#david robins

DAVID ROBINS: One time I met John Lennon: I knew Yoko through Tony Cox, her old man, who was a good friend. He stayed with me in Doughty Street after they broke up. He was another American, except that he made people like Haynes and Levy look like rocks of stability. He was a meshugganch of the highest order. A would-be promoter. He had these rather studious spectacles and he lived in Cumberland Mansions with Yoko, around 1967. We’d talk a lot about music. He wanted to put on an Ornette Coleman concert at the Albert Hall. But it all fucked up. A disaster. He was making this doll’s house for Yoko, even though she’d left him, and he was wandering around the streets with this big package, the wood for it. So my girlfriend Clare and I were going for a walk in Regent’s Park and there they were: John and Yoko walking down the road arm in arm. One tried to be cool about these sort of things. But we got talking to them and Clare lived on Chiltern Street and she said, ‘Would you like to come and have a cup of coffee?’ and they said, ‘Sure.’ … He was very quiet. He talked about art mainly: her exhibitions, riding bicycles. Yoko talked mostly, she talked almost non-stop, she always did. She was little and hairy and fantastically thin.

In Cool Rules: Anatomy of an Attitude, Dick Pountain and David Robins define cool as a 'new secular virtue' - the official language of a private or subcultural rebelliousness returned from generation to generation, as well as of worldwide commodity fetishism. According to Alan Liu, in The Laws of Cool, it's a 'way or manner of living' in a world structured by technological and other systems. Cool exploits the element of 'give' or 'slack' in any such system. It is information designed to resist information: 'information fed back into its own signal to create a standing interference pattern.' Cool doesn't want to have to choose between the competing demands of technique and technology, free will and necessity. It's a serious business. According to Pountain and Robins, cool provides the 'psychological structure' by means of which the 'longest-standing contradiction in Western socieities' - between the need to work and the desire for play - may yet be resolved.