Just being out in the world, you see so many things, and every day, you experience so many concepts and different people and their coolness and weirdness. It's a feast of ideas.
I want to communicate to the everyday person. I don't want to just roll around in my own avant-garde pool of coolness.
I have really never aligned myself with hipsterdom or coolness.
I would hope that people didn't think I was anything like Joan! It's very hard for me because Joan says such cruel things all the time. It sort of makes me cringe every time I read them because I think, 'Who could be so horrible?' To be able to deliver those lines and do them with a coolness, yet still make her likable, is a bit of a challenge.
I don't think coolness used to be such a commodity among adults. And now it is.
In my relations with my father, which are difficult and where I'm often met by coolness and indifference, I am constantly tempted to be cold and indifferent. Yet I know that this is a test if I could take it rightly.
I try to maintain a high level of coolness. Which means I've gotta look at lot of magazines. I've gotta look at a lot of ads to see what people want to wear.
As a kid in the eighties, I didn't need much disposable income. I went to Catholic school - white shirt, plaid skirt - so fashion choices were limited. But youth finds a way. For me and my schoolmates, neon argyle socks were a crucial barometer of coolness. Hair ribbons, too, and they didn't come cheap.
Being hip, being popular, being cool, that's really easy. Until you have to make tough decisions. And when you have to make tough decisions, that veneer of coolness comes off real quick.
I suppose what happened is that I spent my whole life wanting to be cool but eventually came to recognise the mechanism of how coolness works. So it's not really that I don't want to be cool anymore - it's more like I've come to realise that coolness doesn't exist the way I once assumed.
