R.I.P.
Click the image for the interview.
Tony Snowdon died yesterday. One of the finest photographers of his time, Snowdon never cheapened or ridiculed his subjects, an approach consistent with his breeding.
You can see the 2001 Charlie Rose interview by clicking the image above.
My son is free.
These pieces generally run annually in time for Hanukkah and Christmas.
A year ago I wrote of A Most Extraordinary Year, one which saw my son on the way to prep school and ninth grade in Massachusetts. His decision – he chose Northfield Mount Hermon in north western Massachusetts as his home for the next four years – prompts this year’s column and fills in the gaps.
In the spring Winston and I revisited the two schools he had short listed based on his original visits in November 2015. So compelling did he find the presentation and people at NMH that he decided this would be the place for him. I offered no argument. Any decision which was not totally his would forever rankle in memory. His and mine. Nor did I have any issue with his choice. It was superb in every way and a perfect fit for my boy’s kind and gentle soul.
When your only child moves three thousand miles east from home trepidation abounds, and the first few weeks of transition to his new environment were sleepless ones for his dad. You can never prep well enough for prep school. I should not have worried. NMH, along with the many great private schools in New England, has been at this for some 150 years and, boy, do they know their business. Between academic studies, Acting, Theater and Debate along with a new avocation for cross country running, calls to my nearest and dearest were met with an unexpected “Don’t bother me now dad. I’m busy.” Could there have been a better message?
That academic life at a premier New England school would be challenging goes without saying. This is a preparatory school, after all, with 100% matriculation to college. That is what the student is preparing for. And after a public intermediate school, fine as it was, Winston has some catching up to do. What I did not realize is that his new school’s goal is not merely to challenge the child intellectually, it is also to exhaust him physically, a process which saw Winnie taking to cross-country like a duck to water. Getting to sleep at night is the least of his problems.
“You got trashed, Win?”
“Well, dad, what do you expect from the school with the biggest endowment in the nation?”
Where did he get that? You figure it out.
Parents’ Weekend was wonderful. I met the usual cadre of over-ambitious parents, determined to get a return on their investment regardless of the emotional toll on their kids, along with the occasional sports scholarship winner every bit as determined to excel at basketball and a future in reality TV. But of far greater import was the opportunity to meet students and faculty. The first wonderfully self effacing and charming and genuinely kind, the second the ne plus ultra of educators. Teachers at this school teach because they want to not because they have to, and they most certainly do not need a trades union. Many are Ivy League graduates with Oxbridge and London alma maters also well represented. Theirs is a passion, a vocation, a commitment to teaching. The level of care and feeding of the student is why you really want your child attending one of these institutions. And feeding is not just intellectual and athletic, for NMH is renowned as having the finest dining hall of any school or college in the United States!
So as Parents’ Weekend wound down to its inevitable conclusion, we walked over to the library on the beautiful campus and I snapped one last image to remind me of what will be.
My son was free. Free to be his own man, free to make his own friendships, free to make his own decisions and free to set his direction. His fire, to echo Yeats, is well and truly lit.
With Winnie safely ensconced in his new digs, I turned to pursuits more selfish and finally enacted a long considered plan to abandon the Bay Area, home for twenty years, and move to a place I have long loved, Scottsdale, Arizona. This is a throwback to Norman Rockwell’s America where neighbors stop by to chat and crime is a word in the dictionary. And while moving house makes a root canal seem like a fun time by comparison, I reasoned that, as with visits to the dentist, it was best to get it over and done with, so this Christmas finds me in the Arizona desert, infinite vistas at my doorstep accompanied by glorious sunsets and a distinct sense that this is how America once was. Silicon Valley be damned.
All snaps on the Panny GX7.
Click here for an index of all the Biographical pieces.
Times past.
With my son recently registered at a Massachusetts boarding school, the full force of the sheer horribleness of living in the Bay Area invaded my psyche massively as I contemplated that great day.
I moved to California in 1987, Los Angeles. Loved it. Later stints found me in San Diego, loved it, and San Francisco, loved it a lot.
But, after two decades, no more. San Francisco and the Bay Area are a living hell. Maybe if you are here on an H1B visa and MacDonald’s is a new taste sensation for you, it’s heaven on earth. But for long time denizens, it’s anything but. Take the Mission District, which I love, as a microcosm of what has happened. Earnest Googlites are destroying the Hispanic culture, replacing it with seven figure condominiums and chic restaurants. We really need more of those. Housing costs effectively gentrify all poor areas – Millbrae, South San Francisco, SOMA, Oakland, and yes, even as far north as Sacramento, as our great capitalist businesses force out all those who cannot code social media apps. The result is that the people who keep a city running, the waiters and cooks, the house cleaners and secretaries, cannot afford to live where they work. That is not right.
So within a week, emulating my son, I will also take a one way flight out of here, to the more relaxed vistas of Scottsdale, Arizona in the desert that I have learned to love on my many travels there these past two decades.
That move brings with it the inevitable rigors of packing precious possessions, though in my case they are precious by association, not by value. And one which ranks right up there is the greatest desktop computer Apple ever made, the iMac G4. Here it is after the ever amusing task of trying to figure out exactly how it fits in all those complex polystyrene pieces, packaging which is a design masterpiece in its own right:
Design genius.
The original, butt ugly iMac may have saved an Apple headed for Chapter XI, when Steve returned. But it was a prosaic CRT design housed in a funky translucent plastic shell which was mostly silly for all its ‘Think(ing) Different’. The G4 iMac was something else. First there was the use of an LCD display, 15″ or 17″. No one used LCDs. SSDs did not exist – at least not at affordable prices – so Apple housed the HDD in a cheeky gargantuan half-cricket ball (OK, baseball) which formed the housing for the electronics and fans. And they boasted about it on that splendid box. See above.
But the genius of the design, an ergonomic masterpiece, was the elegantly cantilevered ‘screen on a stick’. Move it up, move it down, move it toward you, move it away, move it around. It did what it was told. Burning DVDs? Easy. At a touch of the button Pandora’s Box opened, and the DVD tray magically emerged from the cricket ball. It was fun, it was new and it was magic!
And that magical G4 iMac defines exactly what is wrong with Apple today. It’s the same thing that is wrong with the Bay Area. Life is not a mobile device looking for a new app. Life is not an overpriced condo which displaces good people. Life is a contemplative experience attended by an extended attention span which rewards those who indulge in that rarest of modern pastimes: thinking.
Click here for an index of all the Biographical pieces.
Mexico understood.
It is heartwarming to see this retrospective of Alex Webb’s color images of Mexico and its towns bordering the wealthiest nation on earth.
Webb is Henri Cartier-Bresson’s spiritual successor, but with the added complexity of color masterfully handled (HC-B couldn’t take a color snap to save his life, and had no need to do so).
Click the image and just look at images 1 and 6 in the NYT’s slide show. As for a moving picture of the plight of today’s Hispanics in America, look at #8.
Winston starts at NMH.
Friday, September 2 was the best day in my son’s life. He registered at Northfield Mount Hermon School as a ninth grader and you can read the whole run up to this event here.
The school’s organization of registration day was peerless; then again, they have had a few years’ practice at this sort of thing! With many sign-ins – bookstore account, IT access, health insurance, bank account opening, dorm check-in, followed by the very moving matriculation ceremony – the potential for chaos was significant, but NMH saw to it that all went smoothly. Given how potentially stressful a first move away from home can be for a young man I am in awe at the school’s capacity for warmth, empathy and caring. Winston is in good hands.
The names of the eight Ivy League prep schools are proudly displayed in the magnificent basketball courts, used here for registration activities. Competition is fierce in all events.
Sporting a new buzz cut – one final cruelty inflicted by his mother – my son gets his IT password.
The registration packet is handed out. Just 160 new freshmen will get one, out of 1,600 applicants. (The all boys UK schools of Eton and Harrow have 1,300 and 700 pupils, compared with NMH’s 650). My son goes by his mother’s name rather than mine. After a lifetime of spelling that accident of birth I had no intention of subjecting him to a like experience.
Outside the main administration building, Holbrook Hall. Winnie is lucky that his Advisor is none other than the Deputy Dean of the school. Many buildings in like colonial architectural style dot the 1,500 acre campus on the Connecticut River.
More signing up. Winnie opens his first bank account with a local bank. Yup, the boy is a leftie.
Moving in. I delegated packhorse duties to the boy. The smile on Winston’s face says it all.
Unpacking. We shipped all of 21 boxes to the school. How did we survive pre-Amazon?
Like father, like son. We are both twits. Winnie got the idea for the lined winter hat from the Coen Brothers’ ‘Fargo’.
In the dining hall. NMH food is renowned as the best in any new England prep school or college – vegan, vegetarian, salads, meat, sushi, you name it. A very smart policy by the administration. After all, the pupil will be eating here for four years.
Winnie went missing over lunch and on wandering outside the dining hall I found him busy at a game of frisbee with his newest friends. The open minds of kids are something to aspire to. He is on the right. The Memorial Chapel is in the back.
The Memorial Chapel. The matriculation ceremony found us singing ‘Jerusalem’ (40 years since I did that at my English prep school!) while freshmen signed the pledge in the school’s book, promising to agree with its principles.
The matriculation pledge, issued to each freshman, and signed by the Dean of School and the Dean of Students. Honor and decency are not dead.
A Day of Days, perfect in every way.
All snaps taken with the iPhone6.
Click here for an index of all the Biographical pieces.