Harvesting Cool

                            "Son, let me school you on cool..."

Outlaw bikers never set out to become an iconic image. Neither did alcoholic writers or semi-deranged artists or Surfers or left-handed guitar players.

They became iconic images because someone, somewhere, saw them, became completely enamored of them, and said to themselves, "I want to be like them".

So they adopted the way they walked, talked, dressed, acted, etc., in the hopes that whatever it was that those people had, that undefinable something that made them...cool...would somehow, through some sort of osmosis, transfer itself to them.

Absorb the zeitgeist, as the cultural anthropologist call it.

People always seem to want to be someone or something else, something other than who they are. 

So, of course, smart people learned to make the marketing of cool very profitable.

Those people who find a way to market the attitude, the style...the ones who trade on image, who manufacture an aura...those people have always interested me.

Those that co-opted cultural archetypes or lifted a popular image/personality from the past - think Madonna liberally borrowing the gypsy/hooker/Marilyn/Harlow looks/attitudes, or millionaire rock-stars like Springsteen and Mellencamp dressing like average working men, or rappers doing the whole street/gangsta' thing (I attended High School with a man who won a Grammy for co-writing a gangster rap song - he went to college on scholarship).

Actors, of course, can create iconic characters that become icons of cool because of the way the character is received - Eastwood as the man with no name, Brando as Johnny Strabler in the Wild One, Peter Fonda as Wyatt in Easy Rider - hell, the list is practically endless.

Thing is, most of those actors do not become their characters - they go back to being their regular selves after the filming wraps. However, some actors can get trapped in certain roles, typecast, due to the public not being able to perceive them any other way.

I am sure many a fan of most of those actors has walked away after meeting one thinking to themselves, "Man, he/she sure wasn't anything like I thought he/she would be."

Image and the perception of cool are entangled to an immeasurable degree, and the way entrepreneurs have been able to sell it is truly an accomplishment of the manipulators art. Everyday I see people walking around wearing the clothes that some celebrity has made fashionable, sporting a haircut that some actor or athlete has made almost necessary, or even adopting mannerisms and attitudes of popular figures.

It's quite mind-boggling, this seemingly overwhelming compulsion to eat up whatever it is that is currently being foisted upon the public as essential to having credibility amongst the proletariat.

I gotta find a way to get me a piece of that action - now that'd be cool.