Miles Davis and Juliette Greco, Jackson Pollock and Jack Kerouac, Marlon Brando and Bob Dylan and William Burroughs.
What do all these people have in common? Fame, of course, and undeniable talent. But most of all, they were cool.
Birth of the Cool
is a stunningly illustrated, brilliantly written cultural history of
the American avant-garde in the 1940s and 1950s -- the decades in which
cool was born. From intimate interviews with cool icons like poet Allen
Ginsberg, bop saxophonist Jackie McLean, and Living Theatre cofounder
Judith Malina, award-winning journalist and poet Lewis MacAdams extracts
the essence of cool. Taking us inside the most influential and
experimental art movements of the twentieth century -- from the Harlem
jazz joints where Dizzy Gillespie and Charlie Parker invented bebop to
the back room at Max's Kansas City when Andy Warhol was holding court to
backstage at the Newport Folk Festival the night Bob Dylan went
electric, from Surrealism to the Black Mountain School to Zen --
MacAdams traces the evolution of cool from the very fringes of society
to the mainstream.
Born of World War II, raised on atomic-age
paranoia, cast out of the culture by the realities of racism and the
insanity of the Cold War, cool is now, perversely, as conventional as
you can get. Allen Ginsberg suited up for Gap ads. Volvo appropriated a
phrase from Jack Kerouac's On the Road for its TV commercials.
How one became the other is a terrific story, and it is presented here
in a gorgeous package, rich with the coolest photographs of the
black-and-white era from Robert Doisneau, Henri Cartier-Bresson, Man
Ray, and many others.
Drawing a direct line between Lester Young
wearing his pork-pie hat and his crepe-sole shoes staring out his hotel
window at Birdland to the author's three-year-old daughter saying "cool"
while watching a Scooby-Doo cartoon at the cusp of a new millennium, Birth of the Cool is a cool book about a hot subject...maybe even the coolest book ever.
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