Dear Cool, California,
I hope this letter finds you living up to your name. I imagine there is a certain pressure in trying to live up a moniker that sounds as if it were bestowed on you by the Fonz, but coolness rather comes with the territory in California.
The same cannot be said for us in New Orleans – and particularly not with summer having descended upon us like a wet, woolen blanket. By the time this communique finds its way to your California-cool clutches, the Crescent City will be armpit-deep in the humid soup that passes for oxygen during summer months in these parts.
I am not an evolutionary biologist, but I am fairly certain that if human beings ever develop gills, it will happen in New Orleans first.
While we await that Darwinian inevitability, we can at least rely on our well-honed expertise in beating the heat. I will not get into particulars, but it involves a strategy reliant on equal parts snowballs, ceiling fans, porch swings, river breezes and certain choice beverages.
The curious thing is, although we are proven experts on getting cool, no one here seems to expend much energy trying to look cool – which, I am told, is one of the coolest things about the place.
I was reminded of that duality in a quote from Trent Reznor that recently resurfaced online. He was speaking to a local music journalist about what drew him to live in New Orleans for a decade in the late 1990s and early aughts.
“I remember,” he mused, “when a friend of mine from New York first came down to visit in New Orleans. He said, ‘This place is pretty cool. Everyone is concerned with being cool in New York. Here, nobody’s cool and everybody’s having fun.’ It stuck with me.”
There is certainly something to that. After all, the least cool kind of cool is the performative kind – and, in New Orleans, we are generally too busy trying to survive than to pay mind to what others think of our authentic souvenir shop T-shirt.
There are many names for the practitioners of that particular low art. “Poseurs” was in fairly heavy use before the turn of the millennium. After Hurricane Katrina blew through town, “hipsters” took over. Nowadays, thanks to the scourge of FlipFlöp, Facehole or whatever the social media app du jour is, “Gen Z” seems to have inherited the exhibitionist essence of it.
These are the pork-pie hat wearers of the world – which is a dead giveaway in New Orleans that somebody might be trying too hard to look cool. Yes, a pork pie might look dapper on the right head, but that tiny brim makes them entirely impractical when it comes to providing protection from the sun – which, when outdoor temperatures are approaching blast furnace levels, is the one and only purpose of a hat.
In New Orleans, hat brims are like daiquiris: Size very much matters.
The key is simple. The harder you try to be cool, the less cool you will look next to a true-blue New Orleanian.
So: That guy steering a bike down Decatur with a sousaphone wrapped around his top half? That guy is cool.
But the dude on Bourbon Street with a tribal tattoo wrapped around his bicep (which he got to cover up a barbed-wire tattoo)? Not so cool.
The guy at a red light eating crawfish out of a paper sack? Cool.
The festivalgoer who records the entire performance on her phone? Not cool.
The woman wearing a Marques Colston jersey while walking a dog wearing an Archie Manning jersey? That lady is the epitome of cool.
You in Cool, California, carry it right there in your name, something to aspire to, something to maintain. Around here, we are more about perspiration than aspiration. It is too hot, too humid and, frankly, too much trouble to worry about such things as image.
But that’s cool. You get the name. We get the music, the food and the endemic dysfunction that makes New Orleans the magnificent mess it is. Crucially, we also get those small, unguarded moments that would never survive close inspection in other locales, much less attempts at curation.
So, stay cool, Cool. We will be here doing what we do: sweating through our seersucker, dodging hurricanes, debating the success of the Saints’ offseason – and, honestly, having a pretty good time in the process.
Insincerely yours,
New Orleans
