Cool for Cats

Hitchens* wishes upon a star.

I have a small wish of my own in this season of public and private Utopias. It is that the emergence—or should I say ascendance?—of Barack Hussein Obama will allow the reentry into circulation of an old linguistic coinage. Exploited perhaps to greatest effect by James Baldwin, the word I have in mind is cat. Some of you will be old enough to remember it in real time, before the lugubrious and nerve-racking days when people never knew from one moment to the next what expression would put them in the wrong: the days of Negro and colored and black and African American and people of color. After all of this strenuous and heated and boring discourse, does not the very mien of our new president suggest something lithe and laid-back, agile but rested, cool but not too cool? A “cat” also, in jazz vernacular, can be a white person, just as Obama, in some non–Plessy v. Ferguson ways, can be. I think it might be rather nice to have a feline for president, even if only after enduring so many dogs. (Think, for one thing, of the kitten-like grace of those daughters.) The metaphor also puts us in mind of a useful cliché, which is that cats have nine lives—and an ability to land noiselessly and painlessly on their feet.

In his Golden Globe acceptance speech, Mickey Rourke used "cat." I can't remember who he used it in reference to, but I do remember thinking "that's not a word you hear very often anymore."

Alessandra Stanley writes about Rourke

When Mr. Rourke won a Golden Globe award for “The Wrestler” last Sunday, that comeback within a comeback movie was not merely a vindication for an aging, underemployed, sometimes mocked but mostly forgotten movie star.

It was a needling reminder that the French, after so many years and after so much derision, never gave up on an actor who, in this country, became a living symbol of French contrariness — a human Security Council veto, the Tinseltown embodiment of the force de frappe and fromage de tête.

We mocked the French for admiring Mickey Rourke the way we laughed at their serious assessment of Jerry Lewis as a comic genius. In both cases, the French despised us right back for disparaging artists who are avatars of what they consider to be the best of American popular culture.

I had forgetten the French were fans, but I do remember being a big fan myself in the '80s, and was glad to see he was making a comback back in 2005 and 2006.

In 1980, I was a little shit 10-year-old and in 1990 I turned 20. In between I enjoyed many of Rourke's movies, like Body Heat, Diner, Rumble Fish, The Pope of Greenwich Village, Year of the Dragon, Angel Heart**, and Barfly.***

The types of characters he'd play reminded me of a couple of acquaintances of mine at the time, guys who didn't give a shit but also had a certain amount of integrity.
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* Again, Hitchens has all the fun: "And yes, that was me at the ball given by The Root, making a mild fool of myself as I boogied chubbily on down to the strains of Biz Markie, DJ to the capital's black elite." Also at the party: Oprah, Henry Louis Gates Jr., Tom Joyner, Chris Tucker, Samuel L. Jackson, Kal Penn, and token white guys David Gregory and Larry King. The mention of Biz Markie brings back memories of college, when late in the evening/early in the morning the entire drunken party would be singing/yelling along to "Just a Friend."
** Robert De Niro's Satan was portrayed as I imagined him to be.
*** "Drinks for all my friends!"