Threads, Lost Or Do You Remember The New Yorker Cool Hunter Article From 1994?

So last night around 6:30 there were two guys on the Gold Line, each taking up a little two-seat row and leaning over and talking to each other. I don't know exactly how to describe them -- they were kind of rocker guys, not the verging-on-derelict type, but the day-job-as-a-file-clerk type. One was older and he wore a pin-striped suit jacket and had a set of kind of pirate-y earrings and the other was younger and all-right looking and he had on an army jacket.

I got on and sat next to one of them which caused him to move over next to the other guy, so that they were now talking to each other in a single row, which struck me as an improvement. I wasn't planning on listening to their conversation; I had my headphones on and everything, but then the older one started talking about how his girlfriend stabbed herself in the wrist with a fork, which was a little attention-getting, and then he said, "I'm not with her for her looks."

He said, "I mean, she's cute, but not as cute as I can get, but she loves me and that's a great feeling."

So at that point I was kind of stuck on them and their conversation and I heard how the older guy and the girl he was with the last time he ran into the younger guy got into a screaming fight that night and he wound up chucking a taco at her face and this was all because they couldn't score. And the younger guy said that he had taken down his profile off of MySpace because he got over it.

"Dude, I told you, I'm getting over everything." It was the kind of conversation where they would be talking about somebody and they'd say things like, "That's when he was a Scientologist."

It reminded me of something which I try as hard as I can to forget, which is that I have lost the goddamn thread. I have no clue what's cool and what's not.

Let me be perfectly clear. I myself was never cool. I tried, from 15 onward, to be cool, which is the least cool thing you can say about yourself. In everything, by which I mean in Conde Nast publications such as the New Yorker or W, I hunted for clues, and tried to put it all together. What I learned is that living in shitty New York apartments that you pay nothing for is cool and will always be cool, and that I will never be as cool as Chloe Sevigne, and that there are professional cool hunters out there, which is, I guess, about what you should expect if you are taking your cool guidelines from the New Yorker.

Obviously, again, I never succeeded in making any use of this information. Nevertheless, there was a brief shining moment, not so much coincidentally taking place in my college years, where I thought I knew what cool was. I was capable of making very precise gradations, and I was confident in those gradations.

Let's leave aside whether I was right or wrong; it's probable that I was getting it all wrong even then, and all the cool kids were really playing hacky-sack, which is something that I would have been prepared to describe as a crime against humanity.

The point is, somewhere around the time of the rise of Britney Spears, I completely lost the thread. Things that the New Yorker had never prepared me for were, it turned out, cool. And now I don't have a goddamn clue what is cool and what is not. Maybe that's just age -- maybe I adopted an aesthetic of cool back in 1995 and have never adapted since then. Likely. Maybe it's age in a different sense -- as I do more things just because I have to or want to my aesthetic judgments get blurry and diffuse. Maybe I was just wrong all the way along.

My point is this. I used to look at people on public transportation and feel like I knew what their story was. I could take the way they walked and dressed and talked and reconstruct a little world for them. That makes me sound like an asshole -- let me clarify that I was aware that there were limitations to my ability really to imagine other people's lives.

But I can't do that anymore. I'll be perfectly honest with you -- those guys on the Gold Line were not people that I would classify as cool. But that's probably my limitations talking. They thought they were cool. Maybe other people would think they were cool. I don't know.

The older guy got off, in goddamn Highland Park, and he stood there and made a jokey noise in the back of his throat at the younger guy, a like "rrrr" noise. What do I know.

The Juno Soundtrack: Cool Or Lame?

When I saw the movie Juno, I happened to be by myself. I was in a very crowded theater, sitting near the front (as I always like to do), and a couple sat next to me and started jabbering away during the opening sequence. "It's supposed to have great music!" the woman said. "Oh, yes, I know, I know!" the guy said.

"Hmmph!" I thought. I hate it when people talk during movies. I hate it when they think that just because there's no dialogue at some particular moment it's OK if they talk. It's not OK, guys. Just be quiet.

They continued to get on my nerves. At one point one of them said out loud, "Oh, she'll never go for that." Good lord. But you know, I had to say at the end that I agreed: the music was good! I liked it.

When I told my friends I liked the music to Juno, they said, "What?" "Really?" "I thought it sucked," and things like that. I had a twinge of 8th-grade style embarassment. Did I like something lame?

"But, The Velvet Undgerground!" I said. "That's song is great!"

"Cutesy guitar with awkward, reedy singing?" they said? "No."

I was curious enough to go to iTunes and check out the list and play some snippets to remind myself what it was like. Maybe I was hallucinating.

OK, so here's the story.

There are 19 songs. Four songs have coolness/excellence credentials I feel no one can counter, given the artists: The Kinks, Buddy Holly, Sonic Youth, and The Velvet Underground. Two are covers of classics: All the Young Dudes and Sea of Love.

A few songs are really short or instrumental.

Then things get interesting. We have six songs (!) from an artist named Kimya Dawson; we have two version of a song called "Anyone Else But You," and we have "Piazza, New York Catcher." All of these involve cutesy guitar and reedy singing.

Then, finally, we have "All I Want Is You," which is the very boppy opening song. "All I want is you will you be my bride? . . ." Remember?

OK. This last song (the first in the movie) is cute, but it's not cutesy; in fact the artist records children's songs. It's meant to be a nice, boppy, and kind of funny, song for kids. And you know, I like it. Not like I'm going to download it or buy it or whatever, but I think it's just a nice, simple, happy song. Like, "The Princess Bride" of songs.

What's a little more surprising is I also liked two of the cutesy/reedy songs: "Tire Swing" and "Anyone Else But You" are both real sing-songy, childlike, nice melodies. When I hear them I don't hear the style so much; I just hear the song. And I like it.

The rest of the cutesy songs, not so much; I don't know why. But we now have a full explanation of my initial judgment, especially if I'm right in thinking "Tire Swing" got more play in the movie than the other Dawson songs. If you put together these with the first batch, I clearly like a lot of this soundtrack.

Listening to the snippets on iTunes and from what I could remember, it seems a lot of the lyrics are simple and romantic. Not romantic in the teenage-crush-I-feel-like-I'm-going-to-die sort of way, but romantic in the simplest, "I like you" sort of way. In fact, The Velvet Underground's "I'm Sticking With You" fits in here perfectly; I remember how jarringly sweet it was to come upon that song at the end of the VU album with all its songs about heroin and sex.

Maybe I found that simple romanticism refreshing. On the other hand, maybe I wasn't paying attention and liked the songs in spite of that -- I do remember some sort of annoying lyrics, too. I'm not sure. But on the coolness question of Juno, I'm coming down on the side of coolness. It's not easy to write a nice simple melody, one that's not too catchy and not too elaborate, but just nice to listen to. And really, how could a soundtrack with Sonic Youth, The Kinks, and the Velvet Underground not be cool?