I just saw this show at the Addison Gallery of American Art in Andover, MA. I cannot recommend it highly enough! If you're in the Boston area its well worth the train ticket up to Andover.
The show is quite possibly the best I've seen in discussing a comprehensive movement through art, design, architecture, and music. The show is in rooms divided into those categories, but extremely well designed - flowing effortlessly from the Case Study house projects, to Eames furniture & films, to landscape architecture, to graphic and television designs, to the influx of Jazz. Paintings by Ray Eames, some rare prototypes of Eames furniture, extraordinary paintings by Karl Benjamin, and Wile E. Coyote videos were among the pleasant surprises.
The only unpleasant surprise was the 70$ price for the catalog. Thank god for Amazon!
Being cool is a response to a world beyond one's control...
Being cool is essentially hip existentialism.
It is Eames saying yes millions were murdered in Nazi concentration camps and the Japanese Americans were interned in places like Manzanaar, and a hundred million or so were slaughtered in WWI and WWII, and the USA just nuked two Japanese cities incinerating over a quarter million humans in the blink of an eye, but I'm going to focus on discovering new, useful and cool abstract forms for furniture and keep smiling and having fun, because, like wow, man, what else can a cat do in the middle of this nightmare.
Cool was Albert Camus fighting the good fight in the underground but writing The Fall and dying in a car wreck in a trench coat smoking cancer sticks to the end.
Cool was the ultimate existential response to the 20th Century nightmare of two world wars separated by a disasterous depression and followed by cold war in which the world hung from a hair trigger of nuclear holocaust.
Cool was Charlie Parker blowing his reed and shooting up on horse in Kansas City when it was ruled by one of the most corrupt city machines of all time, while African Americans were being lynched simply because they wanted to use the same restrooms as whites and take a seat anywhere on a bus. Cool was the Bird saying, "Screw Pendergast and the Near North Side Sicilians,and their territorial circuit for pedalling blackmarket whiskey made in the strip pits of Pittsburg, Kansas, man, this cat is going out in style baby; this cat is mainlining his way to New York, New York, the city so nice, they named it twice, no matter what, man."
Cool was mid and late film noir with cheap jazz scores showing desparate little people caught in the middle of alienation and anonymity of grotesquely stark big city life and getting stepped on right and left while the rich didn't even notice, or were orchestrating the stepping on.
NeoCool is coming back, perhaps, because because we are in the middle of another holocaust of emerging wars, cities with infrastructures rotting out of control, and economic problems so overwhelming no one is even thinking seriously about them.
Like, Part Two, Man...
Moral outrage, marching, and voting, haven't changed a thing, just like they didn't prevent the maddness of the Cold War, or the slaughters of WWI and WWII. Current economic melt down triggers no more compassion than the Great Depression did. Judging from the inner cities, we probably already have as many unemployed now as we had in the entirety of the Great Depression, man; its like the cats in government just decided to index it away, so all the hungry, destitute cats simply go uncounted. Remedies? Oh, man, they are as trivial in the face of this rising tide of suffering, as they were in the first few years of the Great Depression. W is proposing the kind of irrelvant fixes that that Hoover proposed. And all the while no one mentions that the decisions of central bankers triggered the whole weary gig in the first place. Its all planned, man. There ain't nothing improvisational about it, man. That's why you got to play jazz in the face of it, man, cause Jazz is all improvisation, man.
I feel sorry for all these, uncool cats. What are they gonna do in the face of this?
They can retreat to the digital fantasy world of PCs and iPods and Nintendo the way so many retreated into dark theaters in the 30s and 40s to escape the nightmare outside.
Or they can grow impossibly cyncial and die of bitterness.
Or you can keep a stiff upper lip, experiment with various coffees and teas, maintain as many of your ordinary rituals as you can and hope you build a kind of bulwark against the nightmare.
Oh, man, if Beale Street could talk, you know what it would say, man? Like the fire next time, you dig?
If you are a neocool cat, like, you gots to go NeoCool.
To those who say, "We are all African Americans now," in the face of a world being folded into derepresentative European Unions, North American Unions, Asia-Pacific Unions, and Middle Eastern Unions, where economic warfare called demand destructions are waged by the leaders on their own people in order to scale up markets to deal with China and India coming on line, well, man, a Cool Revival may have considerable appeal.
You dig?
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