BEING COOL

Glenn O'Brien, ed., The Cool School: Writing from America's Hip Underground (New York: Library of America, 2013) (From the "Introduction": "The scary thing about this project is that you begin to realize that the underground as we used to know it really doesn't exist anymore except in our nostalgia for it. Burroughs was always quoting Hassan i Sabbah, the Old Man of the Mountains, the founder of the assassin order, the first terrorist: 'Nothing is true, Everything is permitted.'" "And never was this more true. Or permitted. Marketing has simply turned the forbidden, the underground, the enemy even, into something marketable. What once made artistic products underground was either  censorship or cultural disapproval enforced by the guardians of the marketplace.If a book or a band was too outrageous it wasn't considered for production. But in the digital age the gatekeepers are out of business.").