HW 34- The Cool Pose and Various Approaches to Life Rooted in Class, Race, Gender, Age, etc.

As has been stated before, both myself, my peers, and known scholars, cool is not one definite state or thing. It is in fact fluid, constantly flowing and changing and the tighter you try to grab a hold of it, the more it slips through your fingers. Cool applies to one thing and one thing alone, and that is the cool pose you learned growing up. To clarify, the "cool pose" is really basically what you learned to admire growing up. For some rich white kid in Connecticut it might be to wear expensive clothes and be successful, that would be cool. Meanwhile, so black kid from the projects might find it right to be with a lot of women and goof around. This is the problem of the cool pose, one version cannot be held or compared properly to another.

Look at the Fresh Prince of Bel Air. This silly sitcom of the 90's shows two very different black cultures, the established upper-class who had to work for it and the youth who seem to live in a completely different place. In this show, we are led to believe that Will Smith's character (Will) is very cool and hip and fresh and poppin' and all that jazz. However, despite this emphasis on Will being so cool, he is often shown to be wrong at the end of the day. The culture class shows that even though he thinks he is cool, he is in fact a "fool" of sorts. However what the show never says is that his version of cool is not cool to the Banks (the family he is staying with). However, it is not within their rights to truly say that what he is doing is not cool. The times the show worked best was not when the two cultures clashed, but rather when they saw the problems in their perceptions of cool and looked past them. Even better were the episodes where cool was not a factor but they instead thought to understand the way things worked in the world and how they had been previously looking at them with bias. These episodes showed not only the cool pose but how it could be disintegrated to a greater mutual understanding.

The cool pose also changes over time. What is cool when you are a kid is not always the same as what is cool later in life, in fact it rarely is. I remember when I was little I was (In my opinion and clearly biased memory) quite popular. I was always hanging out with friends almost every day and I always had something on the agenda to do. However I remember what made me and my friends cool was that we had cool toys and cool video games. As I got older though, it was no longer cool to have toys and video games remained. In fact, upon reflection, video games have remained a constant of many cool poses for quite some time. Going back though, having toys was no longer cool. Instead, being on sports teams was cool. After a while this too stopped being cool. It wasn't uncool, but it did not hold the same weight it once did. Now it was cool to hang out on the streets and skateboard or smoke. Now over the years, I have considered myself to be cool at various points but I have also disagreed with what the "cool pose" of the time is. This is where other factors come into play, such as your family, friends, and upbringing. With these, you van break it down so much that it is impossible to determine who is a clear cooler and who is not. I now find myself in a very different cool pose than the mainstream "cool pose". Does this make either of us uncool? We cannot judge, nor can anybody else, because if I were to judge my own cool then I would be holding it against a different standard than somebody else held theirs when assembling it, another flaw in the cool pose.

However, these different examples of the cool pose clashing are also in a way invalid. Somewhere out there, I know that their is somebody who is a mesh of many cools. For example, there is probably a rich kid from Bel Air who hangs out somewhere like the streets of Compton and comes home and can be formal. For them, both Will and the Banks would be cool, or at the least, acceptable. By that same regard I am sure there is somebody who reads comic books, smokes, and skateboards and would find both the mainstream cool posers and me to be cool. Cool is too abstract a concept to try and define. Instead of define, all we can try and do is break it down and eventually get everything to be an equal ground. However, this would lead to one thing that I can think, and that alone. If everybody was truly to experience the same cool pose they would have to be raised in identical housing in a communist society where everybody is given one option and one alone. However this is not fair either, because even if unanimous, somebody would be given a higher authority in making a certain decision that would change their cool pose a little bit and would make the cool pose change for somebody and therefore everybody. At the end of the day, the cool pose is inevitable but not necessarily a bad thing. In fact, through it we are given diversity and choice and the best thing we can truly hope for in ridding the cool pose from the world is accepting it and the people who use it (therefore accepting everybody). And that would be cool.