(Part one)
(Part two)
So anyway, at this same picnic, you remember, the one by the river with the famous person at it, one of the hosts, I’ll call her WAF, was sitting across from me at our picnic table full of yummy stuff, when, out of the blue, and with several other friends around, asked me, “"Jamie, how is it that you’ve stayed so cool?"
Now this was both embarrassing and dumbfounding and flattering and also felt a bit deflating in that it referred in to my relative agedness in the group (I was 5-20 years older than everyone else there, a fact that I really wouldn’’t have thought about – especially not the 20-year-gap part! – without that reminder). She went on to say that maybe it has something to do with not having kids, that, childless, I’m more able to keep up with pop culture. But then someone else, with kids, (said person, it’s worth noting, is regionally famous) argued that he is in touch with youth culture not in spite of but because of having kids who participate in said culture.
WAF concurred that my childlessness wasn’’t it, not entirely anyway, but didn’t come up with many other explanations of my “"cool"”-ness. (Yes, of course I have to put it in quotes – what am I going to say, that I really am so damn cool?) If I’’m being as honest as I can be with myself, I’’d say that however cool I am has a lot to do with, in middle and high school, being not cool (not altogether uncool, but definitely somewhere in between the cool and the "“losers,"” and when you’re not cool, you’’re not, you might as well be a loser, and very few people think of themselves as one of the losers, just as no one thinks he/she’s below average intelligence.)
Watching cool happen and how ridiculous and powerful and awful it was/is (at my school it was based purely on athletic prowess and aloofness) and then going to college and suddenly being thought of as cool for a number of reasons involving everything from my grey Hush Puppies to my love for Joy Division to my . . . heck, I don’t really know, I was just suddenly way cooler at a big university in New York City than I was at a small, preppy, private school in Albany. It certainly had something to do with finding a niche – in my high school, there simply wasn’t a niche that existed in which I would’ve been "cool."
But what do I mean by “cool”? What did WAF (whom I consider both cool and hip in the most positive senses of the words) mean? I think we both mean a certain ease in the world, a certain ability to interact with a lot of different people comfortably. There are cultural and aesthic factors, too, of course, but, “easy, ease, easily.” These are words that bespeak (the good or at least innocuous kind of) cool. An ease attached to a certain hipness? I’d say sometimes, but not always – I don’t think one has to be hip to be cool.
But there are so many different kinds of cool. If you asked ten people to name a famous person they thought was cool, I think you’d not only get ten answers but that the answerers would argue amongst themselves about it forever: "“You actually think Jack White is cool?!?” “Dude, he’s way cooler than Jack Black, who’’s like a total sellout"” . . . . Brad? Angelina? Brangelina? You tell me. Matt Damon – I say yes. Ben Affleck – I say NO.
“Sellout,” now there’’s a term with hip/hipster connotations big time. Every hipster wants not to be a sellout as much as s/he wants to be thought of as not trying to be cool, but also wants to be adored, admired, and paid, for being hip – for being a hip “artist” of one kind or another – and most of the time ends up being quite willing to sell whatever it is he or she has to sell, quite completely “out.”
David Byrne comes to mind as someone who has sold his talent over and over again, gotten way too old, and yet still maintains some hipster cred. Brian Eno, too. I suppose a list of those elder statesmen anomalies might help: among the living, Jonathan Richman, Leonard Cohen, and Christopher Walken come quickly to mind. (All men – hmmmm.) Chirstopher Walken is just a freak of cool/hip nature. It just pours from him in waves – unassuming, graceful waves. But of course, I’m sure many would disagree. Perhaps a list of those who were hip and cool but faded, and those among the famous and successful who never were (Seinfeld, Leno, et al) either might also be useful. Readers?
But back to this definition of cool in terms of ease, of a graceful, seemingly effortless way of moving through the world. By this definition, the Conchords boys aren’t cool at all. Both are nearly always awkward or uncomfortable, as one would imagine the actual Bret and Jemaine and the creators of the show to be, too. But yet they are, or, at least a year ago they were, very, very “hip”. Which is not to say popular, but liked by a particular set of trend-setting, supposedly status-quo-busting, icon smashing young adults.
Their awkwardness, their mismatched clothes, have a geek charm, an anti-jock, anti-winner, winsomeness akin to the high school “drama fag” who the girls always loved, if platonically, and the jocks always hated, because they thought that the “fag” was just to get laid and was succeeding. The drama fag was uncool to the max, and not hip, yet somehow liked by girls, he (and the drama fag is a “he” in my day anyway – girls who were in plays didn’t face the same stigma by any means) had a certain dorky style, an I-don’t-know-what, as the French say. Or perhaps that’s just the way I’d like to remember it.
But now I wonder, am I too easily equating the adjective “hip” with the noun “hipster?” I would argue that the characters on the Flight of the Conchords are neither hip nor hipsters. They are not looked at or up to, are not emulated, are not listened to, and generally are failures, and not even tragically hip ones. And they lack the essential poseur-ness of the hipster – they may want to be cool and look cool but they certainly don’t seem to be doing the research or putting on any attitude (or at least, not successfully) that would render them either hip or hipster. And they sure don’t have the innate skills to carry it off. No, they’re two nerdy musicians. It’s the show itself, in its irony and archness and connection with a certain element of pop culture (the McSweeneys/Weezer element, if you will) that is both hip- and hipster-related. It’s the writers and producer and the actual musician-actors themselves who are that; it’s the entity that lurks beneath and elevates the dorky failures (and the culture that grants them “hip” status) that Dan resents.
Right this minute a popular figure came to mind who plays both sides of this fence, manages to be the hipster (or at least lounge lizard) behind the scenes and the dork and somehow still the hipster in front of the camera. I’’m not a big fan, and I haven’’t watched him that much, but Conan O’’Brien is whom I’’m thinking of. What do you think? Some famous people are dork-genius types of a more-or-less hip variety (Beck, David Sedaris, Jon Stewart); some are cool (Clooney, Clooney, Clooney), but rarely does anyone pull off both. Again, not that I love Conan, but he treads that line very skillfully. And here, again, just coming to mind now, is the king of the Mantheon to tie it all together. He’’s cool, he’’s uncool. He’’s so very hip without being hip at all. He’’s a dork genius, but also a song-and-dance man. He is, of course, Stephen Colbert.
***
(I find interesting to note, looking back at this, that nearly all of my references to hip and cool have been male. I’m not sure why that is, certainly it isn’t because women aren’t cool or don’t participate in hipster culture and its snobbery. Liz Phair: once very cool and very hip, then a sell-out extraordinaire, a singer-songwriter who , a couple of years ago, went so far for a buck as to let her songs be written and her image, even her voice be packaged by, Avril Lavigne’s people, as I recall it, in an attempt at pop superstardom and it’s accompanying cashflow, is now trying to revive her hip-cool cred by re-issuing her masterpiece debut, "“Exile in Guyville."”)
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But wait, there’s more: “"Wifey" and "“eJanel"” both wrote interesting comments on fame the other day.
Wifey:
“…that being said, isn’t it time to admit that you ARE famous, here in the valley? Jamie, for everyone who doesn’t know, was the "connection" in an area-wide radio game of two strangers trying to figure out how they are connected. Jamie Berger, Famous Connector.
That counts for at least 3 seconds of fame.”
For those of you who didn’t quite follow this, Monte, the fabulous morning guy on The River, WRSI, a radio station in our area, does a segment in which he takes two callers at once and tries to get them to find one person, place or thing that connects them (Monte was the “regionally famous” guy at the picnic, fyi. Monte, what do you call the game again? “One degree of” somethingorother?). Last week two people called in and it ended up that I was the person who connected them, thus winning them a bunch of North Country Naturals soda, I believe.
Two friends contacted me, one by text, one by phone, thrilled to tell me I had been what I believe Malcolm Gladwell would call a connector. Perhaps I am, but that doesn’t make me famous. It just means I know a lot of people and talk a lot. Indeed, the three seconds on the radio are the only arguable moments of “fame” there. And, yes, that did give me a tickle.
Now, eJanel wrote, “I still hate your wifey for having met David Bowie once. Just so you know.” (Whether my wifey and the commenter Wifey are one and the same, well, I’m beginning to wonder.). eJanel’s response is akin to those who heard my name (not even my voice) on the radio and were tickled: that is, even fame by association is exciting (in this case, hearing a DJ say my name because I know two random people). eJanel is jealous of Wifey for even coming in contact with a famous person she apparently reveres. It’’s almost as if a smidge of the fame rubbed off on Wifey, somehow, too. And we all know the people who love to drop names, as if, indeed, the fame of their acquaintences elevates them in our eyes. And, in fact, sadly, it often does, but, at least for me, said behavior also disgusts and repulses. (Yet another reason I’m trying not to mention too many names in these fame posts.)
(NOTE: If you notice any missing apostrophes of quotation marks, there’s something wacky going on with the interface here, and I tried to go back and fix them one by one, but I’m just not that good a proofreader.)
