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On the subject of Cool and Imperfection. Cool people don’t really seem to make mistakes, in fact I might even go as far as to say that cool people don’t really seem to have any flaws. I think this belief stems from the fact that our conception of cool revolves around this image that has been created with meticulous care in the form of mass media. When we think of cool people, the first people who come to mind are almost always celebrities of some sort, and the picture we have in our heads when we think of them is usually either a shot of them from a music video, a scene from a movie, or some sort of professionally taken photograph. But the fact of the matter is that in a majority of these situations, these people have had an unrealistic amount of attention paid to their looks. You never see a cool person in a movie with something wrong with their attire, and every facial imperfection is doctored out in post-editing. Cool people look the way their publicists and PR managers want them to look, as far as celebrities go. Things that are inherent to them, physical attributes they were born with, such as a scar, birthmark, or their height are left unchanged, because part of being cool is accepting the things you can’t control as they are. But when it comes to things that might tip the scales of external/internal such as weight or health-related issues, cool can often be questioned. When’s the last time you saw fit to attribute “cool” to someone with acne?Even when it comes to people who aren’t constantly being touched up by make-up artists and costume crews, as in celebrities in non-entertainment related fields, such as writers, painters, etc. their image and legacy is maintained by professional photographers who manage to use lighting, composition, and angle to distill certain traits from a picture that otherwise might’ve been very difficult to capture in person with your very own eyes. And that’s just external appearances. I started off the post with a picture of a guy who failed at managing to put on a pair of sunglasses. No doubt in the shooting of MIB, Will Smith and Tommy Lee Jones went through more than one take as well to put on their shades, but the public will never see that footage, unless in some sort of DVD outtake extras. Being cool is about maintaining an image of what I like to call NOT-FUCKING-UP-NESS. And NOT-FUCKING-UP-NESS is much easier to achieve when you have a whole public relations firm behind you making sure that your mistakes never see the light of day.

On the subject of Cool and Imperfection.

Cool people don’t really seem to make mistakes, in fact I might even go as far as to say that cool people don’t really seem to have any flaws. I think this belief stems from the fact that our conception of cool revolves around this image that has been created with meticulous care in the form of mass media. When we think of cool people, the first people who come to mind are almost always celebrities of some sort, and the picture we have in our heads when we think of them is usually either a shot of them from a music video, a scene from a movie, or some sort of professionally taken photograph. But the fact of the matter is that in a majority of these situations, these people have had an unrealistic amount of attention paid to their looks. You never see a cool person in a movie with something wrong with their attire, and every facial imperfection is doctored out in post-editing. Cool people look the way their publicists and PR managers want them to look, as far as celebrities go. Things that are inherent to them, physical attributes they were born with, such as a scar, birthmark, or their height are left unchanged, because part of being cool is accepting the things you can’t control as they are. But when it comes to things that might tip the scales of external/internal such as weight or health-related issues, cool can often be questioned. When’s the last time you saw fit to attribute “cool” to someone with acne?

Even when it comes to people who aren’t constantly being touched up by make-up artists and costume crews, as in celebrities in non-entertainment related fields, such as writers, painters, etc. their image and legacy is maintained by professional photographers who manage to use lighting, composition, and angle to distill certain traits from a picture that otherwise might’ve been very difficult to capture in person with your very own eyes.

And that’s just external appearances. I started off the post with a picture of a guy who failed at managing to put on a pair of sunglasses. No doubt in the shooting of MIB, Will Smith and Tommy Lee Jones went through more than one take as well to put on their shades, but the public will never see that footage, unless in some sort of DVD outtake extras. Being cool is about maintaining an image of what I like to call NOT-FUCKING-UP-NESS. And NOT-FUCKING-UP-NESS is much easier to achieve when you have a whole public relations firm behind you making sure that your mistakes never see the light of day.

2/12/12 — 9:46pm Short URL: http://tmblr.co/ZrEO7wGKv8vV