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The Death of Cool: Is Five Points “Hip” Enough?

By James D. McCallister

A letter appeared in Brad Warthen’s MSM sandbox last week (i.e., The State newspaper’s opinion page) decrying the vibe of our urban village, that we were no longer “truly eclectic.” A torrent of steaming yerba mate shot out of my nose: Now, this here was some news to me! Five Points not eclectic? What about cool? Or tight? Or phat? Or groovy?

The State’s letters editor had already put it into blunt perspective with the headline: “Five Points No Longer Hip Place To Be.” Man, I was suddenly depressed.

But then I remembered some wisdom recently imparted to me by an 18 year-old niece: If you use the word “hip” to describe yourself as such, then, baby, you ain’t hip. “You’re not cool, I mean,” she clarified. “Only old people say ‘hip’. That’s the point.”

Cool minus hip equals eclectic, perhaps?

Among the letter-writer’s chief complaints (written in response to a State editorial that rightly advocated cautious commercial development of the area) were that “no one I know over the age of 25 shops or dines there very often.” But logic rears its ugly head: If you want a place to be hip, er, eclectic, then you surely don’t want a bunch of flabby, middle-aged mooks hanging around, scratching themselves and whoop-whooping over the returns on their retirement funds, do you? Man, that’s not cool. That sounds like having to hang with your parents.

I pondered the philosophical implications. What is eclecticism? Is it to be “cool”? How, then, do we define uncool, or in this case, not-eclectic?

By necessity, my thoughts came into sharp focus: At the behest of a fellow FPA board member, I dashed off a characteristically biting response to the State in the service of defending the honor of our five-pointed star of a neighborhood. I pointed out that a number of the previous letter-writer’s complaints were specious, I praised the fresh and bright appearance of our newly renovated sidewalks and, like a good salesman, I managed to obliquely reference my novel, my wife’s music projects, our business (cleverly referred to as a “hippie shop”), and in the coup de grace, quite directly invoked Papa Jazz in the hopes that Tim will grant me a lifetime’s worth of fully-stamped PJ cards that I can use on Criterion edition DVDs.

But did I make the case for cool? In a sense, yes. But the more I thought about the woman who’d written the letter, and who seems to want Five Points to be a more “grownup” place (my word, not hers), I began to wonder what the average person who is not a college student would want from a neighborhood like this and what she meant by declaiming that “there is nothing eclectic about a cluster of college bars and… shops that are barely breathing.”

(A brief aside: Lady, are you boinking my accountant or something? No? Then on what basis do you make your observation about the fiscal health of my, or anyone else’s business? You know what happens when we assume, dear heart, and it ain’t me braying like a donkey right now about stuff about which I don’t know jack squat. Capice?)

Well, what do we expect from a mixed-use neighborhood bordering a 30,000 student-strong major university, and that is also economically fed by a number of smaller colleges that are within biking distance? This is a college ghetto in the classic sense, but what also makes it special are the ordinary neighborhoods that also surround us. The normal traffic on any given day is filled with all manner of demographics. What do all these different people see in our streets, lined as they are by family-owned businesses?

Ah-ha.

What, I ask, is more eclectic in this day and age than a group of locally-owned small businesses who have withstood both the horrendously intrusive (though ultimately successful) beautification project, as well as the inexorable corporate creep that has made America into a bland, unimaginative land of homogeneous robots buying four-dollar cups of coffee and believing, in the process, that they look (ahem) cool for having done so?

Changes are coming, some of them probably of a nature that will ensure that Five Points will slowly look less like itself and more like Anytown, USA, which in the 21st Century means everything’s plastic, everything’s familiar and everything’s just exactly the same so we won’t have to worry about encountering That Which Could Harm Us. Five Points turning into such an abomination is a danger even the State’s editorial board was astute enough to recognize (no mean feat with that bunch).

Look, we don’t need to rehash yet again in this space the “danger” the “eclectic nature” of our district faces by mere dint of its ever more valuable geography. Let me just close by repeating what I said in my own, possibly still-unpublished rebuttal:

Five Points is still a place where you can see someone writing a novel (Pimp! Pimp! Pimp the book! a voice screamed) or protesting the war or playing the guitar or otherwise debating existential matters around a coffee shop table, be it Adriana’s or Starbucks. Show me another neighborhood in this two-bit berg with that kind of vibe, and I’ll show you a very cool place indeed.