Bar Stories

What happens when a local screenwriter steps up to the bar to tell a few stories? Bar Stories is a rib tickling, crowd pleasing, gin soaked, seat of the bar stool ride through movies, pop culture, and fiction.

Category: Storyteller

THE BIRTH OF COOL

Feb 08

3:19 PM

The idea of cool has been kicking around for a long time and everyone knowns what it means. Cool is an aesthetic, an attitude, and an amorphous but defining quality that is often difficult to explain, but easily recognizable once it is teased from the ether.

The Internet is full of cool places like Cool Site of the Day and Engines that aggregate cool like Daily Candy. Cool can also can be found on the library shelf. Any up and coming hipster worth his coolness can turn to the pages of the book Birth of the Cool: California Art, Design, and Culture at MidcenturyTo examine his roots.

In the book author Elizabeth Armstrong collects contributions and explores the beginnings of Fifties modernist influences on the West Coast in art, music, film, and architecture. A pretty nifty trick.

Besides being an aesthetic and an artifact of culture, individuals and music can also embody cool and nothing is cooler than Jazz and nobody is cooler than Miles Davis. Davis' legendary album Birth Of The Cool was released by Capitol Records in 1957 with music from 3 recording sessions and the album is timeless cool and even inspired a whole school of jazz musicians in California known as the "cool school.

Objects, movies, and fashion can be cool. Take Ray Ban Wayfarers, Messenger bags, Cloverfield, and other stuff. This type of cool often translates into marketing strategies targeted at the teensy segment of the culture and can lead to consumerism and the rise of materialism to enhance prestige and status based on affluence. And that's not cool!

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