Word: punk
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Dressed in a brown suit jacket, teaching fellow and Government graduate student Samuel W. Goldman doesn’t look much like a punk rocker. His curriculum vitae, which includes publications in the Weekly Standard and Wall Street Journal and a thesis-in-progress advised by Harvey C. Mansfield ’53, is not a product of counterculture. Looks can be deceiving. “When I was in high school, I was, not to say a leader,” Goldman says, “but maybe a fixture in the New York area punk scene...
From Scottish Kiltsto Camden punk, tartan has long been the fabric of choice when tribute is paid to the Queen. Now designers and retailers as diverse as Alexander McQueen and L.L. Bean are indulging in the traditional textile. Kate Spade's wool boot is boxed out in plaid, as is Este Lauder's jeweled compact, illustrating the evolution of this onetime preppy look. What was once campus chic is now runway cool. Yves Saint Laurent designer Stefano Pilati even featured it for spring. But who better than Burberry, epic old English purveyor of plaid, to square...
Frank Portman had to grow up. The punk pop band he founded in the '80s--the Mr. T Experience--had the kind of long-term niche success that leads to self-doubt and massive credit-card debt. Plus, the band had fallen apart. Portman, 42, was on the verge of becoming that old guy working at a record store. And record stores don't much exist anymore...
Although the thought of Johnny Rotten writing the next Catcher in the Rye seems weird, Portman is punk's best-educated tone-deaf singer. An excellent student at Berkeley, he deferred a Ph.D. program in history at Harvard to play in a Bay Area punk band. Not only that, but he knew the teen genre because in high school he worked as a children's librarian, and as part of the job he downed all the young-adult classics. The Mr. T Experience's teen anthems were surprisingly literary: a breakup song, Checkers Speech, is based on Nixon's television...
Even after the cutting and streamlining, the book is deeply nuanced--a teen novel in the way that Mark Twain wrote teen novels. Or J.D. Salinger. In fact, the punk conceit of King Dork is that the main character rails against "the cult of Catcher in the Rye." The cover of King Dork is a faux red Catcher cover, with the title and Salinger's name erased and replaced by Portman's. "I always felt a lot of people might have been faking the adulation of it, to impress their parents or their teachers," says Portman. Plus, he knew that...