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 Click for words events SCHOOLED IN COOL "Cool Rules: Anatomy of an Attitude" by Dick Pountain and David Robins
Cool, or coolness, like pornography, is one of those things that isn't easily defined, but you definitely know it when you see it. Archetypal images of twentieth-century cool -- Marlon Brando's Johnny in "The Wild Ones," Elvis Presley swiveling his hips, James Dean in his red windbreaker -- have permeated our culture to the point of myth. They smoked. They drank. They took drugs. They fucked. Great, so do a lot of people; how did these characters earn their ranking in our cultural mythology? In their search for answers to these and other questions, Brits Dick Pountain and David Robins have taken up the uncool endeavor of tracing the history of cool and attempting to define its ever-present, ever-changing mystique. In their quest, they've left few theoretical stones unturned; the most interesting poses that the elusive concept actually has roots in ancient West African civilizations. Robins and Pountain argue that in animistic religions of the Yoruba and Ibo civilizations, composure was a major tenet and philosophical cornerstone that evolved as a trait valued above even physical beauty. This philosophy, over time, was imported to America via the slave trade, where it morphed into the cool we know today: some form of ironic detachment. Elements of this ironic detachment can thusly be found in blues, jazz, beat writing, sixties counterculture, punk, wall street, even '90s advertising and marketing -- essentially, every manifestation of the cool attitude that has affected us. Though Pountain and Robins tread uncharted waters on this, er, birth of cool, little time is spent validating the theory as anything more than conjecture. Much of this book is spent dropping names like Brando and Dean, while giving a Reader's Digest version of most every major American and British pop-culture movement in the twentieth century. While fans of things pop may get a kick out of the authors' meanderings on that subject, nothing new is brought to light -- yes, Robert Mitchum is cool, yes, Andy Warhol is cool, etc. -- but there is nothing groundbreaking in their classifications of these characters, nor in their definition of what traits helped land them in the world of cool. Still, the authors have contributed an accessible, iconoclastic look at some of the less-thought-about sides of cool -- the study of which, until now, has been left to the ranks of academics like Greil Marcus ("Lipstick Traces") and Thomas Frank ("The Conquest of Cool"). Pountain and Robins recognize that cool has expanded beyond rugged white males acting rebellious, and that, in many ways, the late-capitalist status quo has actually become cool, encompassing all ethnic groups, all persons of socio-economic status, sexual orientations and, gasp, even women. What's more, the authors never account for their unique approach to the subject; while embracing the fact that neither is any sort of expert (if there is such a thing as an expert of cool), they claim "Cool Rules" is a "work of popular social commentary...[not an] academic treatise." Defining cool may be the most uncool thing one can do, but give "Cool Rules" middling credit for probably being as cool as that endeavor gets. "Cool Rules: Anatomy of an Attitude"
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