The entry begins:Plot: A college junior studying popular culture goes back in time to early-50s New York to find out how and when Americans first started using the word "cool" to understand its mythic hold on global society.Visit Joel Dinerstein's website.
The Origins of Cool focuses on the intersections of iconic figures of film, music, and literature in post-World War II New York (1945-1965). We start out at a jazz club called The Three Deuces where legendary saxophonist Lester "Pres" Young (Terence Howard) is playing with a quintet that includes a young Dizzy Gillespie. Young first invoked "cool" as a word, concept, and style, wore shades at night and on stage, spoke a poetic, coded slang, and developed a bluesy urbane romantic sound along with his musical soulmate, Billie Holiday (Taraji P. Henson). Howard and Henson replay their hiphop romance from Empire here in key of film noir, that is to say, in black-and-white. Their friend Frank Sinatra...[read on]
My Book, The Movie: The Origins of Cool in Postwar America.
--Marshal Zeringue
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