Once its cool, its square

Spent weekend in PO. Lucy's MetalMania/get out of jail party. Climbed Green Mountain. Applied on Thursday to Spiro's, applying at Metro market today. Friends of the Library book sale, account at bookstore next to West 5.

Finished The Birth of the Cool, it ended with Warhol, Velvets, Seeger, and Dylan. Good pop culture history, altho the original concept of cool was something unpopular but savy. Cool was no longer cool once it was popular to be cool, you dig?? Same with punk, the rebellious outsider attitude can't exist along with mass acceptance of even the superficial, marketable aspects of the movement. Cool, like punk, was an attitude, and once it was defined, emulated, and commodified it ceased to exist. Thats not accurate though, the statement "punk is dead" is not accurate. It just evolved into new forms. Once punk was popular, it became neccesary to move onto new frontiers in order to maintain its precept of non-conformity. So it is with cool. As image of the hip beret and sunglasses clad jazz musician became trendy, trivial and stereotyped, cool moved elsewhere. Now we have a meaning of cool that is somewhat opposed to the original. What is cool is what is trendy. Once enough people see how cool something in, it isn't cool anymore, but that meaning has been lost.
The really cool people are not labeled as such, they are ahead of the trends. The period between something being cool and countercultural, and the commericialized selling of that image has grown shorter and shorter. But cool lives on, the punk attitude lives on, the visionaries stay one step ahead, and the market continues to coopt countercultual values for maintainence of the status quo.