The intermediate range

There is an intermediate range between the child who is perceived to have no special talent, and the child whose talent is such that it must be brought to the attention of a wider public. In that range I found myself, full of potential in my own eyes and in the eyes of some of the adults responsible for getting me through high school. No extraordinary efforts had been required of me. I knew no foreign languages, played no instruments, had not gone beyond calculus, had never written anything publication-worthy. But the multiple-choice game of the SAT test (actually the PSAT, and then the SAT) opened the door to higher education to me in a way no positive effort did or would have done: by virtue of my percentile ranking (which depended, obviously, on the population of willing test-takers I was one member of) I became a "National Merit Scholar." The cash award associated with that quasi-achievement was on the order of a thousand dollars, but I discovered in the process of applying for financial aid at Johnston (my parents having no more than a few hundred dollars saved for the education of any of their six children) the pleasures of "leverage": the thousand dollar scholarship translated into a full board and tuition grant at Johnston for my first year there, a multiplier of about five on the original award. The door was opened for me to a kind of experience I'd never imagined as anything but cinema.

Tutankhamen and the Golden Age of the Pharaohs

Literally golden, yes. The opulence and state of preservation of the exquisite objects in this exhibition are without parallel in ordinary experience. Their immediacy, their conveyance of three thousand years in gilt and faience applied to carved wood, are well worth the price of admission.

That said, I'm doubtful, though willing to be corrected, that any deep student of Egypt would consider the era of the boy king the Golden Age of the Pharaohs, though the exhibition does make some claims for the greatness of Tut's immediate ancestors that seems to carry some weight, even if one excludes the strangeness and utter idiosyncracy of Akhanaten when considering the unbearable continuity of dynastic being.

But the Golden Age designation offers some distraction from the fact that the Mummy nor the Sarcophagus nor any of the glorious boxes wherein Tut resides have made the trip from Cairo. Schoolkids may complain, but I found the presentation and the selection utterly compelling. The polished faux camp chair with carved wood faux hide seat is such a contemporary piece of trompe l'oeil simulation I can hardly believe Baudrillard didn't have a hand in it. Maybe there is such a thing as reincarnation, and Tut's incredible workshop studios were the last place where all the postmodernists gathered in one place -- and in that case, accomplished something of substance for the ages.

Radical influences

I first visited Johnston as a high school senior on a sleepover visit in 1974 or early 1975. My high school guidance counselor recommended that I consider Johnston specifically because she thought I would be overly susceptible to radical influences if I were to go to Berkeley, which I must have mentioned to her as one possible place I was thinking of applying to. If asked, I would have described myself as a pacifist, and if asked again as an anarchist, in my political convictions. All the result of book-reading… I was reading books on “experimental education” that ranged from liberal excoriations of the discriminatory school system to instant anthologies of high school underground newspaper writing to absolute condemnations of all forms of education in schools as such, and skating across the muddle of positions both casually dismissive of and utterly subservient to my opportunities for achievement in high school: writing angst-filled pieces in English classes, taking lit and psychology and sociology through Moorpark, the local community college, and doing what needed to be done to get my A’s in everything else I had to take.