What Is Cool

Download or read book The Book of Cool written by Marianne Taylor and published by Running Press. This book was released on 2009-06-30 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: From jazz music to wearing sunglasses indoors, “cool” has always been the ultimate social label. The craving for this acceptance has powered popular culture for the last hundred years. Fashion, music, cars, pop idols, attitudes, and even some schools and parents, have been labeled Cool. But by whom? The truth is: no one in particular. And then there is the whimsical nature of being Cool: The arbiters of taste and style are so eager to pronounce something Cool, that something immediately becomes uncool as the masses rush to adopt it, in order to be Cool first. Something or someone can be so “In” they quickly become “So Five Minutes Ago” before spiraling downward to “Out.” And then, like nerds and bell-bottoms, something can be so “Out”, it's “In.” (That's cool.) Taylor details the history of Cool, spotlighting its current manifestations. She charts the evolution of Cool from the sidewalks to the boardrooms, separating who creates cool from who merely markets it.

Download or read book Black Cool written by Rebecca Walker and published by Catapult. This book was released on 2012-02-07 with total page 193 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Soft Skull Press proudly offers this tenth-anniversary edition of visionary essays exploring the glory and power of Black Cool, curated by thought leader and bestselling author Rebecca Walker, with a foreword by Henry Louis Gates, Jr. Originally published in 2012, this collection of illuminating essays exploring the ineffable and protean aesthetics of Black Cool has been widely cited for its contribution to much of the contemporary discussion of the influence of Black Cool on culture, politics, and power around the world. Curated by Rebecca Walker, and drawing on her lifelong study of the African roots of Black Cool and its expression within the African diaspora, this collection identifies ancestral elements often excluded from colloquial understandings of Black Cool: cultivated reserve, coded resistance, intentional audacity, transcendent intellectual and spiritual rigor, intentionally disruptive eccentricity, and more. With essays by some of America’s most innovative Black thinkers, including visual artist Hank Willis Thomas, writer and filmmaker dream hampton, MacArthur-winning photographer Dawoud Bey, fashion legend Michaela angela Davis, and critical theorist and cultural icon bell hooks, Black Cool offers an excavation of the African roots of Cool and its hitherto undefined legacy in American culture and beyond. This edition includes a new introduction from Rebecca Walker, a powerful meditation on the genesis, creation, completion, and subsequent impact of this landmark volume over the last decade.

Download or read book The Origins of Cool in Postwar America written by Joel Dinerstein and published by University of Chicago Press. This book was released on 2017-05-17 with total page 550 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Cool. It was a new word and a new way to be, and in a single generation, it became the supreme compliment of American culture. The Origins of Cool in Postwar America uncovers the hidden history of this concept and its new set of codes that came to define a global attitude and style. As Joel Dinerstein reveals in this dynamic book, cool began as a stylish defiance of racism, a challenge to suppressed sexuality, a philosophy of individual rebellion, and a youthful search for social change. Through eye-opening portraits of iconic figures, Dinerstein illuminates the cultural connections and artistic innovations among Lester Young, Humphrey Bogart, Robert Mitchum, Billie Holiday, Frank Sinatra, Jack Kerouac, Albert Camus, Marlon Brando, and James Dean, among others. We eavesdrop on conversations among Jean-Paul Sartre, Simone de Beauvoir, and Miles Davis, and on a forgotten debate between Lorraine Hansberry and Norman Mailer over the "white Negro" and black cool. We come to understand how the cool worlds of Beat writers and Method actors emerged from the intersections of film noir, jazz, and existentialism. Out of this mix, Dinerstein sketches nuanced definitions of cool that unite concepts from African-American and Euro-American culture: the stylish stoicism of the ethical rebel loner; the relaxed intensity of the improvising jazz musician; the effortless, physical grace of the Method actor. To be cool is not to be hip and to be hot is definitely not to be cool. This is the first work to trace the history of cool during the Cold War by exploring the intersections of film noir, jazz, existential literature, Method acting, blues, and rock and roll. Dinerstein reveals that they came together to create something completely new—and that something is cool.

Download or read book Spit written by Mary Batten and published by . This book was released on 2019 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "Spit uncovers the secrets secreting in the many mouths on the globe. From humans to cows to vampire bats to spitting spiders, this book looks at spit from many different angles to provide readers with the fascinating world found in this gross-out subject."--

Download or read book Just Cool It! written by David Suzuki and published by Greystone Books Ltd. This book was released on 2017-04-22 with total page 196 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Climate change is the most important crisis humanity has faced, but we still confront huge barriers to resolving it. So, what do we do, and is there hope for humanity? The problem itself is complex, and there’s no single solution. But by understanding the barriers to resolving global warming and by employing a wide range of solutions—from shifting to clean energy to planting trees to reforming agricultural practices—we can get the world back on track. Just Cool It is David Suzuki at his most passionate. In this book, he offers a comprehensive look at the current state of climate science and knowledge and the many ways to resolve the climate crisis, imploring us to do what’s necessary to live in a better, cleaner future. When enough people demand action, change starts happening—and this time, it could be monumental.

Download or read book Muslim Cool written by Su'ad Abdul Khabeer and published by NYU Press. This book was released on 2016-12-06 with total page 285 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Interviews with young Muslims in Chicago explore the complexity of identities formed at the crossroads of Islam and hip hop This groundbreaking study of race, religion and popular culture in the 21st century United States focuses on a new concept, “Muslim Cool.” Muslim Cool is a way of being an American Muslim—displayed in ideas, dress, social activism in the ’hood, and in complex relationships to state power. Constructed through hip hop and the performance of Blackness, Muslim Cool is a way of engaging with the Black American experience by both Black and non-Black young Muslims that challenges racist norms in the U.S. as well as dominant ethnic and religious structures within American Muslim communities. Drawing on over two years of ethnographic research, Su'ad Abdul Khabeer illuminates the ways in which young and multiethnic US Muslims draw on Blackness to construct their identities as Muslims. This is a form of critical Muslim self-making that builds on interconnections and intersections, rather than divisions between “Black” and “Muslim.” Thus, by countering the notion that Blackness and the Muslim experience are fundamentally different, Muslim Cool poses a critical challenge to dominant ideas that Muslims are “foreign” to the United States and puts Blackness at the center of the study of American Islam. Yet Muslim Cool also demonstrates that connections to Blackness made through hip hop are critical and contested—critical because they push back against the pervasive phenomenon of anti-Blackness and contested because questions of race, class, gender, and nationality continue to complicate self-making in the United States.

Download or read book What is Cool? written by Marlene K. Connor and published by Agate Bolden. This book was released on 2003 with total page 232 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A profound, personally engaged anatomy of the codes that have shaped, and continue to shape, black manhood. Marlene Kim Connor reveals cool as a vital code of behaviors and attitudes that plays an often disregarded role in shaping the conception of manhood among young black boys. In this thoughtful, impassioned and provocative book, Connor uncovers cool s history, explores its essence, and explains why, even though it deserves praise, cool often becomes an insidious force affective black American life today."