Birth-and death-of the cool.

Lisa Simpson and I have the same favorite album: Birth of the Cool, Miles Davis' iconic 1949 jazz collaboration with Gerry Mulligan and Gil Evans. It is also the title of a wonderful new book by Ted Gioia. How I loved the cool era of James Dean, Jack Kerouac and Chet Baker. It was my antidote to the square world that was listening to Patti Page's "How much is that doggie in the window?" The first hip tip I got when I was 18 at UCLA was about my Chevy convertible. I was told that never put the windows up when the top is down. Attitude was the name of the game if you wanted to be cool. The term only applied to people, not things like today when you see cool apps for your laptop. All my heroes when I was young were grownups like Gordie Howe, Ted Williams, Charlie Parker and yes, Albert Schweitzer, certainly not comic book heroes or kids like Harry Potter or Narnia. One of the coolest things I saw was in a WWII newsreel showing Erwin Rommel wearing sunglasses, the ultimate cool fashion accessory. When I see the troops in Iraq wearing sunglasses it all seems very sinister and they look like the Imperial Stormtroopers out of Star Wars. But the cool era is over even though I can still put on "Miles Ahead", "Kind of Blue", anything by Lester Young and re-read "Catcher in the rye". Now we live in the time of Twitter and titter and "How much is that iPad in the window".