MacAdams, Birth of the Cool

[Dave Monroe]

... more from Lewis MacAdams, Birth of the Cool: Beat, Bebop, and the
American Avant-Garde (New York: The Free Press, 2001).  Some of this, at
least, resonates I believe with comments made about "keeping cool, but
caring" here by Terrance and Jody.  Let me know ...

In the documentary Song of the Spirit, a [Lester] Young biographer,
Douglas H. Daniels, claims that Young coined the phrase "that's cool."
(19)

An intensely private, solitary man, so cool he wore crepe-soled shoes,
Young's Fu Manxhu mustache and trademark porkpie hat were pieces of a
mask that his many things.  To most of the world, Young appeared
unruffled and fastidious.  He always came in a moment after the beat,
just to remind you that you were on Lester's time.  (19, and recall
McClintic Sphere's Fu Manchurian embrochure ...)

To Carnegie Mellon emotionologist Peter Stearns, cool symbolizes "our
culture's increased striving for restraint" to better blend into the
social fabric. (19)

"Black cool," adds Dr. Richard Majors ... "is better understood as a
complex system of coping mechanisms, a technique for black survival in
America." (20)

Marlene Kim Connor posits that cool arose when male slaves were forced
to maintain an outward calm while their wives and mothers and daughters
were raped by white men.  For an African-American male, "being cool"
meant that he had harnessed his anger.  Indeed, as Connor writes, "A
man's ability to protect himself is at the very core of cool."  Cool,
then, became the ultimate reevenge of the powerless.  Cool was the one
thging that the white slaveowner couldn't own.  Cool was the one thing
money couldn't buy.  At its core, cool is about defiance.  (20)

... Peter Schjeldahl sees cool as transcending race, citing the
unemployed aristocracy disenfranchised by the French Revolution as one
likely source of cool.  "Cool is one of the consolations for the
aristocracy's loss of power--[cool is] an inborn excellence that you
don't have to prove."  (20)

Cool can be extremely negative.  Cool can refuse to get involved or to
take a stand.  Cool may reject all feeling and become, as William S.
Burroughs put it, an "Ugly Spirit." (21, 23)

The birth of the cool took place in the shadows ... 923)

The history of cool is a history of a shiver in the human heart.  In the
face of the atomic bomb, everybody felt powerless.  After 1945, the idea
that history was a steady progression toward perfection began to seem
naive.  Absolutes were shaken; relativity entered the world.  as the
World War victory euphoria gave way to the paranoia and conformity of
the Cold War, artists were forced to turn inward and go underground in
search of ways to express powerful new realities.   Before, there had
been many individual acts of cool.  Now Cool--a way, a stance, a
knowledge--was born.  (23)

Cool could not remain at teh culture's cutting edge forever. In January
1945 ... Jean-Paul Sartre ... was climbing out of an American military
transport plane in New York ... (23)

... and here see my previous post excerpting MacAdams' book.  But one
more note ...

By the 1960s, as Thomas Frank writes in The Conquest of Cool: Business
Culture, Counterculture, and teh Rise of Hip Consumerism [q.v.], cool
had become a commodity--something money could buy.  (27)

... ring any bells?  Again, let me know ...