THE CREDIBILITY OF COOL

People seem very concerned with being cool.  Even the people who say they aren't concerned with being cool are really concerned with being cool.  Or, at least, not appearing to be uncool.  Because, while "cool" is something one might justifiably sneer at, "uncool" is really a thing that one still wants to avoid.

Yet, when cool is in the clothes and music and mannerisms and - sweet valley high! -  the gosh-forsaken blather that passes for "street lingo", it all seems a bit of an effort to truly make oneself cool.  And surely the point of being cool is that you don't really try, you just are.  It's a conundrum, my friend, and one I am happy to wrestle with for you.

If you are struggling under the pressure of emulating coolness, I would like to recommend this eye-opening solution:  the DVD audio description track.  You know the one, it's the descriptions for the partially sighted or, as my old TV boss used to considerately call it, "subtitles for the blind".

What the audio description track does is it lets the movie run with a narrator chipping in now and then to paint a picture with words so that those less fortunate in the eye stakes can still experience the glory of whatever it is that Lindsay Lohan is doing on screen.  I guess that narrator's job is to be as unobtrusive as possible, and thus they use this awful monotone.  Really there's just no inflection there.  You wonder if they're just employing corpses to do this stuff, really, it's that bad.  Remember Ferris Bueller's teacher?  Yes, him.  Always him.

Nothing quite destroys the credibility of cool as when that soulless-voiced narrator butts in on an exciting nightclub sequence in a movie and explains, "There are a number of people talking and dancing while wearing hip, punky outfits."  It's like boiling down cool until all you have left is some terrible, terrible residue clinging to your fingertips.  And no matter how much you try to regain your cool mojo, that residue just won't wash off.