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Cool Rules: Anatomy of an Attitude (2000) - Dick Pountain, David Robins
[Amazon.com] [FR] [DE] [UK]What do Humphrey Bogart with a cigarette, Bertholt Brecht, Marlene Dietrich's cheekbones, Billie Holiday, James Dean, Lenny Bruce's irony, Eldridge Cleaver, Chrissie Hinde, heroin and gangsta rap all have in common? They are, for lack of a more precise word, cool. Taking their cue from Susan Sontag's germinal 1964 essay "Notes on Camp," Pountain and Robins attempt to delineate that ambiguous and elusive entity, a cultural sensibility.
Description
What do Humphrey Bogart with a cigarette, Bertholt Brecht, Marlene Dietrich's cheekbones, Billie Holiday, James Dean, Lenny Bruce's irony, Eldridge Cleaver, Chrissie Hinde, heroin and gangsta rap all have in common? They are, for lack of a more precise word, cool. Taking their cue from Susan Sontag's germinal 1964 essay "Notes on Camp," Pountain and Robins attempt to delineate that ambiguous and elusive entity, a cultural sensibility. Declining to investigate the "ontological status" of cool ("is it a philosophy, a sensibility, a religion, an ideology... an attitude, a zeitgeist?"), they claim that we all know cool "when we see it." Their working definition is that "cool is an oppositional attitude adopted by individuals to express defiance to authority" And while this might seem obvious, the pleasure of their brief, elucidating study is in the delicious details. Casting their net widely, to include films like Trainspotting, Hollywood icons, obscure books (e.g., an Italian Renaissance etiquette guide), British punk bands, Dadaists, pornography, the American Beats and gay sensibility. They chart how rebellions against standards of sexuality, gender, race, class, artificiality and "decency" lead to coolness. The most adventurous and insightful aspect of their investigation emerges when they trace a concept of "cool" back to the ancient Yoruba and other West African cultures. This is a cool book on cool.-- Copyright 2000 Reed Business Information, Inc, amazon.com
While the authors do not claim to have discovered Cool, they have attempted a serious, systematic analysis of Cool's history, psychology, and importance. The contemporary Cool attitude is barely 50 years old, but its roots are older than that. Cool Rules traces Cool's ancient origins in European, Asian, and African cultures, its prominence in the African-American jazz scene of the 1940s, and its pivotal position within the radical subcultures of the 1950s and '60s. Pountain and Robins examine various art movements, music, cinema, and literature, moving from the dandies and flâneurs of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries through to the expropriation of a whole cultural and psychological tradition by the media in the 1980s and '90s. What began as a rebellious posture adopted by minorities mutated to become mainstream itself. Cool is now primarily about consumption, as cynical advertisers have seized on it to create a constantly updated bricolage of styles and entertainments designed to affect the way people think about themselves and their society. --semcoop.com
Being cool has been one of the more sought after attributes for the last fifty years or so. Subcultures are contstructed around notions of what is cool. Yet, what constitutes cool is something that constantly shifts. In this fascinating work, the authors examine the development of cool in the postwar era and how it has been idealized, viewed, and marketed. While the idea did not become a major commodity until the appearence of James Dean, Marlon Brando, and Elvis, cool had been around for a long time. In particular, black jazz musicians and their followers celebrated those who had an aura of detached rebelliousness and were seemingly unafraid to cultivate a style that went against the mainstream. The authors identify these attributes as integral to notions of coolness but demonstrate how they have been exemplified in different ways. Thus coolness as defined by Brando and Dean took on a new meaning in the 1960s when political radicals and Black Panthers were seen as cool and then again with Punks, and then again.... The authors also examine how cool informed various art movements, music, cinema, and literature. They conclude with a look at the co-opting of cool in recent years by advertisers who have found “coolness” to be a successful tool of marketing.--semcoop.com
Notes:
acquired at De Slegte, May 2005
Peter Gay, author of Weimar Culture
Norman Mailer defines hip and hipster in the White Negro
cool jazz, Miles Davis, heroin
frequently cites Greil Marcus
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