David Hoppe

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:: The death of cool

We need a new adjective

By David Hoppe

I’m not sure exactly what time it was, but cool died last night.

Cool. That word practically all of us use as shorthand for what’s brilliant, hip, stylish, smart, has been around a long time. Miles Davis, who was nothing if not quintessentially cool, named an album, The Birth of the Cool, in 1957.

1957 was also the year that West Side Story opened on Broadway. In it, a bunch of dancers dressed in tight jeans (they called them dungarees in those days) pretending to be gang members (they called them juvenile delinquents) circled one another, singing, “Boy, boy, crazy boy – be cool, boy.”

Cool was with it, boss, far out. It was what everyone secretly wanted to be, a quality that, like obscenity, couldn’t be defined but, as a Supreme Court Justice famously said, “I know it when I see it.”

I once met a woman who was mother to a six year-old boy. She distilled her philosophy of child-rearing this way: “I just want him to be cool.” From the look of it, this meant finding a rascal charm in what looked to me like swaggering, bullying and oafish behavior, but never mind. I’ll bet that tyke grew up to be an incredibly cool assistant principal or township trustee.

Marshall McLuhan, the media visionary, categorized all forms of media in terms of hot and cool. “A hot medium,” he wrote, “is one that extends one single sense in high definition. High definition is the state of being well filled with data. A photograph is, visually, high definition…Telephone is a cool medium, or one of low definition, because the ear is given a meager amount of information. And speech is a cool medium of low definition, because so little is given and so much has to be filled in by the listener.”

No wonder so many voters in the last mayoral election thought Greg Ballard was cool.

This reminds me of the day, in fifth grade, when a bunch of us guys gathered in Paul Carrico’s garage. Paul had gotten his hands on an 8mm movie projector. He put it on a little table and arranged a nice row of dining room chairs that he’d managed to sneak out of the house while his Mom was away. Then he closed the garage door, which made a great, if somewhat chopped-up screen, and showed us highly condensed, one-reel versions of matinee movies like Abbot and Costello Meet the Wolfman and War of the Worlds. None of the reels could have played longer than 10 minutes; it was like getting a Reader’s Digest version of what was supposed to be a full-length film. I don’t know what McLuhan would have called these things, but, to a man, every one of us there agreed Julia Adams in The Creature from the Black Lagoon looked very cool in a swimsuit.

I used to work for an advertising agency. This was supposedly a cool job in a cool business whose goal was to make all kinds of products, from hamburgers to certified public accountants, seem cool so that consumers who availed themselves of these goods would, in turn, feel cool about themselves.
Which brings me to why I now believe that cool is finally dead.

No, it’s not because of the way I heard the word used during the most recent public radio fund drive – those obviously middle-aged voices gassing on about “all the cool stuff” you’d get if you subscribed. As if a coffee mug or a tote bag with a public radio logo emblazoned on it could possibly be cool. Can you imagine Steve McQueen or Jeanne Moreau using these things? Do you want to? Neither do I.

The spike through cool’s heart was delivered in ad last night by a bright, young red headed woman in a new “I’m a PC” Microsoft ad. She appears to be in her early twenties, dresses with thrift store flair and probably digs Jane Austen or, at least movies made from Austen’s novels. At first blush, her cool factor looks promising. Like any cool person, she needs a new computer, one with a particular array of applications. In other words, she’s no tech-dummy, which also makes her cool.

But the computer of her dreams needs to cost less than a thousand dollars. This turns out to be a problem, especially when she goes to the Apple Store, the place everybody says has the coolest machines. Everything there is too expensive.

“I’m not cool enough for Apple,” she mutters, trudging away. But in the next shot she’ll be thrilled to discover that she can get a PC with everything she wants for about $700. It’s a happy ending. She doesn’t have to be cool -- she’s a PC!

Never has not being cool enough been such a relief. That’s what being over-educated and underemployed in a recession will do. Common sense and thrift are in. We may need a new adjective.