King Dork Speaks! Frank Portman on High School, Individualism, and the War on Free Speech

Summary: Sorry, kids. Life "doesn't get better" once you leave high school behind, says Frank Portman, one of the great chroniclers of adolescent angst and alienation over the past 30 years. "You [just] get better at navigating it, or fighting it off." Portman is a novelist (King Dork, Andromeda Klein) and musician (The Mr T Experience) whose latest project is a soundtrack to his most-recent book, King Dork Approximately, which is just out in paperback. Writing a soundtrack for his novel is an attempt to recapture the hyper-intense and focused multimedia experience that the California native fears has gone missing in an age of digital overload. Like his earlier literary offerings, King Dork Approximately drew rave reviews for its honest, urgent, and wickedly funny take on the big and small ways that our high-school years mark us for the rest of our lives. In a wide-ranging conversation with Reason's Nick Gillespie, Portman talks about his literary inspirations (Philip K. Dick) and musical heroes (Pete Townshend of the Who and Ray Davies of The Kinks), and whether the world is getting more tolerant of oddballs and weirdos or increasingly more repressive of kids and adults who think and act differently.