I've been thinking about this essay for a week. I settled on two points:
1 - American Coolness is the culmination of the American desire to have a classless society. A cool person is blessedly free from condemnation from either above or below. But at the limit, coolness converges to shamelessness. Elegance requires a class to be a part of and to judge the number of stitches between the shirt and jacket collars allowed. If you exceed the limit, you are shamed, and that is not cool.
If you look at Google's N-gram, American Class falls off a cliff in the 1930s, and as you said, Coolness filled the void.
2- American Coolness is *not thinking too much*. Nerd, geek, and dork are all defined by too much thinking. Cool people think enough to see the pattern, but not so much about the why and how behind the pattern. Athletes and artists are equally cool because their expression is intuitive and often illogical. If the HS athlete is still playing in college, wearing the HS jacket is still cool. It's only uncool if he is no longer playing; the old symbol is discordant within the new context. That he doesn't get the pattern mismatch is what makes him uncool; he lacks *unthinking mastery*.
In a way, American Cool is highly Italian-inflected: La Sprezzatura. The contrast is the highly studied subversive subtlety of the French: L'Élégance Désinvolte. Alain Delon, nearly silent, cool, unaffected by the rules. Versus Marlon Brando, mumbling emotions and volcanic outrage at the rules. In America, we see the Delon-style as villainous. In France, Brando is unreliable. It's all true.
Again, “cool”, but I’m still wondering how that got turned into a graph. Was trying to follow my lifetime along the contour and not all the peaks and valleys match my recollection and intuitions. But I love the quantitative representation of qualitative data. One of my nerd spaces.
“In fact, saying ‘you shouldn’t care what people think of you’ is an unconscious bid for the person listening to you to think that you are the sort of person that doesn’t care what people think of them, and is therefore cool.”
I used to believe this too, but I think it is the same mistake postmoderns make: that everything is power or a bid for power (in this case the social power of looking cooler than the next person). It really is possible to give good advice and that be all that it is, good advice (not a bid for the receiver to think well of you because of how cool you are). It can happen, it is just so, so rare.
Well, to be accurate, I don’t believe everything is a bid for power, just that advice is a covert bid for power. Good advice would be “Everyone cares what people think of them because it matters. But do the right thing and be honorable and you will be right with God, no matter what they think of you in the short term.”
First, “architectural sweatpants” is hilarious and apt and I will be using it with my students. Also, architectural yoga pants, architectural spanx, architectural bondage wear etc.
Ok, next I am making this about me but this is the second essay by two different writers who are cool so I care what they think and that tells me I gotta be less lazy with my caps. I already told the first guy the story of my crushed left little finger and he gave me a pass because he likes baseball. But since I work with my thumb here I guess there is no excuse.
A prime reason people travel to smaller cities and towns of Italy is the evening parade of well dressed people who don’t look like they are trying to be well dressed (sprezzatura is the word for it and there is no English translation). so that is also cool and an economic base along with the gorgeous and authentically worn piazzas and cityscapes that forms their backdrop. Done by architects that managed to be at once better and yet more humble than me and my cohort.
I've been thinking about this essay for a week. I settled on two points:
1 - American Coolness is the culmination of the American desire to have a classless society. A cool person is blessedly free from condemnation from either above or below. But at the limit, coolness converges to shamelessness. Elegance requires a class to be a part of and to judge the number of stitches between the shirt and jacket collars allowed. If you exceed the limit, you are shamed, and that is not cool.
If you look at Google's N-gram, American Class falls off a cliff in the 1930s, and as you said, Coolness filled the void.
2- American Coolness is *not thinking too much*. Nerd, geek, and dork are all defined by too much thinking. Cool people think enough to see the pattern, but not so much about the why and how behind the pattern. Athletes and artists are equally cool because their expression is intuitive and often illogical. If the HS athlete is still playing in college, wearing the HS jacket is still cool. It's only uncool if he is no longer playing; the old symbol is discordant within the new context. That he doesn't get the pattern mismatch is what makes him uncool; he lacks *unthinking mastery*.
In a way, American Cool is highly Italian-inflected: La Sprezzatura. The contrast is the highly studied subversive subtlety of the French: L'Élégance Désinvolte. Alain Delon, nearly silent, cool, unaffected by the rules. Versus Marlon Brando, mumbling emotions and volcanic outrage at the rules. In America, we see the Delon-style as villainous. In France, Brando is unreliable. It's all true.
https://books.google.com/ngrams/graph?content=American+class&year_start=1900&year_end=2022&corpus=en&smoothing=3
This is stunning evidence
Cool. But what is the rubric and metric for “American Class”? Might need another essay here JT
I’d say it’s interchangeable with what I called “elegance”
Again, “cool”, but I’m still wondering how that got turned into a graph. Was trying to follow my lifetime along the contour and not all the peaks and valleys match my recollection and intuitions. But I love the quantitative representation of qualitative data. One of my nerd spaces.
This is one of Google services that tracks how much a term is referenced through time.
I was thinking sprezzatura from the first sentence! Just can’t look like youre trying too hard.
cool.
These are fire takeaways from a fire essay.
“In fact, saying ‘you shouldn’t care what people think of you’ is an unconscious bid for the person listening to you to think that you are the sort of person that doesn’t care what people think of them, and is therefore cool.”
I used to believe this too, but I think it is the same mistake postmoderns make: that everything is power or a bid for power (in this case the social power of looking cooler than the next person). It really is possible to give good advice and that be all that it is, good advice (not a bid for the receiver to think well of you because of how cool you are). It can happen, it is just so, so rare.
Well, to be accurate, I don’t believe everything is a bid for power, just that advice is a covert bid for power. Good advice would be “Everyone cares what people think of them because it matters. But do the right thing and be honorable and you will be right with God, no matter what they think of you in the short term.”
First, “architectural sweatpants” is hilarious and apt and I will be using it with my students. Also, architectural yoga pants, architectural spanx, architectural bondage wear etc.
Ok, next I am making this about me but this is the second essay by two different writers who are cool so I care what they think and that tells me I gotta be less lazy with my caps. I already told the first guy the story of my crushed left little finger and he gave me a pass because he likes baseball. But since I work with my thumb here I guess there is no excuse.
A prime reason people travel to smaller cities and towns of Italy is the evening parade of well dressed people who don’t look like they are trying to be well dressed (sprezzatura is the word for it and there is no English translation). so that is also cool and an economic base along with the gorgeous and authentically worn piazzas and cityscapes that forms their backdrop. Done by architects that managed to be at once better and yet more humble than me and my cohort.