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.

Birth Of The Cool: Beat, Bebop, and the American Avant Garde

MacAdams, Lewis

Humor & Entertainment

Free Press

A stunningly illustrated cultural history of the American underground in the forties and fifties and of the artists at its core - Charlie Parker, Billie Holiday, William Burroughs, Jackson Pollock, and more. The idea of 'cool' is one of the most pervasive forces in modern culture - but what is it? Where does it come from? Who invented it? Birth of the Cool is the first serious examination of how cool came about - its meaning, its heroes and its place in the world, from the gritty avant-garde fringes of the culture in after-hours joints in Harlem and cold water flats on the Lower East Side, to the centre of the mainstream. Focusing on New York from 1948 to 1965 and bringing together the era's most evocative black and white photographs, Lewis MacAdams takes us from the jazz joints where Dizzy Gillespie and Charlie Parker invented bebop to Jackson Pollock's studio; from William S. Burrough's frenetic experiences on the road to the Black Mountain School of Zen.

Birth of the Cool

Politics & Social Sciences

Sociology

Scribner

A vivid lyrical romp through many shared realities, memories of poetry's departed greats (Whalen, Corso, Dorn, Jim Carroll) are invoked in heart & ear, with marvelous love poems as well. MacAdam's eye is sharp, his ecological consciousness astute, as he bucks the heartbreaks of modern man and takes on reclamation of the Los Angeles River. A stunning collection.

Dear Oxygen: New & Selected Poems 1966-2011

Literature & Fiction

Poetry

UNO Press

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