MacAdams - Birth of the cool : beat, bebop, and the american avant garde

A two-time winner of the World Heavyweight Poetry Championship, LEWIS MACADAMS is the author of ten books of poetry, a film documentarian (What Happened to Kerouac?, Eric Bogosians FunHouse, and The Battle of the Bards), and an award-winning writer for Rolling Stone, Actuel, Los Angeles Times Magazine, and L.A. Weekly, among many others. Born in West Texas, MacAdams graduated from Princeton in 1966 but got most of his education following beat poet Gregory Corso around the Village and the Lower East Side of Manhattan. He lives with his wife and two children in Los Angeles.

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JACKET DESIGN BY DOUGLAS RICCARDI AND
LARA HARRIS, MEMO PRODUCTIONS
JACKET PHOTOGRAPH FRANCIS WOLFF/MOSAIC IMAGES
AUTHOR PHOTOGRAPH BY MARK SAVAGE
COPYRIGHT 2001 SIMON & SCHUSTER INC.
DISTRIBUTED BY SIMON & SCHUSTER INC.

M iles 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 1950sthe 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 centuryfrom the Harlem jazz joints where Dizzy Gillespie and Charlie Parker invented bebop to the back room at Maxs 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 ZenMacAdams 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 Kerouacs 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 authors 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.

Page numbers in italics refer to illustrations

Adams, Paul,

Advertisements for Myself (Mailer),

advertising, 20

Aesthetic of the Cool, An (Thompson), 72

African Rhythm and African Sensibility (Chernoff),

Afro-Cuban jazz, 73

Agee, James,

Aitken, Robert,

Albers, Josef and Anni,

Alexander, Donnell,

Alloway, Lawrence,

Almanac Singers,

American Century, The (Luce),

American Cool (Connor),

American Cool (Hickey),

Amram, David,

Anderson, Jack,

Anderson, Jimmy,

Andy Warhol (Smith),

Angle Bar,

Another Side of Bob Dylan, 61

Anthology Film Archives,

Anti-100 Years of Cinema (Mekas), 36

Apollinaire, Guillaume,

Are Black People Cooler Than White People? (Alexander),

Artaud, Antonin,

Art Issues,

Artists Club,

Art of this Century gallery,

Art Students League, 87

Asch, Moe,

Ashton, Leigh,

Atom Bombing of New York,

Autobiography of a Wolf, The (Burroughs),

Autobiography of LeRoi Jones/Amiri Baraka, The (Baraka), 99

Avedon, Richard,

Baez, Joan,

Baraka, Amiri (LeRoi Jones), 99

Barnard College,

Basie, Count,

Batterham, Forster,

Bauhaus, 61

Bauza, Mario,

Beard, Charles,

beat generation, 43

first use of term, 42

Beat Generation, The (film),

Beat Generation, The (Kerouac),

beatniks,

Beat Zen, Square Zen, and Zen (Watts),

bebop, 64

invention of term, 45

Bechet, Sidney,

Beck, Julian,

Belmondo, Jean-Paul,

Benedek, Laslo,

Benedetti, Dean,

Benton, Rita,

Benton, Thomas Hart,

Benzedrine,

Berg, Billy,

Berger, Meyer,

Best, Denzil,

Billingsley, Sherman,

Birdland,

Birth of the Cool,

Blackboard Jungle,

Black Mountain Book, The (Dawson),

Black Mountain College,

Bloomfield, Mike,

Blow Job,

Blue Note Records,

Blum, Irving,

Bob Dylan,

Bob Dylan Live 1966 ,

Bob le Flambeur,

Bockris, Victor,

Bonestell, Chesley,

Bottomly, Susan, 47

Bound for Glory (Guthrie), 53

Bourdon, David,

Brandenberg, Bob,

Brando, Marlon,

Breathless ,

Brent, John,

Breslin, Jimmy,

Breton, Andr,

Brooks, Harvey,

Brossard, Chandler,

Brown, Carolyn,

Brown, Earl,

Bruce, Lenny,

Buddha,

Buddhism, see Zen Buddhism

Buddhist Bible, A (Goddard),

Burley, Dan,

Burroughs, William S.,

Burroughs, William S., Jr.,

cabaret cards,

Cab Calloways Cat-ologue (Calloway),

Cabito,

Caen, Herb,

Cafe Society,

Cage, John,

Calder, Alexander,

Cale, John,

Calloway, Cab,

Capital of the American Century (Shefter),

Capone, Al,

Capote, Truman,

Carey, Ted,

Carney, Ray,

Caron, Leslie,

Carr, Lucien,

Carruthers, Ben,

Cartwright, Louis,

Carus, Paul,

Cassady, Carolyn, 71

Cassady, LuAnn,

Cassady, Neal,

Cassavetes, John,

Catholic Worker,

Catholic Worker ,

Cats Caravan ,

Cedar Tavern,

Cernovich, Nick,

Chabrol, Claude,

Chase, Hal,

Chelsea Girls,

Chelsea Hotel,

Chernoff, John Miller,

Civil Defense Administration,

civil rights movement,

Clarke, Kenny Klook,

Clarke, Shirley,

Close, Del,

Cold War, 87

Collier, James Lincoln,

Colliers ,

Collingwood, Charles,

Columbia Records,

Columbia University,

Committee, The,

Connection, The (film),

Connection, The (Gelber),

Connelly, Jean,

Connor, Marlene Kim,

Conquest of Cool, The (Frank),

Cook, Elisha, Jr.,

cool:

authors first encounter with term,

beat as,

as deflecting attention,

essence of, 23

first paper written about, 72

Gelber on,

as koan,

logic and,

Mailer on,

need for teaching of,

as shared code,

ubiquity of, 67

Cool World, The ,

Copland, Aaron,

Corso, Gregory,

Costello, Frank,

Cowell, Henry,

Cowley, Malcolm,

Crane, Hart,

Crane, Philip,

Crowninshield, Frank,

Cunningham, Merce,

Curry, John Steuart,

Cuscuna, Michael,

dada,

Dal, Salvador,

Dan Burleys Original Handbook of Harlem Jive (Burley),

Daniels, Douglas H.,

Dassin, Jules,

Davis, Miles,

Davis, Stuart,

Dawson, Fielding,

Day, Dorothy,

Dean, James,

Death in the Family, A (Agee),

Deer Park, The (Mailer),

de Kooning, Willem,

de Martino, Richard,

Denver, Bob,

Deren, Maya,

Dewey, Thomas,

De Witt, Dorothy, 79

Dharma Bums, The (Kerouac),