I've been watching this programme in which a guy travels around the UK trying to figure out what's "cool" and why. The guy is in advertising, so his perspective is predictably superficial, focussed on youth tastes and how they are intercepted and marketed. "Fashion has always been central to our notions of what is cool," he says.
I don't know. I'm no authority--I don't have a cool bone in my body--but nothing seems less cool to me than anything you have to spend a lot of money on. I'm not a big fan of anything that relies on consensus either, even if it's the consensus of a snobbish elite, as it tends to be with the hipper end of fashion.
"Cool" to me is about the assertion of your personal sensibility, your individual mind, over the crowd. So Hitler was cool? No! because Hitler ran with the mob, like all racists and bigots and homophobes. All of his thinking, despite the not unimportant fact that it was brutish and ugly, relied on the old lies and unexamined prejudice and uneducated bullshit of the centuries. As Sartre points out, if you accept that you are individually responsible for the state of the world, you'll make nice and try to clean it up a little.
Death or glory individualism--that's cool. So, who?
Edward Abbey.
Michael Foot.
William Blake.
Grey Owl.
Sam Peckinpah.
John Peel.
Bob Dylan.
Lee "Scratch" Perry.
Jesus.
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