So I’m in New York City a few months back, giving a talk on the gothic at this weird and wonderful nineteenth-century sort of place called the Morbid Anatomy Library, near the putrid Gowanus Canal, and at a certain point, on the visit, I find myself in Bushwick, the newest neighborhood to morph into hip coolness, or to become a simulacrum of Williamsburg. Near the Jefferson Street stop on the L is a largely Puerto Rican and Dominican neighborhood. The evening is fine—mid-June, seventy-five and a clear, slight breeze—and families are sitting on the steps in front of their buildings. With seemingly jovial un-self-consciousness, they are laughing, telling stories, drinking Coronas, joshing with children. One woman is on the sidewalk grilling hamburgers and hot dogs. About fifteen children play giddily in the steady gush of a fire hydrant. This is a culture informed by decades, if not centuries, of convention, a true form of life, organic, you could say, since growing from within outward. A culture that a person, like me in an early-summer twilight mood, might call real.
But then, after I walk awhile, I discover myself on Moore Street near the Morgan Avenue L stop, and suddenly no more ethnic families delighting in the Saturday night respite from weekly labor. Instead, twenty-something Caucasian hip-cools abound, surrounded by requisite vintage shops, slick bars, and coffeehouses, as well as locally sourced restaurants. I have walked onto a movie set, where everyone is following the same script. Here, in cool world, where it’s happening, nothing is happening.
But the families are acting, too. The parents and children “feel” more real because of the cultural conventions I’ve inherited—which say that “less calculated” (apparently) means “more authentic”—but I can imagine other contexts in which the hipsters would appear more attuned to what appears to be the case: it’s all artifice. If we all are performing anyway, it’s more sincere to playact deliberately, choose to do the things your culture deems cool. (What’s uncool, for sure, is my assuming that the ethnic Bushwick families are less self-aware than the hepcats. The assumption is unfair, narrow. I’m sorry now for bringing it up.)
Anyway, you could say, siding with the hipsters, that it is cool to be cool, admirable to perform self-consciously. But you would have to know what “cool” means. There’s Miles Davis, Birth of the Cool. There’s Fonzarelli’s “Cool it!” And then what about Kurt Cobain, who would “Rather be dead than cool”? Here we have “cool” as intrinsically good, a sign of effortless, almost deadpan grace and beauty; as a style alone, campy, fun; and as phoniness, opposed to authenticity, too tawdry for panache.
What makes George Clooney cool is that he seems “real,” relaxed, comfortable, not full of shit. But another part of his coolness is his awareness that his “cool” is not really authentic at all, but a role he plays, as Clark Gable and Cary Grant and Frank Sinatra played it before. Yet another element of Clooney’s cool, of course, is that it is a total put-on and nothing more, an ordinary man’s simply trying to act out a fairly clichéd script going all the way back to Lord Byron, the first prince of cool, a script that aggrandizes aloofness, mystery, insouciant eroticism, leanness, confidence, eyes that flash. Part of the issue is timing, too. When to try to be cool? If you’re too idiosyncratic in your effort—too early—you’ll just be weird. If you’re too derivative—too late—you’re a wannabe. If you are somewhere in between, people will say, “That’s new,” and “That’s what I’ve been wanting to do for a long time.”