I am not cool.
This bothers me more than it should. After all, we can't all be cool. Being cool is a lot of hard work unless you're lucky and your hobbies happen to be deemed cool by the general public. Mostly I don't really care. But sometimes I notice that I am not cool, and it hits me hard. I will hear about some gathering of interesting people, or some trend that is current, or even just look at what everyone's wearing, and blam! I smack up against the fact that I am totally not cool. I hate when this happens.
What I can't figure out is why I am so uninterested in the things cool people are interested in. I wouldn't mind if it was just this year's cool thing that left me cold but it's every year. Okay, not in the 80's. I was pretty damned cool in the early 80's if I do say so myself. But that lasted, oh, five years tops, and since then I've been way out of the stream of fashion and hipness.
Part of it is my hobbies, or interests, are so uncool as to be incomprehensible to most of my friends. For instance, I have a deep, abiding interest in 18th century English literature and culture, particularly from the female perspective. I am very well read in some areas (novels, drama, clothing, architecture, religion, social customs) and merely a dilettante in others (economics and politics, although I understand how and where they had an impact on novels, drama, clothing, etc.), but overall I think I can fairly claim to be knowledgable about the Age of Enlightenment and the segue into Romanticism. Dry stuff compared to knowing the latest unsigned bands, isn't it?
Part of it that easily half of my friends are considered cool by the outside world and I feel just a tad jealous about it. It's truly keen to see them appear on the covers of magazines, and inside the covers, and on book jackets, and quoted in the paper, but my altruism occasionally bumps up against my secret conviction that I am not getting my fair share of the limelight. This is quite natural if ignoble. I remind myself that they have an interest in something that has always slightly revolted me: contemporary life. It's cool to be into the 40's, 50's, 60's, even 70's. I am thinking those were singularly ugly times to be alive. About the only thing I think is cool from those eras are the cars. So I am way out of step, and likely to remain that way.
There is one aspect of this century I relish: Japanese kitsch. I actually like most everything about Japanese art and design but I'm particularly fond of the Sanrio products, manga, and their television shows like Iron Chef. So I'm not totally averse to modern culture in general, just my modern culture, at least as far as being able to celebrate its uniqueness like the cool people do.
It may be that my dislike of contemporary American culture is rooted in my early exposure to too many Hanna-Barbera cartoons. They were awful. I used to hate how flat and repetitious the backgrounds were, much like my life. I wanted to be surrounded by beauty; instead, I was surrounded by naugahyde, avocado and yellow color schemes, polyester, imitation everything. There was no depth to those cartoons, just small puffy clouds and washed out skies and the merest suggestion of hills in the background while in the foreground animated lions and turtles worked on obliterating or humiliating their natural enemies. Comic books were much more satisfying, but I don't think they had as big an impact.
No, I suppose I can't blame cartoons for this malaise. I simply don't find any facet of contemporary culture terribly attractive, although I'm very fond of the Web. I like living in the here and now, of course. I wouldn't want to live without penicillen, or aspirin, or fluoride, and all that. I just feel this intense pull towards 18th century artifacts and literature, and I regret not being able to devote more time to this. If I lived in Paris I would haunt the flea markets and St. Germaine. If I lived in London I would be down at Portobello Road and Camden Locks all the time. Here, I tend to gravitate to the few French antiques shops in San Francisco which are far too expensive. After a good wander through them, I go home and read World of Interiors or Period Houses magazine and just think about how I'd do up my own home. My dream house would be a hotel particuliere in a major European city, possibly on the outskirts of town. It wouldn't have to be big, maybe only a dozen rooms or so. I'd fill them with French furniture, English fabrics, American folk art, European ceramics and glassware, and in back there would be a Japanese garden with a small pagoda or folly of some sort to retire to in the heat of summer.
Now that would be cool.
