"Life Stories: profiles from the New Yorker"

[fiefoe]

The Coolhunt (Baysie Wightman and DeeDee Gordon) / Macolm Gladwell (1997)

One can usually count on Gladwell for nice monikers ('the Lewis and Clark of cool')  and deft character sketches ('Piney clearly knows: she is twenty-four and used to work with the Beastie Boys and has the formidable self-possession of someone who is not only cool herself but whose parents were cool';  'the halls (at Reebok headquarters) are filled with... young, determinedly athletic people').

Two sound-bites on Coolhunting:

• It's now about chase and flight - designers and retailers and the mass consumer giving chase to the elusive prey of street cool - and the rise of coolhunting as a profession.
• Coolhunting represents the ascendancy, in the marketplace, of high school.
  

This is a snapshot of cool circa 1997 (!): Among male New York trendsetters: North Face jackets, rubber and latex, khakis, and the rock band Kiss. Among female trendsetters: ska music, old-lady clothing, and cyber tech. In Chicago, snowboarding is huge among trendsetters of both sexes and all ages.

The ending of the article is undeniably cool: When she was in the New York Niketown ... recently, she says, she started getting light-headed and freaked out. "It's cult, cult, cult. It was like, 'Hello, are we all drinking the Kool-Aid here?'"
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Man Goes to See a Doctor (Max Grosskurth) / Adam Gopnik (1998)

Now for something quaint: (My pyschoanalysis) may therefore be worth recalling, if only in the way that it would be interesting to hear the experiences of the last man mesmerized or the last man to be bled with leeches.

Among his doctor's 'thunderously obvious maxims':

• The whole speech, I thought, was so profound that it could be parsed and highlighted like one of those dog-eared assigned texts you find on the reserve shelf in undergraduate libraries: Artists suffered from narcissism, which made them susceptible to banter, which they could overcome by resourcefulness, which might lead them to-well, to take up genre studies.
• I mentioned a famous woman intellectual who had recently got into legal trouble: hadn't she been well defended? "Yes, but the trouble is that the guns were pointing the wrong way, like the British at Singapore." 
• No one cares! ... It's O.K. That doesn't mean you shouldn't do it; it means you should do it, somehow, for its own sake, without illusions. Just write, just live, and don't care too much yourself. No one cares. It's just banter.
• Indifference and armor could get you through anything.
  
• In retrospect, life has many worthwhile aspects. Not all or even most aspects. And not beautiful or meaningful or even tolerable. Just worthwhile, with its double burden of labor and reward. Life has worth - value, importance - and it takes a while to get there.
  

Robert Motherwell, "The Raft of Medusa"