The 1950s: Cold War Culture and the Birth of the Cool

Wednesday, June 3, 2009

just finished reading

Found an early copy of this book in the basement. A very interesting novel published in 1954. Remarkably well-written. It reminds me of Dostoevsky but resonates with some sort of 50's melancholia. Need more time to think about it.

Article on 1959 in NY Mag

You might want to check out an article published this week in New York Magazine, adapted from Fred Kaplan's book 1959: The Year That Changed Everything, which comes out this month. Here's an excerpt:

1959: Sex, Jazz, and Datsuns

A year that left its mark— many marks— on the city and the world.

By Fred Kaplan

Published May 31, 2009

Yes, 1959. Not 1968 or ’71 or ’64 but the send-off year of the reputedly frumpy fifties was when the shock waves of the new ripped the seams of daily life, when categories were crossed and taboos were trampled. Other years boast transformative events (you can find them in almost any year if you look long enough), but 1959 was especially pivotal, though widely forgotten. It was the year when a rocket first broke free of the Earth’s orbit, the FDA held hearings on the birth-control pill, the microchip was unveiled, the 707 took its maiden nonstop voyage from coast to coast, and Berry Gordy founded Motown. Yet this New Frontier loomed as a place not just for satellites and rockets and a new youthful music but also for ICBMs and H-bombs. And so, 1959 was the year that saw panic over fallout shelters, fears of a “missile gap,” and Strontium-90 in milk. It was also when U.S. military advisers suffered their first fatalities in Vietnam.

The culture was changing, too, as a new generation of artists and writers crashed through their own sets of barriers—and attracted growing audiences that, amid the newness all around them, were suddenly, even giddily, receptive to the iconoclasm. New York emerged as the center of these changes, and it was 50 years ago that the city took on some of its still-familiar contours. That summer, Allen Ginsberg, the generation’s visionary poet of exuberance and doom, wrote in the Village Voice: “No one in America can know what will happen. No one is in real control. America is having a nervous breakdown … Therefore there has been great exaltation, despair, prophecy, strain, suicide, secrecy, and public gaiety among the poets of the city.”

He might as well have written that today.

Click here to read the rest of the article.