Horace Mann, Facebook, the culture of money, and how i almost got arrested in Italy

very interesting read if you are familiar with this school, or even if you know something about social networking.

"When students created Facebook pages that viciously attacked a teacher, and when their wealthy parents on the school’s board defended them, Horace Mann was forced to confront a series of questions: Is a Facebook page private, like a diary? Is big money distorting private-school education? And what values is a school supposed to teach?"

Here is a rather appropriate reaction as well.

Horace Mann, the school down the hill from my high school was a great refuge for power and money, but it didn't exactly breed the "honorable" type. A good example of an established Alumnist is Elliot Spitzer. (which i will have you note, i found out about AFTER posting this post.) I should also note that not ALL Horace Mann students fall under my generalization. but the majority, enough to make a culture, was a big part of the school's known reputation.

I remember thinking that kids i knew from there were the types who would make great business people or politicians. Of course, they wouldn't be able to do that without the expense of any sense of morality or the importance of doing the right thing. because without discarding morals, they wouldn't be able to compete in such a high level of the rat race. this somewhat long article is very interesting to me, because it supports what i always thought about the place. plus, starting from page one, there are people i know in starring roles.

Another interesting ingredient in the story is Facebook. Just for it's public nature, i love facebook and social networking sites. Facebook plays a vital role in uncovering rampantly bad values in this story because if it hadn't been for the public forum, none of this would have come out. i love how these social sites are having such a large affect on the social fabric of our culture. i love its ability to suck up my time at work by bringing forth all to see. in my own personal experiences, i can say i have encountered just about all the pro's and con's at one time or another.

i've had the pleasure of using these sites to find old friends from forgotten eras. when single i was able to fill up my evening schedules with dates from my work office, while simultaneously rendering on my extra computer processor (i normally work on computers with multiple processors and my renders can take up to 20 hours, so multi-tasking has become a great skill of mine). another new found ability with these sites, was that i could broadcast to all my peeps whatever random shit i wanted to share, with a click of the button.

of course i have also felt the negative effects like most other people. like being found by old peers i was never really friends with and needing to have awkward exchanges with them. i've had situations where ex-girlfriends have become closer to old friends of mine then i am, and i get to watch the semi public banter about events that i never received invitations to. i've had girlfriends get jealous over things like random postings and added ex-girlfriends WHOM I HADN'T EVEN SEEN OR SPOKEN TO BESIDES CLICKING ON THEIR PICTURE. i've even had mini relationships ended for no other reason then i was added by some random, possibly stolen identity, bikini clad floozy and made the mistake of saying "ok". but i would never trade in all these experiences for having none of them. its been way too interesting.

now, mix the social empowerment of these social sites, with the cruel and money driven culture of H.M. high school, and you've got a public viewing of what can go wrong. back in the day the culture was obvious, but it hardly ever boiled out into such a catastrophically public debacle as this article. it used to be, as i like to say, subtle-cakes.

i went to a tennis summer camp there when i was young. my dad was always big with racquet sports and he and my mother really made an effort to teach me and my sister these kinds of sports. it had nothing to do with any class system or money or perceived way out of our own middle class. since when i was young we hardly had any money anyways, but were still a very happy family living above 110th street, when that was saying a lot. but playing these sports did throw me into this culture up there in Riverdale.

i showed up with a pink wooden Chris Everett Lloyd racquet from the 70's. no doubt my sister's at some point a few years before. if that wasn't enough to pick me out of the crowd on the first day of camp, then my Fat Boys/Krush Groovin' t-shirt did the rest of the work. this was 1986 mind you. hip hop was strictly for the ghetto and hadn't even made it out of the five boroughs yet. Riverdale hadn't heard of it yet either. so there i was. completely out of place.

In my life, when i detect that i don't fit in, i make SURE that people know it from the get go. i did things like eat ants in front of the blond daughters of CEO's. watching them freak out was more fun then beating one of them in a match with my wooden racquet.

as a matter of fact, the first time i got on the bus to go up to camp, i had an incident before i had even turned the corner of my block. there was a kid who obviously was already established with the other kids. he decided to make a funny out of me and tried to trip me as i walked down the aisle. he must have seen my racquet and gotten the wrong idea. wellll, i cold clocked him right in the nose. not so hard as to draw blood, but hard enough to knock his well parted hair messy. i heard a chuckle and noticed the bus driver, an old jamaican man by the name of Wilson, with a big shit-eating grin on his face in the rear view mirror. he liked me immediately, and clearly didn't care much for this foppish pamper-dan with stan smiths and white tennis shorts. the kid was stunned, realizing instantly that i didn't know, or care, who he or his parents were.

not surprisingly, I eventually got asked to leave that camp because i ended up mooning the principal of HM. i swear it was by accident. it happened at 60 miles an hour on the FDR drive. i had my bare ass hanging out an open window in the school bus and the principle just HAPPENED to drive by in the left lane. i still get a chuckle from that perfect timing to this day.

but back to the culture of money and power. the people there all carried themselves as if their powerful parents were always standing one foot behind them. the look in their eyes, even when they were losing a tennis match was, DO YOU KNOW WHO MY PARENTS ARE?! i see from the article that that hasn't changed at all. i think its great that these people get to learn about pedigree and how they will be powerful in their lives NO MATTER WHAT THEY DO. but in the end, it misses a big point. it misses that to appreciate power and wealth, one needs to learn humility. one needs to understand compassion and even to know what it's like to earn something on your own.

i actually made one very good friend at that camp. he ended up going to my high school, Fieldston. a school that is similar, but manages to be more self effacing and a bit more into ethics and the arts. this guy, Rocca, who is now busy teaching kids in brooklyn, stood out of that crowd as being a better type of person. he also turned out to be a very useful connection for me. several years later, when i was 17, he got me out of getting arrested in Italy. it's a long story so i will cut right to the incident without any background.

i was going the wrong way down a street in Florence Italy on a moped when one of the dark blue cops, a Carabinieri (the guys with the machine guns and knee pads), stopped me and started to yell and gesticulate in my face in italian. I got the cold feeling creeping up the back of my head that i was in deep shit. i didn't have my passport and i didn't even have a license of any kind. Italy in 1990 was a place with few rules, but when you got caught by one of these guys, you could be in trouble.

so there i was, about 150 feet from the steps of il Duomo about to get my ass handed to me in a foreign language. when suddenly, a guy steps in between me and the pissed italian officer. the guy start gesticulating in a similar fashion as the officer, he points to me and i realize that its fucking Rocca! his family is from Italy and he speaks it fluently. i hear some words i know, like "amici mio", "per favore", and "mi scusi", and i see the officer is starting to look less and less interested. finally he walks away, and two 17 year old friends from NYC are left standing there, on this ancient corner in italy, wondering how the fuck it's even possible that that just happened.

by the way, Rocca had this to say about the story i just told:

Bravo Zen2! As i recall the day ended with all of us drinking more than a few bottles o'wine while hanging off the ponte vecchio, breaking them open against the bridge because we didn;t have an opener.

Oh, and you mooned me too at camp you fucker!


i know that a place like Horace Mann is more about the pedigree of its kids, and letting them network together, but i managed to build a network with a much quicker usefulness then even they had envisioned. of course, now, i am not utilizing this network. i have made a career without using connections and i can safely say that i am where i am because of the work i do, not who i know.

ironically, the guy who i work for, the man who owns the mega corporation that owns my studio, is a Horace Mann Alumnist whom i am familiar with. i would never try to use the network to get something from him. and actually, when he started his first start up company out of college, i helped make some branding animations for him. I never expected much money from him regardless of who he was, and i never expected to cash in on the relationship. which, proudly, i have not, even in the face of being left out of the movie credits.

so now he controls about 1/5th of the planet's media, where i just make pretty pictures for movies and live in a one bedroom. so, that's how that works. Onwards and upwards Horace Mann Highschool!