The Portal Era

The word “portal” is having a moment. It appears at Lincoln Center, and Lou Reed, Ed Park, Ed Park's publicist, Meghan Daum, Boss Hogg, and a Travel and Leisure party all travel through.

A beautiful day in April. I go to Lincoln Center to use the library, but first spend some time sitting outside taking in a the view. I am not usually a person who sits still and takes in the view. So there is something effortful in this gesture of leisure. But it is made easier by the fact that I am sitting in one of my favorite places in the city.

I gaze at the Henry Moore sculpture that sits in a shallow pool. Beyond it, there is a surreal patch of undulating green grass that also serves as the roof of The Lincoln Restaurant. Beyond that, Julliard. This whole area always feels like a secret, even though it as an enormous space off to the side of Lincoln Center’s main square with its fountains and the opera and Chagall murals. I used to bring my family here on summer evenings, when my kids were little. We would picnic on the undulating grass. I make a note to bring them here, again.

It is one of the first really nice days of spring. Everywhere in the city there are daffodils and the forsythias with their yellow spray, even tulips. The cherry blossoms are out, their petals like fireworks. The previous day I had biked through Central Park and the trees were magnificent with blossoms. I took out my camera - I mean my phone - and snapped a couple of pictures. People were posing beneath the trees. I made a point of including them because I for some reason enjoy pictures of people taking pictures, or of people looking at themselves. Even in real life, though, it was as though they had been photoshopped into the image.

Another guy is sitting to my right, also taking in the view. He is very in shape, calf muscles bulging. I wonder briefly about him, if he has worked out already today, if that will come later. There are the afternoon work out people and the morning workout people, and these are usually two discrete tribes. I am an afternoon person, which sounds like something out of Cyril Connolly or Wilfred Sheed.

I go back to the view ahead of me. That shallow pool with the sculpture, and the undulating green grass, the entrance to which is cordoned off by a velvet rope. The rope, like the posing people beneath the cherry blossoms, makes perfect sense and is also surreal.

There was once a big Lou Reed Velvet Underground exhibit at this library, and so Lou Reed entered my thoughts. How churlish and difficult he was. How funny and brilliant. How much I like his music. My unfinished essay about the man who introduced us, Donald Lyons. I have been fretting about this essay and its incompleteness for so long I should write the essay about not being able to finish it.

Donald didn’t even introduce me to Lou Reed directly. I just announced I was Donald’s friend the one time I shook Lou Reed’s hand. He had one of those handshakes that hurt you. His unfriendliness in person was in perfect juxtaposition with the friendliness of his music. Not all of it, I wouldn’t call Waiting on My Man friendly, exactly, but a lot of the songs are. The friendly mood bridges the Velvet Underground records and his solo records.

I think about his interview in Australia from 1974, which I regularly seek out, as some sort of lesson on how to be in the world (which is a very odd thing to say, I admit, but there you have it, there is some lesson to had from it. What could it be?) I guess you could say he was being unfriendly in that interview, but only to the people in the room asking questions. But he is somehow friendly to the people watching; Lou is so funny; he is our pal. I had recently heard his song, She’s My Best Friend, and it has stayed in my head. Such a friendly song! Almost childish in mood. I especially liked the version on the 1971 demo tapes.

I was doing fine being in the moment, the Lou Reed digression notwithstanding, but then I thought that I should have been coming here more often. Soon, I was chastising myself for not having taken better advantage of the place. These feelings may have been influenced by the fact that I had been thinking a lot about the work of Meghan Daum. It was publication day of her most recent book, The Catastrophe Hour, which I had reviewed. I liked it very much. The book elaborates and deepens many of the themes she has wrestled with in her earlier books. Meghan has become a kind of poet laureate of the comedy of regret in life decisions large and small. Her first book, which I published at Open City, included much artful pondering of a nearly Sphynx like riddle: “I spend money on Martinis and expensive dinners because, as is typical among my species of debtor, I tell myself that Martinis and expensive dinners are the entire point—the point of being young, the point of living in New York City, the point of living.”

Meghan’s martini was my moment of repose at Lincoln Center. By which I mean, I wanted to sit and enjoy this only-in-New York place, but the very nature of New York made it difficult to sit and enjoy it, or even to just get there.

Seeking refuge from these thoughts, I picked up the phone. I checked my email. There was an email from a book publicist at Random House, writing about Ed Park’s forthcoming collection of stories, An Oral History of Atlantis. “Hey there,” it begins. “So here’s what happened: someone asked Ed Park to write a short story collection. He misunderstood the assignment and delivered a portal.”

The word “portal” was curious. I feel like I must have turned my head sideways upon encountering it, like a perplexed dog. It was referring to the nature of Park’s stories, (“a translator who hijacks the narrative and rewrites the entire book like he’s staging a coup”; “A washed-up director doing a Blu-ray commentary for a movie no one remembers making”). But there was the uncanny feeling of seeing something you realize you have been seeing often, all over the place.

The word “portal” is having a moment. It is the semantic Zelig of 2025. Patient Portal. Client Portal. Student Portal. Perhaps its most ubiquitous usage is the phrase, “Transfer Portal,” which refer to and summarizes the surreal changes to the way college sports now functions¹.

Portals, everyone is going through them! I had used the word in the title of my piece last week, and received a comment that someone else was thinking along the same lines.

Portal is used in discussing architecture and medicine, but it’s in the science fiction/Star Trek sense of time travel and hyperspace that has driven its usage. It’s an internet word. It’s use didn’t really explode until the internet became something that people started to use, or at least think about, or at least until the dotcom stock market boom of 1997 made the techie sensibility ubiquitous.

While I sat there reflecting on the idea of a portal, and its use in the press release for Ed Park’s book, I received, in a rather portal like bit of serendipity, a text message from Ed Park.

It read: “Randomly sitting on a bench by Central Park, it’s nice out.”

He also sent a photograph of what he was looking at.

I stared at this image, dumbstruck not just by the fact that Ed Park had just jumped through the portal of my thoughts and had now materialized, but also by the image itself.

**

Intermission:

To my subscribers: A big thank you.

To my paid subscribers: A huge thank you!

**

The photograph featured a familiar intersection. It only took a moment to identify: 83rd and Central Park west, as viewed from a bench outside Central Park’s wall,which would have been just behind Ed. A series of associations flickered, and one came to the fore: “I used to rehearse with my first band, The Woofles, in the building on the left,” I wrote back. “The lead singer was the son of Boss Hogg from the Dukes of Hazzard. And the building on the right... even more colorful:”

The building on the right was once an hotel, eccentric in ways that are now celebrated and longed for, part of New York’s “rich history,” as someone put it to me recently, though to live through that era was complicated, especially if you were a kid, which Glyn Vincent was. His piece about Hotel Bolivar, the building on the right, and his childhood living there, is fantastic.

Ed, belonging to the same player/coach tribe to which I like to think I also belong, wrote back: “You should write an essay that’s like the liner notes to a compilation of bands that you were in.”

I stared at the low white building on the left. By the time we went in there to rehearse I had been playing drums in various bands for a couple of years, but The Woofles were my first real band, the first band that played its own songs and actually played shows in clubs. The first band that had a point of view beyond AOR rock music. The other three guys were a year older. They were into bands I hadn’t heard of: Pere Ubu, The Feelies, and above all, The Talking Heads.

Seeing that building on 83rd and Central Park West, I was immediately taken back to those weeks when, for some reason, we rehearsed there. The apartment had lovely windows facing the park, with cool beige curtains that were the same color as the beige wall to wall carpet. The walls were empty. I do not recall any clutter of someone life, which makes me think that one of the band members knew someone who had just moved out, or was soon to move in. Either way, it was a very cool spot. I set up my drums, they brought their amps. And we played our music at the usual deafening rock band level that now would probably be the occasion for everyone in a five block radius calling the police and the fire department. Arthur Miller once wrote a piece about life in New York before air conditioning; there is a corollary sort of piece to be written about noise in the city. It’s not that people were more tolerant or nicer, back then. But the standards of measure were different.

Or, who knows, maybe the whole building had been cleared out because of some sort of radioactive contamination, and we were the only one’s in the whole structure.

I rarely think about that band. My thoughts, when I think about such things, are about the band I was in with my friend Tom Cushman after college. As it happens I had been talking about Cushman to a guy writing a book about the early days of the Beastie Boys just a day or so earlier. The only connection between those bands was that my friendship with Cushman was greatly enhanced, or eve begun, when he was walking down Sixth Avenue sometime in the spring of 1982 and passed SNAFU, a club that booked live bands. He peered in and saw the new kid, me. He came in, we talked. It was the nervous period after sound check and before the show. He seemed moderately impressed, which for Tom counted as effusive.

The bands, and my experiences with them, were very different but it occurred to me that in both cases, with both bands, there was a connection to the bright filament of fame that warmed us and gave us hope. In the case of Cushman, it was The Beastie Boys. In the case of The Woofles, it was Boss Hogg.

I don’t think those other guys thought about him this way, certainly not as some kind of asset. They were cool dudes. But I was still a kid, or at least in 11th grade. We were rehearsing at the midpoint of The Dukes of Hazzard’s television run. I watched a lot of television. It seemed kind of cool that the arty lead singer’s father was Boss Hogg.

In hindsight, Boss Hogg would have been a better name for a band than The Woofles. They had some good art-songs. The 3:00 mark here, for example.

I realize that portal, in the context of this afternoon, is just a euphemism for “phone,” or “memory.” But I wanted to note its recurrence.

The OED, in attempt to stay relatively current, cites examples of Portal from Shakespeare in 1597, James Joyce in 1922 and… Vanity Fair in the May, 1992 issue. They don’t specify the article where the cited phrase appears, they simply offer the line: “Now, as he jauntily enters the portals of Octogenaria, he offers a timely chronicle, Race.”

My first, reflexive thought was, they wrote about Tom Wolfe!

But no. I went to take a look at what Vanity Fair was up to in their May 1992 issue and to see if it would be obvious where such a phrase would be located. There is some irony in the topics covered in that issue of that magazine that I can not fully articulate. Maybe it’s enough to say Imelda Marcos blends right in?

The option are:

a) The cover story on Ivana Trump. (Cover line: “Ivana be a Star!”) by Bob Colacello.

b) A feature on Hillary Clinton . (Cover line: “Will She Get to The White House With Bill or Without Him?” This still feels like a trick question.) by Gail Sheehy

c) Profiles of Imelda Marcos, Rush Limbaugh, Jay McInerney. Not going to quote the cover lines and subheads. There is also a piece about Carol Matthau by Ben Brantley that I want to read because she was married to Walter and was rather directly involved in an emotionally vulnerable moment involving a young J.D. Salinger.

d) James Wolcott on Johnny Carson, which I doubt has the line “Now, as he jauntily enters the portals of Octogenaria, he offers a timely chronicle, Race.” I could see the first half of the line applying to Carson, but not the second.

However I am glad to be able to mention James Wolcott because he has been on mind ever since I heard that he swooped in and got the assignment I had wanted to review Thomas Mallon’s forthcoming book. It is comprised of excerpts from his diaries from the 1980’s and 1990’s. I am very anxious about this book because I had heard that Mallon an old professor of mine at Vassar who I liked, is mean to a old professors at Vassar who I loved, Jerome Badanes.

It’s just a rumour. Third hand. I don’t believe it, except I know Mallon, so I can’t rule it out. He was the professor responsible for my first readings of Norman Mailer, Joan Didion, and Tom Wolfe. He was a good professor! He once put a subtotal of every spelling mistake I made on each page of a paper I wrote and at the end wrote, “No editor should have to tolerate this,” which I took as a huge compliment, as it suggested that my work was something that an editor would one day be reading.

The idea that Tom would publish a book in which he is nasty about a colleague from forty years earlier is difficult to imagine, but then he’s not looking back across time, these are contemporaneous diary. I reserve judgement until I read the book.

It was time to get up and go to the library. But I had one last association that cam,e to me as I gazed at the beautiful view: A night scene that had taken place in this spot about, oh, twenty years earlier. Travel and Leisure Magazine was having a party.

I had included a description of that scene at the party in the introduction to my next book. But later I had removed it. It was a digression. Here is the out-take:

The party was at Lincoln Center in spring. A night-time event, everyone dressed up beside the beautiful shallow lake in front of the New York State Theater, the one people throw coins in, and from which the big green sculpture rises. The editor in chief took the microphone to make some remarks, and then came the reading of the raffle number. The number rolled out across the shallow lake. Nothing returned. She read it again. Nothing. It was a good prize, a week at a resort in the South Seas, the Caribbean, something like that.

Now an awkwardness settled over the event. A prize had been arranged, therefore someone had to win it. The beautiful reflective water of the long rectangular pool, all the guests arranged around the perimeter, spread out in front of the editor as she read the number one more time

Eventually, exasperated, she said, "the first person who jumps into the pool gets to take the trip."

I remember being very eager to jump in the pool. I still had not claimed my cruise. Would they let me win another prize if I had won the last one? And not used it? I would be a prize hoarder.

Also, I wondered, what did "jump in the pool" mean? Did one have to take a belly flop, or was just stepping into it OK? I only had a few seconds to process it before a young man and woman took the plunge. She wore a white ball gown that shimmered in the light. He wore something like a tuxedo. At first, they stepped gingerly, as if unsure how deep it was. The water came up to just below their knees. They began to promenade, armns around one another, as thought doing a tango, they strolled through the pool, pranced through it, kicking up water. Echo of Fellini . Were they being defiant or subservient? That was the ambiguity. I have always wondered if they had come together as lovers, or just friends, or had just met and hit it off, and if they traveled to the resort together or somehow made other arrangements.

These are spring thoughts, when everything is suddenly so beautiful. Part of the reason I hadn’t sat in this very spot in the past week or month is that it wasn’t all the same spot— it was colder, much less hospitable. Now I feel pierced by the suddenness of all this gorgeous life springing up. This kind of duality is what brought T.S. Eliot to this famous aphorism: “April is the cruelest month.”

1. Athletes now “enter the transfer portal” as a matter of course. They do it if have a problem with their coach, or their playing time; they enter the portal after a dissapointing season or a good season, or even and especially if they had a great season. It’s a situation that is quite surreal to anyone who cares about college sports or just remembers the old arrangements. The whiplash between the rhetoric of college sports as it existe for half a century or more, and as it exists now, is striking and can be difficult to assimilate for the old guard. interesting to me, both for the current realities (the money involved!) and for what the future holds (athletes employed by universities). Also interesting: what the visible river of money in college sports today says about that same river when it was underground. All that talk of athletes as amateurs. The power over the players wielded by the schools and the NCAA who held the word amateurism as a cudgel. Finally, and rather relevantly, I am friends with an author whose son is a Division I basketball player. His son has played two seasons and has gone through the transfer portal twice.