My Cork Wall

Before social media, we made modern cave paintings out of posters and memorabilia

I think I had this poster on my cork wall

My cousin Steve had a cork wall in his bedroom when he was a kid, and I wanted one, too. I let my parents know this, and, after some hemming and hawing, one day I returned from school and sure enough there was a floor-to-ceiling cork wall – two walls, really – wrapped around my bed.

I haven’t thought about my cork wall much for the last, ahem, forty-five years, which is when I said goodbye to my childhood bedroom and my parents’ house and went off to college. For some reason unknown to me, the memory of my cork wall popped up recently. And given the time that has elapsed since I took down the various posters, advertisements, news clippings, flyers, and whatever else I had tacked to the wall, I only remember a few items that, in hindsight, I now see were part of my primitive attempt to fashion an identity, to curate the world according to me.

I recall the most obvious or logical items that hung on my wall, looming down at me and breathing their auras into my life. There was the obligatory Bob Dylan poster, which was an intense photo of Dylan singing and playing acoustic guitar, a photo that was probably taken at George Harrison’s Concert for Bangladesh. (A partial view of the back and side of Harrison’s head can be seen to Dylan’s right.) There was a horizontal Bruce Springsteen poster and a vertical Bob Marley poster. And, in the interests of full disclosure, there was a black-and-white poster of Raquel Welch as she appeared in One Million Years B.C. Come on, admit it, how many of you had that exact same poster, perhaps hanging on the inside of your closet door?

There was some New York Mets memorabilia. I recall a well-worn souvenir pennant I likely picked up at one of my family’s rare outings to Shea Stadium. I grew up on a suburban New York street where all my peers were Mets fans, so it just seemed like that should be the team for which I rooted. Plus, my dad had been a fan of the Brooklyn Dodgers, so there was no way he was going to transfer his loyalty to the Bronx Bombers and pass that along to me. (Back then, I could name the entire starting lineup of the 1955 World Champion Dodgers team. Guys like Duke Snider, Cookie Lavagetto, Gil Hodges, Pee Wee Reese.) Besides, the incorporation of the New York Mets into the National League lineup in 1962 was meant in large part as a consolation (and oh, what a consolation it was) to former Dodgers and New York Giants fans, after both teams fled New York City in 1957 for the sunnier, more optimistic climes of California. (I will return to the subject of being a lifelong fan of the hapless New York Mets in future columns.) I probably hung my Mets baseball cap on the cork wall, too.

This is where my memory trails off, and I can only begin to speculate about what else I pinned up on the wall. I am guessing I put up some full-page advertisements from the New York Times for favorite movies and concerts: I vaguely recall an ad for The Missouri Breaks, with Jack Nicholson and Marlon Brando facing off as they did in the delectable movie, one of my most favorite films of all time. There might have been a full-page ad for a Bob Dylan concert – I’m thinking “The Night of the Hurricane” at Madison Square Garden in December 1975. Not everyone recalls, but once upon a time major concerts were announced in this manner, in full-page ads in the Arts & Leisure section of the Sunday Times.Alas, I did not attend that concert; it would be another three years until I would first see Bob Dylan live onstage, marking the beginning of a decades-long string of Dylan concerts, eventually resulting in a book about Dylan.

I’m guessing at the rest: Perhaps I pinned up the historic banner headline in the New York Times announcing Nixon’s resignation. Probably flyers and programs from events I attended or in which I took part. Maybe some cards and letters and photographs. I once wrote a letter to President Lyndon Baines Johnson suggesting that if we stopped fighting in Vietnam, perhaps the Viet Cong and the North Vietnamese would do the same. I got a typed, personally signed letter in return from a White House aide, who took my suggestion so seriously he replied that the administration preferred to negotiate a peace around a conference table rather than on the battlefield. That was likely displayed prominently on my cork wall.

Several things strike me today about the cork wall of my childhood and teen years. For one, much of the type of stuff I displayed on my wall no longer exists: typed letters, analog photographs, and newspaper ads. I assume from seeing them on TV shows and movies that teenagers still put posters of their favorite pop bands on their wall, but I have no idea how prevalent this is.

It also strikes me that my “curation” of self on my cork wall -- back when no one used the word “curator” to refer to anything other than a person who decided how the paintings should hang at a museum art exhibition – has its contemporary analogue in social media. Facebook and Instagram (and perhaps TikTok, I don’t know, I refuse to go there) are the cork walls of the digital age. But there is one fundamental difference between the cork walls of my youth and the digital cork walls of the Internet age. My “cork-wall feed” was intended only for my own viewing, a projection of my inner life, my passions, and my obsessions. They were a reflection of the person I saw who was becoming me.

Now, of course, individuals compete to create a digital cork wall that garners the most views and the most followers and the most likes around the world. That motivation changes the curation of digital profiles: they are, to a large extent, modeled after dating profiles, full of selfies and images that portray you in the best possible light, cool, attractive, and desirable. It is “content” intended to please the global audience. The quiet, private work of decorating my childhood bedroom with two-dimensional objects one could stick a pushpin through has now been transformed into a universal blood sport, one that in theory every person on the planet (with access to an Internet connection) can view and comment upon.

I am not saying that my analog cork wall was better than today’s social media, although I do think the differences between the two and how they function are telling evidence of a change in cultural values. I do, however, hope that the naïve impulse that drove me to create a pictorial version of my inner life on the walls of my bedroom still exists in most young people, as it could be a wellspring of creativity, as I think it was for me. Also, I just don’t want the time- and culture-specific historical artifact that was the cork wall to go unrecognized or to be totally forgotten in a world of all screens, all the time.

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Did you have a cork wall as a youth? What was on it? Please reply using the comments button below.