Lewis MacAdams says it bluntly in his book's preface: "Anybody trying to define 'cool' quickly comes up against cool's quicksilver nature. As soon as anything is cool, its cool starts to vaporize." With that, he still manages to weave a complex ode to all forms of cool in
The Birth of Cool, a book that swings through the highs and lows of bebop and beat without ever losing its intrinsic coolness. MacAdams's background as a poet and film historian enables him to smoothly blend personal histories, public awareness, and political context into a fascinating exploration of the many facets of cool. He begins with the individuals who created bebop: Charlie Parker, Dizzy Gillespie, Bill Evans, Billy Eckstine, and Thelonious Monk. Relatively minor incidents, like Gillespie stabbing Cab Calloway in the butt with a carpet cutter, are played against a larger framework of astonishing new works that Parker and Gillespie created and the enormous cultural changes brought about by these few folks. As the story moves forward into the 1950s, Jackson Pollock, Willem de Kooning, and Arshile Gorky and the beginnings of modern art are examined. Pollock's comment that "technique is just a means of arriving at a statement" seems like something that could have come from any of the artists, musicians, or writers covered in this book. The early years of the Beats get surprisingly little coverage, beginning with William S. Burroughs being "born weird" and ending with the accidental death of Joan Vollmer. The lives of Burroughs, Allen Ginsberg, Jack Kerouac, and Neal Cassady are returned to in later chapters that cover the introduction and adoption of Zen and the final blending of bebop and Beat into one inseparable cultural unit.
With numerous photos and pleasantly glossy paper, The Birth of Cool is a dense book that is both entertaining and depressing. MacAdams has managed an homage to cool that temporarily conquers that "quicksilver nature" and gives us a lasting look at a nearly indefinable era. --Jill Lightner
Tracing the inception and progression of an artistic movement via a series of fluid portraits, MacAdams delivers a fascinating study of the subcommunities comprising the 20th-century phenomenon of cool. A prot?g? of the movement and a writer for Rolling Stone and LA Weekly, MacAdams discusses cool's journey from the avant-garde underground in the 1940sAwhere it primarily took the form of bebop, pre-Beat, Beat and Abstract ExpressionismAthrough its mainstreaming during the folk and pop-culture movements spearheaded by Dylan and Warhol. Along the way, he splices in bits of the theory of cool, considers the political sensibilities of the cultural vanguard and displays a sweeping, nuanced knowledge of his subject. Particularly strong is his account of how the movement became politicized early in the Cold War when, in protest against air raid drills, New York theater folk joined activists in refusing the role of Cold Warrior demanded of every citizen. MacAdams's lively prose does occasionally fall prey to the lure of hackneyed phrasing. Partially as a result of his repetition of the word "cool," the narrative sometimes seems slightly sloppy, na?ve, uncool. Other disappointments concern certain omissions, most glaringly in the field of experimental writing and women. (He mentions Billie Holiday and Juliette Greco, shows their pictures and moves onAbad form for a work that endeavors to represent the underrepresented.) Overall, though, MacAdams's rendering of cool culture fleshes out the broad picture with insider details that should attract jazz and painting fans in the mood for an illuminating, fun read. Photos. (Feb.)
Copyright 2000 Reed Business Information, Inc.
Review
Jann Wenner editor and founder of Rolling Stone 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.
Kurt Loder MTV 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 purchase alone.
Andrei Codrescu NPR commentator and author of Messiah 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 decades. Lewis MacAdams charts the complex flows of this cultural force from its underground roots to its present ubiquitousness. This is a cool book written by one of America's coolest poets.
Jim Carroll author of The Basketball Diaries This book's a dead-on hit. MacAdams combines a reporter's sense for research with a poet's voice. It's not just the facts he comes up with, but that the facts are so entertaining.
Rubin Martinez author of The Other Side: Notes from the New L.A., Mexico City, and Beyond and associate editor of Pacific News Service Birth of the Cool reads great, and connects dots that somehow have become disconnected over time. From the ethereal breath of jazz players to the inimitable gait of zoot suiters, from beatific bards searching for satori to pop musicians hiding their pain behind the baddest of shades, cool is not just highest sign of American signage; it is the very house of our being. Cool smashes the border between high and low art, cuts across the lines of race and class, provides a link between peoples and places with little in common other than their desire to reimagine themselves through style and create a language for that which cannot be spoken. MacAdams's cool prose -- an epic yet restrained ode -- delivers the aesthetic history of twentieth-century America and prepares us for the cool to come.
Robert Farris Thompson Professor of History of Art at Yale University The Doctor of Cool-ology's text is in and it's witty, informative, and rich -- essential reading for anyone following American popular culture.
About the Author
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 Bogosian's 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.
