EBOOK
About
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.
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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Reviews
"I loved this book, which is so redolent of the periods it covers. The history of hip, from the beginning. Lewis MacAdams connects all the dots -- Monk and Miles, Burroughs and the Beats, Pollock and Sartre and Warhol and Dylan -- in this vivid chronicle of the birth of a new postwar culture, high on art and Zen and heroin, too. The saga of the crazed jazz conguero Chano Pozo is worth the price of
Kurt Loder, MTV
"The elusive quality of 'cool' needed a poet to keep it still long enough to glimpse its awesome pervasiveness. For generations of Americans, 'cool' has been the alternative to hypocrisy, the creative challenge to boredom, the hallmark of distinction. What began as the search for an attitude of defiance and beauty on the part of some Black musicians became a veritable 'cool rush' in the last decad
Andrei Codrescu, NPR commentator and author of Messiah
"I've always been a fan of Lewis MacAdams's writing. He brings the eye and ear of a poet and the heart of a journalist to his work."
Jann Wenner, editor and founder of Rolling Stone