The Birth of Cool

The long search for cool, what it is and how you get it.

For a long time, at least since that day on the interstate, I’ve been thinking about cool. The word and the quality. What it means to be cool. I’ve been thinking about this: How do my kids have it and I don’t?

Cool is old, at least 60, maybe 70 years strong. It’s like the sycamores and cottonwoods in my neighborhood. Venerable.

I don’t know its etymology as a slang term, but I’m fairly certain a well-dressed Black man with a saxophone or trumpet invented it. As in the Birth of…

Incidentally, not all jazz is cool. Some of it is bad, even by artists considered geniuses. But that’s just my aesthetic, which might not be cool. Still, if you can’t get with Stan Getz, then I just don’t know. Maybe you’re not cool either.

As slang or the essential component of many popular expressions, cool has endured. It’s just as fresh today as it was in 1969. Our talk is loaded with it. “That’s cool,” “very cool,” “he’s cool” and — the one I’ve heard from both my father and son — “be cool,” as in calm down or here comes the cops.

But what is it? Rather, who is it, other than Getz and Miles, Bird and Dizzy? We can talk about this all day, because so often we can’t define or describe cool, but we can spot someone who has it.

Like Viggo Mortensen in Eastern Promises. Like Steve McQueen in The Thomas Crown Affair. Or Steve McQueen in _____.

We can talk about it. On and on and on.

Women can be cool. Even Pretty Women. Have you seen Julia Roberts in August: Osage County? On second thought, maybe that’s not the best example. But, if wildly effective method acting is cool, and I think it is, then pretty woman’s got it.

Here’s a better example: Furiosa. I haven’t seen the new movie, the eponymously titled one, and probably won’t, because no actor could be as cool as Charlize Theron in Mad Max: Fury Road. In this 2015 movie, Theron is the walking, talking, breathing, ass-kicking epitome of cool. When I see trailers for action films that have tough female leads, I feel embarrassed for them. They don’t measure up to the real Furiosa.

We can talk about it. But I have to stop now.

What is it? What is cool?

I have no idea. (Other than a soft and slow Miles Davis solo.) How can someone who doesn’t have it tell you what it is? I think it has something to do with style, and I think it has something to do with poise. Composure under pressure. That kind of thing. Like Charlie says when I confront maniacs who drive too fast through pedestrian areas: “Dad, be cool.”

Sometimes we define things by stating the opposite, by identifying what it isn’t. One thing comes to mind, which, pun intended, tags me as old, but I don’t care. I can’t get on board with graffiti. Never have. Occasionally I’ll see something on the side of a box car, but nine times out of ten – no, 99 out of a 100 – it’s garbage. Just another form of pollution.

I have more thoughts about cool, as I’m sure you do. So many of us want to be it or at least think we know how to spot it, but it’s such a slippery thing.

So what about that day on the interstate? That’s when I started thinking about cool. It was two years ago, when my then 19-year-old kid said something I would never be cool enough to think.

We were driving back from Springfield, on I-44, which is almost always crowded with crazy drivers. One of them was behind me, in a Kia Soul. I was going the speed limit – and probably five miles an hour above it – and yet the Kia driver was right on my ass.

Nothing says crazy like bumper-to-bumper at 75 miles per hour.

Finally, the Kia got into the left-hand lane and passed us. As it did, Nora Jane McGowan quietly studied it.

“Hmm,” she said, “it’s always a Kia Soul.”

See what I mean? Cool.