What Is Cool? Or: These Boots Are Made for Climbing

Making art isn’t hard when you’re a little kid.

When you’re a little kid it’s expected of you.

Like running in the playground, you paint pictures, you sing songs at the top of your lungs. Mom or dad puts on a song and there you are shaking your little booty. There is no thought to it. No thought stopping it. You just. Do it.

These things change with age, of course. You can paint as an adult. Singing is also something adults do. But the contexts become everything. Where you do these things and when becomes tightly defined. The limitations quickly clear, the rules definite. Karaoke bar, yes. Front porch, not so much. If it doesn’t pay the bills it’s a hobby. If it isn’t a hobby, if it’s more than that, you’re making people uncomfortable. Keep your warbling to the shower, if you please.

But even those permitted to get creative across the widest array of contexts, that is, the established artists, the professional actor, the published author — they make money from it, ergo we take them seriously — are often careful not to claim they “make art”. In my late 20s and much of my 30s, when so much of what I read and reread was by a Japanese bloke named Haruki Murakami, a line of his from an interview impressed me deeply. The journalist referred to the writer as an artist, but Murakami said he didn’t see himself that way. How did he see himself? Simply as a novelist. An artist was so highfalutin, Murakami seemed to suggest. Novelist, however - Murakami, as I understood him, was implying that it’s like a person who builds novels, a craftsperson, an artisan, like a bread-maker or an architect. I simply make things, Murakami was signalling to this journalist and the many fans who would be tuning in to hear the man’s every word. Which is of course true. And for many years this became a lodestar for me. The humility of it. Coming from this world-renowned author. In my little cave, I imagined it, in secret, mostly, I would build these things called novels. Just like Haruki Murakami does. Oh ho hum.

The only problem with what Murakami-san was saying is that it’s also absolute baloney. As if novels like Kafka on the Shore or Norwegian Wood weren’t aspiring (whatever you think of them, or the man who wrote them) to the literary heights of Capital A Art but exactement.

It’s one of the oldest games of them all. You can make art, but you dare not say you do. Like the movie star whose every clothing choice and gesture is calibrated to the utmost cool but who would be the very first to scoff at such a word. The calculated indifference of the one who cares the most.

Jon, my mother would ask me, in slow, painful, one-word-at-a-time manner when I was a teenager: What. Is. Cool? God I hated her doing that. Asking that. Not only because the question was a bald-faced judgement of what I cared about then. But also, because the very asking of the question revealed my mother’s utter inability to get that cool was the kind of thing that the minute you asked what it was, you lost hold of it entirely.

A bit like trying to explain the difference between a locally owned cafe with character and the Starbucks equivalent to one who labels the former as hipster, and frequents the latter, point card at the ready.

At 47 I’m not nearly as under the sway of cool as I once was, or certainly not of the kind of cool my mother so feared influenced me (locally owned cafes notwithstanding). What’s coolest to me now would have been terribly nerdy to my teenaged self rendering the word pretty meaningless. In the juvenile, Hollywood (leather jacket, motorcycle and tattoo: ie Tom Hardy, ie his new movie) sense of the word I’m probably closer to my judgmental (and proudly nerdy) mother today than the Pump Up the Volume Christian Slater heartthrob version I was never going to be anyway.

What’s cool to me now is art. It’s landing upon the things I missed in my adolescence and even my 20s, out of ignorance, out of insecurity or simply because I just didn’t know. Like the Smiths. Or Carole King’s Tapestry, that masterpiece, which is so fucking cool because it so simply is (it’s not simple at all, of course, it’s layered and it’s got levels, highs, lows, promise, hope, despair — like all great albums) and because it was my teenaged niece, singer and artist in her own right, who put me on to it. Art is Robert Downey Jr. who, as Mark Ruffalo pointed out in their recent Variety interview, need never work again for money thanks to Marvel fame, but acted his ass off anyway in Oppenheimer this year because he’s the real deal - as he so supremely proved years before he was Iron Man in my all-time favourive Downey Jr. role, as the gay literary agent in Wonder Boys. That to me is cool. That’s the real thing. That’s the authentic, old, Greek-style (in Toronto anyway) diner, and not the bespoke remade, overpriced version of the thing. A great diner, like a great actor, like a great home-cooked meal, a warm salad with baby tomatoes and feta cheese, made with care. I see the art in all these things that to me are the definition of cool. I’m playing with the words because they are malleable. Can you dig it?

I can’t claim to be an artist but I can admit that I want to make something of quality.

I can’t claim to be an artist because I’ve hardly published enough to even approach such a claim. But also because to make such a claim is of course to be a gigantic asshole. Murakami-san was on to something after all.

But all of this is preamble, a nervous (not so little) bit of cocktail party chitchat to provide the backdrop to what I really came to share.

That I am cool.

Just kidding.

Six months ago I handed over the first 90 pages of my latest manuscript to a trusted reader. I was on the verge of sending pitches to agents. The first chapters were that strong, I knew. It was getting time. Then my trusted reader got back to me, and took me to task so hard I realized that all but the opening ten pages (ten of ninety) were trash.

OK. I've read through twice, and I have some good things to say, And some less good ones.

That’s one quote from her email.

Here’s another, from near email’s end, seven pararagraphs later:

Wow, I know this is harsh, but it's my response.

As I described to my nearest and dearest in the days and weeks that followed, it was like I had climbed a long way up a mountain only to have a boot kick me in the face so hard I tumbled all the way to the ground. The hardest part of which was not the boot to face, ie the sock to the ego, but rather the being back at the foot of the mountain all over again, looking all the way up, realizing the time, the effort, the work involved if I was to honestly attempt this all over again.

A couple years back I posted a chapter from a manuscript I completed before Covid. Like a failed business venture, it never got picked up despite my best efforts to pitch and sell it. Subsequent to that experience, I’ve often been asked what all unpublished writers eventually get asked: why not self-publish the thing(s). Because that’s not the point. Or certainly not the only point. My goal isn’t to publish but to put something out there that I’m proud of. So I’m setting it down on paper, which is where on the second last night of 2023, I wrote the first draft of this, by candlelight, in the nook in my bedroom that is my study, in my Muji journal with my Waterman pen - those things that seem so much like affectation (puffing his pipe, puff-puff, sporting her tattoos, sport-sport) can also be a way of making a thing real. Actors often speak of approaching the character from the outside-in. The leather jacket, in other words, can in fact speak volumes. But then, so can the rare subway rider with an actual paperback book in their hands. Cool, Mum, if it must be explicitly stated, comes in many forms.

What I’m trying to say is this: the untitled manuscript I’m rewriting now, so terribly slowly, one hiking booted footstep up at a time, I have no idea if it will succeed. If it will ever be published. I certainly can’t know if it might ever achieve the lofty capital A heights that art occupies. But fuck, I figure, life’s too short not to try. And whatever form it is meant to come in, big name publisher, small press, self-published, I sincerely hope this is one I can share with you.

OLD FUN

What Is Cool? Or: These Boots Are Made for Climbing