Brief Bio for Friends from Virginia

 

This is a very brief non-bio bio for friends and classmates from Virginia.  It is just a way to keep things concise and not have to repeat myself too much and I doubt anyone else will be interested.

I left Collegiate after 10th grade, spent one year at a high school in LA (public, it was awful) and then spent a few years at UCSB and graduated from UCLA in Math and/or Economics.  From there I went to the RAND Corporation which was wonderful, and worked in early computer graphics for visual effects which was "not pleasant" although I did meet some nice people.  Did some early films with the technology, wrote some of the early technology (for which I received an Academy Technical Achievement Award) and worked on some innovative, very early, projects.  I briefly helped run my own production company, deGraf/Wahrman, inc, and when that was over worked on a variety of consulting projects.  Some of these were lots of fun, like the rebuild of the Hayden Planetarium at the American Museum of Natural History.  If only they could all have been that fun! 

I have lived in Santa Barbara, Santa Monica, Hollywood, Colorado and New York City.  I am currently living in Los Angeles with Jill Fraser, a noted pioneer and composer in electronic music.  

I am thinking about going back to school to make something of my life.

Now its your turn.

Other notes: 

-- email sent to kent hudgens, linda linkins, bruce mckenney on 5/7/24

-- I have heard from Paul Sikorovsky, Bucky Neal, and Linda Linkin, Ed Jones, Bob Siff, Chuck Rogers, Charles Strauss and David Clough

Collegiate Reunion Redux

I sincerely hope that this post and related emails do not annoy my fellow alumni.  If it does, well accept my apologies.

If you attended Collegiate in Richmond, VA then this post is for you.  If you didn't please do us both a favor and go away. 

The reunion at Collegiate last September was a complete screwup for me because I arrived in Richmond (for the first time in REDACTED years) with COVID.  This is not good because I really wanted closure on this part of my life that would only come from 1 on 1 interaction with people who I havent seen for REDACTED years.  This bums me out not least because the organizers worked so hard and with such diligence.

So what I want to do is as follows:  1. Get in touch with whoever I can via the bold new internet and have some minimal interaction, 2. Maybe even have a zoom call with one or two of you, 3. Try to get some answers about some mysteries / questions that I have, 4. Find out what happened to a bunch of our instructors, and finally 5. At some point come back to Richmond and see a few of you as available.

For those of you who wonder what took so long, when I came back from Richmond I was (a) sick, (b) about to enter a medical disaster because of my incompetent doctors (c) about to move from Santa Barbara to LA to move in with my girlfriend, and (d) processing what had happened and what I thought about it.  At the same time, not everyone was willing to reply to my (pathetic?) emails.  And I started processing the Torch and discovered that I remembered all the guys, did not recognize most of the girls, and was completely baffled by a time skew between the boys and girls classes, and was shocked to see I recognized all the instructors.

What happened to them?  Where are they now?  Are any still alive?  And where are you, my fellow students?  What city(-ies) do you live in?  What do you look like?  Married?  Children?  Dogs?  Anyone still in prison?  What?  

So far I am in touch with Chuck Rogers, Chris Conlon, Janie Katzenberg Asch, Ed Jones, Bob Siff and Mary Ellen.

The tag below marked Reunion should link you to any other posts about this.

Please contact me at michael.wahrman@gmail.com and let me know.

Thank you,

MW

Moderate reunion success: email has been sent to Charles Strauss, Lewis Little, Paul Sikorovsky, Buzzy Northen and of course Bob Siff, Mary Ellen, Ed Jones and Chris Conlon.  More to follow.  Let there be a non official official reunion in september.

Eric Cantor, the One Ring of Power, and my Virginian High School

Part One

Once upon a time, I attended the The Collegiate Schools in Richmond, Virginia, a somewhat prestigious private high school in the region. We had a number of people from Virginia society in our school, or their children at least, as well as some well-established outsiders. I propose to describe something about this High School because it affects all of us as citizens of this country.

You may ask, why would Michael's High School be important to all of us as citizens?

Because Eric Cantor is now the Majority Leader of the House of Representatives in Congress and Eric went to Collegiate. 

And Collegiate is a somewhat amusing, somewhat peculiar place. It definitely has a culture all its own, and its place in Virginia society.

But first I want to review with you how our imperialist superpower works because you need to understand this to understand why Eric Cantor matters. Although the president gets the helicopters and the airplanes, and gets to say who gets a drone missile up his ass on a day-to-day basis, it is in fact Congress that allocates the money for those missiles and helicopters. And in general, the executive branch abides by the law, most of the time at least, we hope, and those laws must be passed by both houses of Congress and signed by the President.

But to bring a bill up to a vote is not a trivial matter, and it requires the machinations and scheming of the two political parties to do so. Every time there is an election, the House and the Senate reorganizes itself into a majority and minority coalition, and each of those coalitions has representatives on the important committees that are preparing the legislation and the budgets. So if the Republicans have a majority of the House, as they do, their representative is the chair of, for example, the House Armed Services Committee. Seniority in the House and Senate also plays a role in determining who can get things done.  The standing committees take the lead in preparing legislation for their branch of Congress, House and Senate, and when passed by the committee it goes to the floor of the House or the Senate for a vote by all the members. (1)  (2) 

the smoke filled room

So the House and the Senate are each a complicated network of smoke-filled rooms, each filled with power, self-entitlement, influence, obligations, history, villianry, idealism, and hypocrisy and having been driven mad by power, push each other around with their large software packages, working with great vigor to get nothing done.

But one stands above these smoke-filled rooms whose job it is to coordinate their actions and bring it to a vote on the floor of the House of Representatives.

One ring to rule them all, one ring to find them, one ring to bring them all, and in the darkness bind them.

Eric Cantor is the Majority Leader for the House of Representatives, and Eric went to Collegiate.  The mind reels.

End of Part One

Eric Cantor on Wikipedia
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eric_Cantor

The smoke filled room on Wikipedia

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Smoke-filled_room

The One Ring on Wikipedia
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/One_Ring

______________________________________

1. The Academy of Motion Pictures Arts and Sciences works in a similar way. The various subsections nominate films in their respective categories, e.g. acting, screenwriting, costume design, film editing, cinematography, etc, but then the entire Academy membership votes on who receives the award that year.

2. If you think about each of those representatives and senators having constituents, each with their own strongly held beliefs, and multiply out the different agendas, then it becomes clear that most bills in Congress must be wild compromises almost by definition to "get out of committee".   Thus, having a major party that does not compromise throws a wrench into the system like you would not believe.

The Shocking Truth about Roman Architecture in France

[Revised 1/7/2012]

This is the story of the first time I actually saw a Roman ruin. I think it is very funny for what it says about me, and maybe, just a little, about how some of us perceive various cultures and periods, perhaps without realizing it.

My high school had a fabulous Latin teacher (1) and I took advantage of the situation, taking many years of Latin and learning a lot of Roman history.   I may have been somewhat influenced by the fact that my high school combined the advanced Latin classes between the Boys and Girls school, so you had to go to the Girls school to study Latin.   Such were the lofty motivations of my youth.  I read Roman and Aegean history and related topics even now and I assure you the past isn't over, it isn't even past yet.

If you never studied Latin, to give you a feel for how nouns are declined and verbs conjugated, see this sequence from Life of Brian (1974) in which anti-Roman activist Brian is trying to write "Romans Go Home" and is corrected by a Roman Centurion.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XbI-fDzUJXI

But, to my chagrin, I have never been to Rome. We were not of that economic class that could afford such things when I was growing up, and when I was productively employed as a young adult, I had not arranged a trip. Then I got involved in computer animation and of course my life went to hell and I still haven't been there, except of course in books.

But like so many others of my generation of computer animation, I was invited to speak at various European conferences during the late 1980s, which provided an opportunity to see at least some of Europe. So, after one of these conferences, Imagina, I arranged for a friend of mine to meet me in Monaco and we would sight see for a few days in the south of France.

So my friend, Paul Cross (2), met me at the conference and we rented a car and started driving through Nice on our way to Nimes. As we stopped in Nice, I pointed to a building and said, "Look, Paul, someone has built a building and made it look Roman."

I am still looking for a suitable picture.  This one has some of the right feel, but it is not integrated into a major current building on a busy street, like the building this post is about.

Paul looked at it and said, "No, Michael, it is Roman".

I thought that was a weird thing for him to say, so I repeated myself and tried to explain, see, someone has built a building and made it look really old and Roman. Isnt that nice?

In Los Angeles, you see, we regularly theme various venues based on classic European and other civilizations, including our own. We might have a Chinatown, for example. Disneyland would have a Fantasyland including a notable synthesis of many medieval castles at the center of the park. The little tourist town of Solvang in Southern California has a Danish theme, complete with windmills. Our Japanese restaurants such as Benihana entertain guests with a performance that is alledgedly at least somewhat Japanese in origin. Santa Barbara is zoned for a traditional Hispanic style.  Although most studio backlots have been repurposed as real estate development, a few still exist with their various themes: a New York street, an Old West street with its saloon, a small town America main street, and so forth. Theming is a major design concept in use in our local commercial architecture and culture.

So clearly, what we had here was a modern building that had been designed using Roman antiquity as a theme. I thought it looked good, although perhaps they went overboard on some of the "ancient" aspects of it, as the Roman section clearly had seen better days.   

My friend just kept explaining to me that no, they were not pretending to be Roman, that Nice was in part an ancient Roman city, and it actually was Roman.  That's interesting, I thought, it had never occurred to me that it might not be fake.

_____________________________

1. His name was Anthony Ruffa, I think.   Before taking an exam, some of us would say to ourselves, "AVE RUFFA MORITURI TE SALUTANT"  ("Hail Ruffa!  We who are about to die, salute you!")

2. Paul Cross is a very amusing person, and an alumnus of Symbolics.  He moved to Taos, New Mexico and helped set up one of the internet not-for-profit web sites for the Taos Pueblo.   He has disappeared, and is hopefully doing well wherever he is.