Where Has All The Cool Gone?

Where Has All The Cool Gone?

http://thegovmonitor.com/world_news/united_states/where-has-all-the-cool-gone-16159.html

By Robert McHenry, The American Enterprise Institute
23rd November 2009

Cool was once associated with reticence, savoir-faire, and irony,
none of which is much practiced or regarded these days.

Whether or not it is true that you can't go home again, as Thomas
Wolfe claimed­and the claim is just a special case of the more
general observation of Heraclitus that you cannot step into the same
river twice­it seems that when we find we can't, nostalgia is the
place we go instead. Nostalgia has a mixed reputation.

Outfits like Time-Life happily sell, and many of us happily buy,
compilations of old photos or music that allow us to escape the
present moment and all its cares and return to a vision of a past
whose cares are omitted or at least denatured. It is those words
"escape" and "vision" that critics rightly fasten upon. So if the
following remarks seem strained or just wrong, put it down to
nostalgia run riot.

Right now I am listening to one of the great jazz recordings, "Stolen
Moments," from a 1961 album by the saxophonist Oliver Nelson,
accompanied by Freddie Hubbard on trumpet, Eric Dolphy on flute and
alto, Bill Evans on piano, and others. It is a thoughtful, bluesy
eight or nine minutes during which, it seems to me, as I drift into
the music, that the group pretty well summarize an America at the
tipping point of a deeply unsettling change. Yes, that probably
overstates the case just a tad, but in nostalgia you can do that. You
can remember visiting the Big Rock Candy Mountain if you want to.

What it seems to me that I am remembering is a time when we admired
people who were cool. Some movie stars were cool, a few television
personalities were cool, some writers were cool, even one or two
politicians may secretly have been cool (there was certainly talk
about Stu Symington). There were cool people we never heard of. Here
I am using the term "cool" in an expansive sense. Narrower senses of
cool mostly point to styles of behavior that are, in fact, distinctly
not-cool. They are more like codes of conduct and appearance for
wannabes: goatee, beret, and a sneer for poets; all black and a blank
look for dancers or art students; full beard, rimless glasses, army
jacket, and a defiant glare for revolutionaries or sociology grad
students; and so on. We've all learned to decode the game.

No, true cool is both easier to describe and far harder to achieve,
if in fact it is achievable at all. It may simply be that some are
born cool, or at least with the requisite quanta of intelligence and
temperament, and the rest of us are not. (There is no record of
anyone's ever having had cool thrust upon them.) But that's fine. We
don't all have to be cool. What is important is how the rest of us
respond to the ones who are.

Who and what was cool? Cary Grant was cool, and of course Steve
McQueen. Thelonious S. Monk (anybody remember when Time captioned a
picture of him "Melodious Thunk"?) and Horace Silver, Fairfield
Porter, E.E. Cummings (bear in mind that that "e.e." business was the
bright idea of his publisher), Bob Cousy, P.G. Wodehouse, Philip
Marlowe, Gus Grissom … a list is pointless except to suggest the
breadth of the concept. For contrast, here are some more or less
parallel non-cool types: James Dean, Chet Baker, Andy Warhol, Allen
Ginsberg, Kobe Bryant, Norman Mailer, Howard Roark, Frank Borman.

Cool is not dependent on achievement, or vice versa. Cool is how you
get there. Cool is just doing the job; not-cool is making sure, while
you're at it, that everyone sees just how tough the job is and thus
how cool you are to be doing it. Cool is self-direction,
self-possession, self-sufficiency, capability, discretion, and a bit
of wit. Not-cool is angst, conspicuous display, disdain, tropisms
toward bright lights, crowds, and media­in short, all those
adolescent traits that so many people fail to grow out of.

I'm looking at my copy of the June 1959 issue of Playboy. Here's an
ad for a Lord West summer dinner jacket. Well, score one for the
olden days to begin with. Our contemporary dress code, if there were
one, would doubtless recommend for a summer dinner party a nice tee
in preference to a muscle shirt, and might go so far as to plump for
your newest pair of flipflops. Anyway, the illustration shows a tall,
slim fellow who is entirely at home in his clothes­relaxed but not
slouched, one hand casually in a pocket, and the smile on is face is
one of genuine good cheer, no smirk, no leer, no vacuous stare back
at the viewer. Easy, manly elegance is the theme, and more than a
suggestion of cool.

But the reason to have the magazine, as we all understand, is the
articles. On page 31 begins a piece by Jack Kerouac on the origins of
the Beat Generation. "Beat," for Kerouac, was a deep and rather
elusive concept, but he insisted upon its spiritual content against
those who saw in it only an attitude to strike and a style to be
bought at the Salvation Army store. He begins by writing about a
publicity photo taken of him wearing a crucifix on a chain around his
neck. He is dismayed that it was reproduced in several publications
with the crucifix airbrushed out; only the New York Times left it alone.

"Therefore the New York Times is as beat as I am, and I'm glad I've
got a friend. I mean it sincerely. God bless the New York Times for
not erasing the crucifix from my picture as though it was something
distasteful … I am not ashamed to wear the crucifix of my Lord. It is
because I am beat, that is, I believe in beatitude … So you people
don't believe in God. So you're all big smart know-it-all Marxists
and Freudians, hey? Why don't you come back in a million years and
tell me all about it, angels?"

I do not mean to suggest that cool and beat are synonyms. But they
are complementary, hence their frequent confusion. Nor do I claim
that cool is a virtue. Styles change, but virtue abides. I only point
out that the sort of cool I am talking about was once associated with
such virtues as reticence, savoir-faire, and irony, none of which is
much practiced or regarded these days. Cool outlasted beat as a word
but devolved into a general term of approbation that your clergyman
uses as easily as your drug dealer. As a term denoting a certain
admirable way of being in the world, not so much.

The problem was that admiration bred imitation, and imitation lives
on exaggeration. Thus reticence was exaggerated, transformed from a
quality of character into a mere tic, that produced, among others,
Clint Eastwood's "thousand-yard stare" characters; savoir-faire
became the faux sophistication of a James "shaken, not stirred" Bond;
irony became the mugging knowingness of Dave Letterman.

What replaced cool? Nothing did, not in the sense of a one-for-one
substitution. But what we seem to have been left with instead is
sour. Sour is what you get when irony gets into the hands of poseurs,
the professionally not-cool. Instead of the needle-sharp barbs of
Mort Sahl­"Are there any groups I haven't offended yet?"­you get the
ramblings of a Lenny Bruce throwing cow pies blindly until someone
tells him the set is over and he can stumble off. Instead of Sid
Caesar you get "Laugh-In." Over Clark Gable's wry worldliness, paint
in George Clooney's slightly imbecile simper.

The thing is, not-cool is so much easier to get than cool. The masses
get it; agents seek it out and hone their protégés to empty
perfection; cultural entrepreneurs publish it like so much salt pork
in barrels. And so it becomes the national standard.

Where literature once gave us models to emulate in creating lives for
ourselves, media now give us merely images to ape. Of one of his
characters Raymond Chandler wrote, "his voice was the elaborately
casual voice of the tough guy in pictures. Pictures have made them
all like that." That was in 1939.

And media have taught us a self-subverting double consciousness about
achievement. Not more than three or four years after Roger
Bannister's sublime conquest of the four-minute mile in England in
1954, a cartoon by the acute Giles, late of the Daily Express, showed
an obviously American press photographer shouting to a runner
straining across the finish line: "Let's have it again, Bud; not
enough agony for a winner."

Oliver Nelson must have been a seer. "Stolen Moments" is a blue
celebration of true cool, and at the same time it is an elegy
anticipating a wake that won't get under way in earnest for another
couple of years. It's one of those pieces I'm careful not to play too
often. Nostalgia can really hang you up the most.
--

Robert McHenry is the former editor of Encyclopædia Britannica.

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