch, London, where the OM would take me for a treat now and then. London? Because in a rare burst of intelligence, even my folks had twigged that living under Russian occupation in Poland might not be a good thing, and five years of speaking German had not exactly been fun, so they had high tailed it in 1947, with the proverbial clothes on their backs. Fast forward to 1955 and the chocolate cake which I seem to be anticipating in the snap. It’s such a Proustian moment of remembrance that it gives me the intensest pleasure today to do a like favor for Winston, my son, though our choice of restaurant has a few more stars. Winston looks forward to the treat and I enjoy his emotions as much as the Old Man likely enjoyed mine. Mercifully, Winnie’s dad had the foresight his parents lacked in their choice of destination, exiting stage right from losing Britain to a vibrant United States 35 years ago. Maybe one of the waitresses snapped the picture? Her timing is impeccable because it says so much about childhood and the sense of wonder and amazement which pervades it.

The second is no less extraordinary for its juxtaposition of emotions. This was done in one of those photo booths, invariably placed in railway stations, where you inserted your half-crown (about $1 then), rushed in, were blinded four times by the flash after drawing the little privacy curtain, then waited for ages outside for your black and white passport sized pictures to emerge, damp. The Old Man was generally on a bit of an authority trip – too bad he hadn’t taken like authority over the family’s capital in the spring of 1939 – so I rather fancy he told me to smile and I, ever a dork, did my best. As you can see, the pictures are all about him, and I am appropriately out of focus. Still, he was clearly not a man to be messed with.

Anyway, he died in 1966 when I was 15, so I barely really knew him. Destroyed by the stress of fighting in the Resistance and greasy Polish cooking he succumbed at 60 to coronary thrombosis before Christian Barnard and his successors invented transplants and the coronary bypass.

Given that I was never allowed to think of him as my ‘dad’, but was always reminded that he was ‘Father’, I can’t say I miss him. What a way to bring up a child. Authoritarian, cold, distant, domineering, severe, strict. Where I was interested in art, architecture and science, his talk was solely of chivalry and war. How he expected this to make an impression on a kid with a severe squint, flat feet and scoliosis, beats me. I was closer physically to a young Richard III than to Richard the Lionheart, and that vicious squint from youth leaves me without three dimensional vision to this day, meaning you really do not want me pouring the red wine at dinner where a white tablecloth is involved. I have missed more times than I care to relate. So if I tell you that when my son Winston calls me ‘dad’ it evokes the biggest possible frisson of pleasure, you will understand. Heavens forbid that I would have addressed the OM in that casual manner, and as a result the last thing on this earth I expect from my son is any of that hierarchical respect.

But the Old Man did leave a couple of fine mementos in the guise of these snaps. As for the lost fortune, I got over it and made my way, though I still rue the idle life of a dissolute, spendthrift wastrel that was rightfully mine. And, unlike for the Old Man and his wife the Countess, I made my own bed to lie in, rather than through the more traditional route of choosing my parents well.

The Old Man, left, 1932, with his manservant, preparing for a spot of hunting.
Nothing like a bit of slaughter to regale the lads over a few pops in the evening.

These pictures provoke so many mixed emotions, but parental love is most certainly not one of them.

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Click here for an index of all the Biographical pieces.

The Burning House

Bio, Photography

What would you take?

The author Foster Huntington has a web site requesting submissions. From his site:

“If your house was burning, what would you bring with you?

It’s a philosophical conflict between what’s practical, valuable and sentimental. You’re forced to prioritize and boil down a life of accrued possessions into what you can carry out with you. What you would bring reflects your interests, background and priorities. People’s stage in life also dictates their selection. A father of five in his forties would grab very different things than he would have as a bachelor in his twenties. Think of it as a full interview condensed into one question.”

Click the image to go to Amazon. I get no click-through payment.

What a thought-provoking idea.

Assuming that loved ones – human and animal – are always the first priority, what would I take? You have to be able to carry it so not much can be chosen.

In no particular order:

Dr. Sabała.

Dr. SabaÅ‚a (Sa-bow-aaah) is my first and only teddy bear, given to me by my maternal grandfather Dr. StanisÅ‚aw Wachowiak. Once the owner of the Robur coal mine in Poland and an owner and director of Bank Handlowy w Warszawie (Warsaw Trade Bank – it’s OK, bankers were honest back then), he managed to combine the skills of a Heidelberg trained economist and capitalist with those of an authority on Latin prose. No one quite knew where from his deep imagination Dr. S. got his name but he always reminds me of a skill set to aspire to. That of the donor. Smarter than most Poles (not exactly difficult) my grandfather saw the German threat coming and managed to extricate much of his wealth to Brazil where he died happy, wealthy and tanned at the age of 90. Dr. S. has had more than his share of restorative surgery but at age 60 he’s holding up pretty well.

Patek Philippe Golden Ellipse:

That same grandfather willed me his Patek Philippe pocket watch; sadly, my mum took it to a watchmaker to have it cleaned and he was coshed, and the watch stolen. This determined me to replace it some day, but that took a while as I was eleven at the time and had no wealth or inheritance. Twenty-nine years later, aged forty, I finally managed to complete the deal, a gift to self coinciding with partnership at a money management firm. I deserved both, the watch and the partnership, but it was still awfully difficult to blow so much coin on a piece of decorative art. But when you look at the sheer elegance of this mechanical masterpiece, no dials, no batteries, no buttons, you too would take it with you when your place was aflame, and hang the cost. This one says in the simplest way that if you want something it’s yours to be had.

Don Normark’s book:

Click the picture.

The art book is the sole genre which will survive the tablet tsunami unless, that is, someone makes a 21″ tablet. I’ll be first in line. But books are bulky, the flames are licking at the shelves and I can only make space for one, so this wonderful, warm book of a time past is my choice. I wrote about it here.

My mum’s Remington:

I typed my Mech. Eng. dissertation on this, UC London, class of 1973, and it remains a reminder of the magnificence of the mechanical age in which I was born. The output, of course, needed a lot of hacking as typewriters weren’t especially suited to mathematical notation. It remains an enduring reminder of the fact that you always make the best of what you have. Plus I love steam punk! (RMP – Renata Maria Pindelski).

50mm f/1.4 Nikkor S:

Easy. This gorgeous lens and the lovely images it creates is like the Patek. A reminder of a time when mechanical engineering and slide rules …. err, ruled.

Hewlett-Packard HP12C calculator:

As the gorgeous Eva Green relates to 007 (Daniel Craig) in the latter’s first Bond movie, “There are dinner jackets and there are dinner jackets. This is a dinner jacket.” Well, same goes for calculators. This one dates from my days at Salomon Brothers and I learned bond math on it. Sure, there’s a modern, infinitely faster, version to be had for the iPhone, but it’s just not the same. And it won’t last 40+ years.

iPhone:

The greatest consumer technology of the 21st century yet. We named our son after the chap on the home screen.

Letter from Ron and Old Glory:

My interest in politics is zero. My interest in great leaders is substantial. When one man rights the world’s greatest nation while simultaneously defeating the greatest source of evil in modern times, I notice. When the great man announced his illness I dropped him a line and he graciously responded. Of course. The flag is the one I was given in the Los Angeles Coliseum, when, together with 2,000 other lucky immigrants, I took the oath to be a loyal American, June 9, 1988. After my son’s birth it remains the most special day in my life.

* * * * *

What, no cameras? Well there is always the one in the iPhone. But modern digital cameras leave me cold. Competent, supremely effective, soulless. I can always buy another body and lens. No pictures or hard drives with files? Nope. It’s all backed up in the cloud.

60 years

Bio, Photographs

A sad demise.

The only thing I have in common with the Queen is that my time on this earth closely coincides with hers on the throne. Britain celebrates its Queen today, with displays of bunting and small craft on the Thames as have not been seen since the US won the last world war.

During that time Britain has destroyed what was left of her magnificent industrial heritage, forgotten what Englishness is all about by virtue of a seemingly non-existent immigration policy, and sold whatever was left to foreigners. Thus, somewhat comically, what lucre is to be made from the upcoming London Olympics will largely end up in the Swiss coffers of tax avoiding American global enterprises. You know, people like Kraft and its newly American Cadbury’s, whose unspoken goal is to kill as many of its consumers with its junk food products as nature allows. Think of it as the Tobacco Lobby business model.

What prompts these thoughts was a question from a very English friend asking whether I was watching the Jubilee celebrations on TV. “Well, not exactly, dear” I responded, “you see, America is a republic”.

After a carefully crafted British education, complete with public schooling by pederast Catholic monks and a proper degree from a proper university, I was all set to join Rolls Royce aircraft to help make better engines when RR went bust, taking Lockheed with it. Bother. Scouting around I found a job with a multinational in finance (where the numbers bit was child’s play compared to fluid dynamics) and, inevitably, started working with and for Americans. Now this was a greatly distasteful experience. That same schooling on which I prided myself had carefully inculcated a deep xenophobia directed at all things American. Yanks, you understand, were still regarded as “Over loud, over sexed and over here” as the pointed epithet aimed at Britain’s savior Eisenhower had it a few years earlier. But as one trained in analytical ways I stood back, observed and shortly thereafter …. emigrated. Rarely has a decision been so easy to make on grounds of sheer obviousness.

Meanwhile, since that November day in 1977 which saw me leave, Britain has continued to sink. Its serial theft of centuries past, known euphemistically as ‘The Colonies’, came to a rapid end, though the English always had a reason until then to pillage, plunder, rape and steal, for as the toast in the Officers’ Mess had it: “Gentlemen, the Queen!”. Now they still have the Queen but little to toast.

Still, it doesn’t take a computer to figure out that Mrs. Windsor is one heck of a good deal for a nation that has little left to sell. Sure, she’s a poorly educated philistine with awful taste in dogs. However, receiving a modest stipend from the taxpayer and paying substantial taxes on her investment income, she costs little or nothing in upkeep. As for all the tales of her wealth, they are meaningless. She can no more sell Buckingham Palace and its stolen Leonardos than the US taxpayer can sell the White House. It has zero value, as do her other residences as they cannot be transacted. In exchange, she fills the Treasury’s coffers mightily with tourist dollars, at least those dollars as are left after Kraft et al have kept theirs.

So happy Jubilee Your Majesty.

Nothing to wave the flag for. Hyde Park, 1977, right before I left.
Leica M3, 35mm Summaron, TriX.

My Years in New York – 1980-1987

Bio

The center of the world.

These pieces generally run annually in time for Hanukkah and Christmas.

“Move on, bud.”

It was like a quote form a cheesy Bogart gangster movie from the ’40s. Yes, I was in the center of the world, 6th and 54th in Noo Yawk City, on an exploratory trip during my Years in Alaska, before finally moving there in October, 1980. I had asked the cop for directions to my equally cheesy hotel and those were the first words I heard spoken in Manhattan. Just like the movies said. And, yes, the hotel when I finally found it, unaided, was crawling with cockroaches. Just like New York.

Yet there was no way on this earth that one could call life complete without trying to compete and survive in this strivers’ paradise. Much of my personal fortune would soon be deposited on a luxury high rise at West 56th Street. That luxury high rise took the guise of an L-shaped studio co-op on the 14th floor of a Hell’s Kitchen place, all 450 square feet of it, which had three singular appeals.

One, I could see Carnegie Hall from the window.

Two, Lincoln Center was two blocks away.

Three, you could get mugged outside the front door, while the doorman watched, by the nice Puerto Rican boys from 9th Avenue, one block west. Steinberg was right. And yes, I was mugged right there.

But, heck, those boys were just forecasting today, when a handful control most of America’s wealth. I gave them the $30 I had in my pocket, wiped the spit off my glasses, and praised the powers that be that my Leica M3 survived the assault. Until you have been mugged in New York you can not claim to have lived there, though I confess that my Paul Stuart shorts and knee-high white socks may have been a bit of a provocation.

This was, truth be told, a tough time in the city. Street crime was common, chain snatchings were the order of the day and the subway had no air conditioning, the cars’ windows totally obscured with graffiti, like in some dystopian movie. At least if you lived, like I did, on the West side, a sensibility which suited my pocket book as much as it did my soul. You see, payola came from the East side, so their subway lines got the spotless, stainless steel Mitsubishi cars with the graffiti resistant exteriors and quiet wheels long before the West side did. We got fans in cages, seized as often as not. So by the time I arrived at work, 1 New York Plaza, at Salomon Brothers, the perfect crease in my pants and the beautifully laundered shirt were so much of a Louisiana-swamp-National-Geographic-Explorer Real Man sweaty mess. Sheer hell.

But I cannot complain too much about the RR subway or the lack of cool. Because the West side, in the years I lived in NYC, was the epitome of cool. 1980 thorugh 1986 saw me there and while I have no desire to return, I recommend the experience highly. Sinatra was right. “If you can make it here, you can make it anywhere”. And believe me, you will never feel sorry for yourself again after a couple of years in Manhattan. You survive or you run away. A rite of passage.

As luck would have it, I was blessed with a wonderful girlfriend during my New York years. Nancy, a distant relative of the Canadian Bronfman family, which owned Seagrams at the time, was just a joy to be with. There was simply no subject under the sky where she would not claim complete expertise, meaning she loved to debate everything. A lovely, bubbly, at times eccentric personality, who made human an otherwise tough time. Once, when she lost a bet, the prize being dinner for two at a restaurant of the winner’s choosing, I soaked her well and truly at La Grenouille which to this day makes its home, and the best French food in America, at 3 East 52nd Street. Of course, she had to argue with the waiter over the bill which, recalling its size, I would have argued also. After dinner she showed me some snaps of her Aunt Sadie’s place in Toronto and I remarked on the lovely Degas reproductions visible on the walls. “Thomas”, Nancy rebuked me, “those are the real thing”. Many years later, on a trip to Manhattan, I popped in for a concert at Carnegie Hall, as was my habit, and who should I meet in the crowd at the intermission but Nancy! We parted at 3am at a dive in Greenwich Village. She remained as committed to NYC as ever and it gave me confirmation that New York would remain in my past. I missed Nancy, but not the city.

So what were some of the greatest memories, as a photographer, of these six wonderful years?

More visual memories than photographs, for I was too busy trying to survive than wanting to take snaps.

There was that magic moment walking up Broadway. I would do this at weekends, fighting the Black Dog, en route to Zabars, the quintessential NY deli. Not only was my goal the coffee beans, it was equally a visit to the upper level where I rejoiced in trying to determine the use of the strange implements for sale. A tool seemingly for everything. Have you seen asparagus steamer cones?

And this is what I saw on one such walk:

Broadway, Upper West Side, Leica M3, Kodachrome 64.

I caught the M50 bus home, only to find myself seated in front of one of the more beautiful women this earth has yet produced. Unknown to me, this was a cross-town bus and by the time I stopped gaping I was at the United Nations on the East side, far from home. Yes, she has a gap in her teeth. Superstar Lauren Hutton took the bus ….

America had a new president then, one of the two or three competent or lucky ones in the twentieth century, so naturally that played to New York’s counter culture.

Reagan’s teeth. Leica M3, Kodachrome 64.

Only in New York can you find so many professed liberals looking to rip their fellow man off to make a quick million.

And the beautiful women were everywhere. Shop girl or model, it was all the same.

Madison Avenue, Tourneau. Leica M3, Kodachrome 64.

New York City is the cultural center of the world. It has the three essential ingredients – immigrants, capital and greed. Let no one tell you otherwise. Cecil Beaton knew it when he moved there in the 1930s to work for Vogue and it’s true today. Where there’s money you will find culture. Sorry, it’s not to be found in south central Vladivostok, Neasden, Lyon, or anywhere between America’s coasts, with the honorable exception of Chicago.

And cultural activities peaked, for this resident of the center of the world, in October 1982, when Herbert von Karajan and the Berlin Philharmonic came to town. Yes, the Jews boycotted it (deNazifiation does that to your audience, much as they might love your music) and yes, the lines for tickets were long, and yes, only the Vienna Philharmonic played better back then, but if you were into Brahms and Mahler, you bought tickets. They gave four concerts, on October 21, 22, 24, and 25 and there I was, seat 6F at Carnegie Hall, to soak it up. The last was Mahler’s Ninth, and you can hear the live repeat from Berlin on CD/iTunes. I ceased going to live symphonic performance after that one. You should quit at the top. We were all still wildly cheering when only von K was taking bows, and the lights were dimming. A small man with a big passion for perfect sound. And awful political judgement.

Von Karajan and the BPO, sold out. Leica M3, Kodachrome 64.

Returning two hours later from a favorite upper Broadway hang out, I passed by Carnegie Hall on the way home, only to see the workers dutifully packing the Stradivarii and Guarnerii, each in individually numbered boxes, in the BPO’s van. The nation that gave us the Holocaust still believed in alles in ordnung. Instruments numbered and arrayed as neatly as death camp corpses. So, appropriately, when I think of death, it’s von Karajan’s rendition of Mahler’s Ninth I turn to. Probably not a good idea for you to go there.

In many ways, these New York years were a failure photographically. I was too busy doing the striving, so to speak. Little time was afforded my passion. And I never really ‘got’ the brutality, the crassness, the crude grasping of the place. The City has some sort of machismo desire to prove itself through the rudeness of its inhabitants.

And, naturally, I had to take all the cliché snaps:

Frank Lloyd Wright’s execrable Guggenheim Museum, 5th Avenue. Leica M3, Kodachrome 64.

Macy’s Thanksgiving Day parade, Central Park West. Pentax ME Super, 28mm Takumar, Kodachrome 64.

Architecture meets structural engineering. Woolworth and the WTC. Pentax ME Super, 135mm Takumar, Kodachrome 64.

At the Natural History Museum, Upper West Side. Leica M3, Kodachrome 64.

Bergdorf Goodman. Pentax ME Super, 40mm Takumar.

Carnegie Hall. Pentax ME Super, 85mm Takumar, Kodachrome 64.

So it was with a distinct lack of regret that I left the Center of the World in January 1987. But before leaving, the musical experience peaked in the guise of Strauss’s ‘Die Fledermaus’ at the Met, with Kiri Te Kanawa no less. It was de rigeur to smuggle in a bottle of Moët’s best with a couple of flutes in my genuine English-style raincoat, to be popped at the champagne scene in the third act, only to find that 1,000 other concertgoers had the same idea. New York was a genuinely tolerant town back then, before the depredations of the right were visited upon it by subsequent mayors. The corks popping in the audience drowned out those on the stage.

As we walked the two blocks home to my hovel on West 56th Street, a torrential downpour and howling wind conspired to rip my superb, double ribbed doorman’s umbrella from my hand. Big bugger. It shot across Columbus Avenue at a rate of knots and was immediately crushed by a Checker cab, made in Kalamazoo, Michigan. Yes, there really is a Kalamazooo. Or there really was.

That seemed right. New York was history for me, as much as the Checker would be, soon enough. And I would not need an umbrella where I was going.

Gorgeous, sunny Los Angeles. This young man was going West where the weather was real and the breasts were not.

Looking back, I realized I no longer wanted to live in a city where my two closest friends in the world were the doorman in my co-op with the methadone habit, and the Russian chauffeur with whom I argued in Polish/Russian about the Russian classics. Life surely had more to offer?

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Click here for an index of all the Biographical pieces.