This week the AMERICAN COOL photo exhibition opened at the Smithsonian’s National Portrait Gallery.

Cool reserve was a specialty of the British upper-class, however true coolness originated with the Yoruba concept of Itutu, which according to Wikipedia is a combination of gentleness, generosity and grace coupled with the ability to defuse fights and disputes. The slave trade imported this aesthetic to the South of the New World with the downbeaten chattel of the plantations carrying themselves with a dignity unknown to the whip-wielding masters.

Saxist Lester Young is credited with coining the modern meaning of cool.

“Don’t lose you cool.”

For me as a young boy in the late-1950s cool was a land populated by bikers, outlaws, and rebels fighting the system without betraying their honor.

Martin Luther King was cool.

Steve McQueen was cool.

Robert Mitchum was cool.

The ‘American Cool’ exhibition has included these three icons in the pantheon of cool.

I agree with many of the cool, but not all;

In the Roots of Cool section I concur with the choices of Fred Astaire, Bix Beiderbecke, Louise Brooks, Duke Kahanamoku, Zora Neale Hurston, Walt Whitman, Bert Williams, Georgia O’Keeffe, Jack Johnson, Buster Keaton, Willie “The Lion” Smith, Mae West, H.L. Mencken, Bessie Smith, and Dorothy Parker, but James Cagney, Frederick Douglass, Greta Garbo, and Ernest Hemingway don’t make the list.

The next selection COOL AND THE COUNTER-CULTURE was harder to criticize.

Lauren Bacall, James Baldwin, Humphrey Bogart, Marlon Brando, Gary Cooper, Miles Davis, Duke Ellington, Gene Krupa, Robert Mitchum, Thelonius Monk, Anita O’Day, Dizzy Gillespie, Woody Guthrie, Audrey Hepburn, Billie Holiday, Muddy Waters, Frank Sinatra, John Wayne, Hank Williams, Lester Young, Barbara Stanwyck, Charlie Parker, and Raymond Chandler entered the corridor of coolness without question, however I don’t give the nod to
Lenny Bruce, William S. Burroughs, James Dean, Jack Kerouac, Jackson Pollock and Elvis Presley.

The Cool and the Counterculture created more of a chasm.

James Brown, Johnny Cash, Angela Davis, Muhammad Ali even though he treated Joe Frazier like shit, Jim Brown, Faye Dunaway, Clint Eastwood, Jimi Hendrix, Bruce Lee, Joan Didion, Steve McQueen, Paul Newman, Bonnie Raitt, Lou Reed, Walt Frazier, Deborah Harry, Malcolm X, Billy Murray and Frank Zappa bridged cool between the 60s to the 70s. Bob Dylan sucks due to his recent sell-out for Chrysler, Patti Smith is a bore, Jack Nicholson ruined EASY RIDER, Carlos Santana had too much fire to be cool, Susan Sontag spoke to the rich, Hunter S. Thompson loved guns, John Travolata had good dance moves and Andy Warhol was a ghost.

They were not cool.

And the final grouping of the Legacy of Cool led off by people I have met;

Afrika Bambaataa and Jean-Michel Basquiat.

Those I admired; Tupac Shakur and Shepard

And one that makes me laugh.

The rest are uncool; David Byrne, Kurt Cobain, Johnny Depp, Missy Elliott, Tony Hawk, Chrissie Hynde, Jay-Z, Steve Jobs, Michael Jordan, Madonna, Willie Nelson, Prince, Susan Sarandon, Selena, Bruce Springsteen, Quentin Tarantino, Benicio del Toro, Tom Waits, and Neil Young.

I like many of the rejects, but they aren’t cool.

Not like Serge Gainsbourg, Willem Dafoe, Gil Scott-Heron, Johnny Thunders, the MC5, Gene Ammons, Marilyn Monroe, JFK, Bill Russell, Grace Slick, John Coltrane, Totie Fields, George Carlin, Redd Foxx, and always # 1 on the list the one the only Godfather of Soul, immortal Mr. James Brown.

And some many others unknown to the curators of the Smithsonian.

Cool is cool.

Simple as that.

Here are the origins of cool.

There is no mention Oscar Wilde.