Michael Caine is speaking, talking Italian

If there was any doubt that my brain just can't focus, not for two seconds, it was eradicated today. While I was meant to write, or at least meditate on the subject of rather dull questions, my brain was occupied trying to make my inner voice sound like Michael Caine ('Hello, my name is Michael Caine. Not a lot of people know that'. Try it, it's excellent fun). In case you were wondering - no - it is not very helpful in an exam. Having said that, there is something that's been nagging on me for a while and relates to an earlier post here (that you won't have read). I was thinking about being a grown up and how that is meant to change you. Now, I do not want to relate to myself as a grown up, but I have crossed the line, I think of grown-up behaviour, never to come back again. I have bought a gift and a card for a newborn, which means that 1. I know somebody with a baby and 2. I sort of care, and 3. I no longer belong to the entity that is my parents, who will send a separate gift and card (that is if my mother is bothered enough).

Part of the Guardian's solution for future graduates.

Now a month has passed and I spent that month trying not to freak out over too much work and not enough sleep. My chronic lack of ambition and stoic mind help, but mornings like today's do not. Why are some lectures boring? Why was I tired despite 10 hours sleep? Why does my tea no longer remain hot in my thermos? All in all, not a good day for reflection, fashion, nail polish, hair and certainly not a good day for productive ideas towards a dissertation. AND, it's Valentine's Day, another perfectly ordinary day highjacked by commerce and transformed into a Disney production of love and affection. Yes - this is a single speaking, and yes - I had a lot of cake during the last couple of days. I mean a lot. 

My weekend was spent with cake, beans and a treasure hunt - possibly the best hunt I've ever done. Beans included. And at the risk of blowing my own trumpet, dear non-existent reader, I summed it all up on Saturday night: 'if this is what being an adult is like, I want more of it'. True. It was a genuinely great day, spent in the glorious cold London sun, with people I like, doing crazy things of our own and others' design.  And lots and lots of rhyming, photographing, laughing and random silliness. I secretly wish never to look back onto my teens again, where everything was tense and not so very cool, despite my very hard attempts.  Have we reached the summit of coolness without trying? Or have we reached a state of coolness through a reversal of all that is classified as cool, de-accelerating to the point of total acceleration? Paul Virilio would be very proud indeed of me now. Reaching the level of complete acceleration where the only possible way is regression, the return to what has already been. What is coolness in the first place? Is it a virtue? An accomplishment? Is it natural? Can it be learned. As an outsider, a non-cool person, I have only ever had the possibility to observe coolness from the outside, i.e. with the longing to become or be cool, or cooler. Interestingly, it manifests itself in a variety of ways, which only have the ideological notion of coolness in common - it translates into so many visual, physical and metaphysical details that the only valid comparison I find is the universe, a an indefinitely large mass or un-mass, hosting galaxies and planets and and and... The question whether coolness is experienced by the bearer of cool him- or herself is an interesting layering of the idea that coolness may be only experienced by the outsider, and that 'a' cool person is not capable of grasping their own coolness. 

'Hello, my Name is Michael Caine'

Coolness as a distorted mirror image of the self that does not allow for a coherent evaluation. Which implies that anybody thinking of themselves as cool, could not possibly be cool, for cool cannot be self-experienced. This would explain why coolness seems effortless - because it is.

Any conscious effort must result in the individual's fail to be cool. Michael Caine is a prime example (notice how I make a suave link to an earlier bit): he spent the 60s and early 70s being cool. Nerdy glasses, mod-cut suits, unruly curls, Cockney accent, a good choice of movies, and the best spy movie scene in human history in The Ipcress File; two agents with trolleys in a supermarket. Coolness was a byproduct of good British acting. He did so well: and this is where it all went wrong. Michael Caine realised that he did well. So he made the effort to continue doing well, and did not so well in consequence. And what's worse: he lost his cool. I am particularly referring to the actors' workshops (1987) and a range of 'straight-to-video' films he made in the late 70s and 80s. In trying to replicate earlier coolness, Michael Caine created a caricature version of himself; a sort of postmodern pastiche of the actor he once was. Michael Caine in the 80s was a construct, designed after a bad description of Michael Caine in the 60s: an overemphasised Cockney accent, weird glasses, set hair (like his own grandmother) and bad 80s fashion. He might not have been responsible for the fashion, but it articulated well what had become of the 60s icon. It was the attempt to continue being the same character 20 years into his career - it was bound to fail.

Luckily, Caine grew up. There was a transition period where he had to age and mature to distance himself from Alfie, and where he became a sleek, witty, short-breathed grandfather. It took nearly 40 years, but Michael Caine is cool again, because he doesn't give a toss about it.