New website will help you keep it cool

What’s cooler than a book about what’s cool? How about a really cool website about cool?

That’s the gist of Catalog-of-Cool.com, the new website based on the 1982 book with the same name by Gene Sculatti, former director of special issues for Billboard magazine and veteran music-industry wag.

The site launched in September, but check in this week for a newly expanded site with added features.

You’ll find the five coolest cars as determined by ZZ Top’s Billy Gibbons (hint: one is Ed “Big Daddy” Roth’s “Beatnik Bandit”), rave reviews on recent albums from Los Straitjackets and the Rutles-esque British Invasion Revival and paeans to such coolios from the past as jazz pianist-composer Vince Guaraldi and the Baja Marimba Band.

There’s even a history of how “cool” itself has been defined and anointed over time, complete with glossary on correct usages of words and phrases from “arc-out” (to overcome a bothersome obstacle) to “Z-bird” (a loser).

Sculatti emerges from the site’s predominantly retro groove long enough to offer his guide to “Finding Cool Radio Now,” beginning with a plug for the KXLU-FM (88.9) show “The Bomb Shelter,” Fridays at 8 p.m.

“The one-hour show wails wall-to-wall: Brief intros and a local calendar are the only interruptions to James Brown and Jack McDuff, Los Straitjackets and a German cover of Napoleon XIV,” Sculatti says. “I don’t think I’ve ever listened to the show without hearing something utterly wild and new to me.”

Among the newest “cool” features is “Cool Commies: Eastern Europe’s Swingen’est Dictators,” an irreverent essay by veteran publicist-pop biographer Davin Seay that draws a not-entirely whimsical parallel between former Eastern bloc strongmen and Western pop-culture style mavens.

“Say what you will about slavish Slavic submission to big bosses of every description -- it sure makes life a lot simpler when the ultimate arbiter of taste has his picture plastered everywhere; when every street corner, steel plant and sibling bears his name and when every blip on the radar screen of his whimsy provides helpful clues to the latest trends in style and survival,” Seay writes. “In totalitarian cool, everyone’s the cognoscenti or else.”

Cool.