The importance of not being visibly earnest

FRIDAY, DECEMBER 27, 2013
The Weekly Screed (#657)

The importance of not being visibly earnest

by David Benjamin

“Hipsters seeking Sel Rrose restaurant last month were startled to see…”
The New York Times, 9 Dec. ‘13

MADISON, Wis. — My first encounter with the term “hipster” in its new — pejorative — formulation was in a Paris wine bar, as I was struggling to converse with a 20-something quasi-New Yorker whose name now eludes me, but it was something like Aurora or Elantra. She was the date of a 50-something bookseller friend whose taste for nubile “interns” is both entertaining and unquenchable.

I’d started the exchange by uttering the word, “hipster,” to describe Rene Miller, who has reigned for almost two decades as one of Paris’ most gifted and prosperous street buskers. A bandleader and a blues/jazz/Dixieland guitar virtuoso, Rene emulates the great Tampa Red and maintains an effortless level of class that distinguishes him even in the world’s classiest city. He is, as I tried to articulate to Aurora (or Elantra), perhaps the world’s last living hipster. I was using the word in its classic sense, unaware that it had been reborn with a new meaning.

Like his forebears in the demimonde of improvisational music and all-night jams, Rene Miller speaks in an underground, in-crowd argot whose meaning is usually comprehensible — even familiar — to outsiders but which, when attempted by the uninitiated, sounds lame and labored. Rene is one of the few guys I know who can still, in the second decade of the 21st century, refer unself-consciously to other men as “cats,” to an apartment as a “crib,” to money as “friends in the bank,” to a beautiful girl as a “slinky piece of homework,” and to a new hairdo as “fried, dyed and swept to the side.” I can’t imagine Rene using the highly nuanced verb, “to dig” improperly, without pretense or error.

I mean, Rene is cool — straight from the fridge, Dad.

Bluesman Mezz Mezzrow, one of the hippest cats in the history of hipness, described the “hipster” as “someone who’s in the know, grasps everything, is alert.” The true, classic hipster is the apotheosis of cool, and to be cool, according to Norman Mailer, writing in 1957, “is to be equipped, and if you are equipped, it is more difficult for the next cat who comes along to put you down.”

When I think about the sort of “cool cat,” who’s impossible to put down, I think of the musicians who’ve informed Rene’s style, going back all the way to King Oliver and Louis Armstrong but scrolling forward to Ellington on the eighty-eights and all his righteous sidemen, to Coltrane, Miles Davis and Stan Getz, to Monk, Ella, Anita, Carmen, Blossom Dearie, Chico Hamilton, Jobim, Tatum and Bill Evans and the just-passed Jim Hall. Yeah, and Count Basie, too.

“One more time.”

Most of us, if we’re not into jazz, learned “cool” from the movies, where, of course, the hipster who has set the tone for generations is James Bond, especially Connery but Roger Moore was passable, and Brosnan? Hey, the man walked through a luxury hotel in wet pajamas and a two-year beard, ending up with a suite and Halle Berry. That is cool. But now, oh my. The current Bond, alas, slid down the thermometer — no stops — all the way to plain old cold, leaving everyone to wonder if the movies will ever be hip again. I mean, Ben Stiller? Keanu Reeves?

Which brings me back to Aurora’s version of “hipster.” She described this creature as a mere poseur to hipness, the sort of hepcat imposter whom Holden Caulfield simply labeled “phony,” who more recently came to be known as “yuppie scum.” Aurora reviled these fakes and fashionistas with such heat that she betrayed herself as one of them, apostate perhaps but haunted by shame. I felt fortunate that I was too old, too iconoclastic and — maybe — too cool to even recognize these new-breed metrosexuals. Whenever I think about youthful trend-followers trying to dress, flirt and carouse their way into the circle of those who set the trend while not knowing there is one, I hum Frank Zappa’s lines: “Every town must have a place where phony hippies meet,/ Pysychedelic dungeons popping up on every street…”

As Elantra inveighed against her peers, I couldn’t help pondering: OK, who, besides jazzmen (and jazzy dames), James Bond and Babs Gonzales, have perpetuated the culture of cool over the years? Who have set the standard for those few of us hip enough to get wise and know our groceries before the long goodbye.

Calvin Coolidge notwithstanding, our coolest president ever was Jack Kennedy, followed closely by Barack Obama. Recently, in the Times, novelist Ishmael Reed wrote, “Democrats have more of an affinity for jazz than Republicans. Even Jimmy Carter, not everybody’s idea of a hipster, invited Dizzy Gillespie to the White House. But among the Democrats, President Obama is the one who comes closest to the style of bebop called ‘the Cool.’…”

Also cool, with his sax, his red-light childhood and his back-seat bunnies, was Bill Clinton. But Hillary? Sorry. She might become the first girl president, but she couldn’t hold Eartha Kitt’s Cadillac keys. Meanwhile, as Prof. Reed says, “the Cool” is not in the GOP’s DNA. There hasn’t been a cool Republican president since Teddy Roosevelt.

Not even Ronald Reagan. Coming from Hollywood (after Dixon, Ill.) didn’t necessarily make the Gipper hipper, especially after he stooled out his SAG sidekicks to the cubes from HUAC. Besides, in just about every movie he ever made, Reagan got outcooled by another guy — usually Peter Lawford (JFK’s brother-in-law). I mean, you want to see cool, check out Lawford in Good News, winning the game, getting the girl (June Allyson) and then leading the entire Tait College student body in the “Varsity Drag” — without even breaking a sweat.

Sure, Reagan tried hard, but that was more leather than he ever burned.

Dig?