Chasing the cool. How do you think gentrification starts? It's me, my kind, young middle-class white people who move in to the alternative, the mysterious, the underrepresented. 

To be cool you have to be uncool. That's the first and only rule to the cool. Think about it, the coolest people are onto their own jives, their own jams, they have their own style, their own way of talking, their own walk in a world where everyone walks the same. No one was like the Fonz or I should say the Fonz was like no one else. And so he was cool. 

But there is a paradox. People searching for the cool inevitably emulate the Fonz. And where before there had only been one Fonz, now there are dozens, a month later hundreds more, and then Kurt Cobain goes on and kills himself. "I'm not trying to make a statement, I'm just trying to be me."

What becomes of the cool then? Where does it go? Well, luckily, the cool is a shifting and fluid phenomenon, it moves suddenly and into any unnoticed crack. For awhile there nerds were the cool ones, the buddy holly glasses and the bookishness, they dress in tweed with elbow pads and even I could beat them up. But they were the coolest... ALl the girls went for them.

But the cool doesn't stay still, it moves. And where it moves followers follow. Swarms of the cool-seekers make cool uncool. Once something becomes popular enough with the masses it's no longer cool. THink Williamsburg in Brooklyn. That was the scene 8 years ago, today its a mockery even among its inhabitants. "Oh, I live in WIlliamsburg" They say it with an embarrassed awareness of how late they are to the party. "oh, I live in Bushwick" They say it with a knowingness that they are still avant-garde, colonizers, though they would say explorers. 

The white middle-class youth cool-makers are the ones who somehow make the most peripheral existence cool. And so they push into historically poor neighborhoods filled with minorities and underrepresented people who no one thinks are cool because no one thinks about them at all. This is where they set up camp and begin hiring workers (white-middle-class friends) to work in their cool factory. And people start to notice. Because whether they will it or not, media attention follows the white-middle-class youth even as they try to jump off the map completely. "Look at what our kids are doing now! They're so cute!" I wonder how local-inhabitants feel about the news cameras that come with a white gentrifying force. "Well, they never cared before..."

I somehow doubt that it is a conscious decision by the cool-makers to jack the styles of the black minority. Rather, it is a never-ending game of follow the leader; the leaders being more risk-taking and adventurous, more driven to become an insider from being an outsider. And in America what is the most prevalent outside/inside dichotomy than black/white? Slave/slave owners. Oppressed/ Oppressor.

But where does this fascination to be cool come from? Why can't we all wear the same clothes and be happy there are no stains on ours? I'm not really sure. It's a far cry from post WWII America where value was earned by making sure your lawn looked exactly like your neighbors. Somehow the individual has become all-consumingly important. I'll have to think on this more...