The Spirit of Spring Journal 43/22/08 Birth of Seasonal Cool
The sun is high in the sky but still the wind from the northwest makes things cool. The usual March cool. Speaking of which, we went to the Addison Gallery and saw the Stoller (a fantastic photo from the early sixties of the TWA terminal displayed on the exhibit website is indicative of the black and white flavor of the photos depicting modern architecture with all its curves and lines), Homer (an amazing watercolor featuring a predominately yellow rooster large in the foreground with cornfield, mountains, and farm house receding small into the background kept me coming back to look), and Birth of the Cool (think of the Roadrunner in a plastic chair meets Chet Baker resting on a rectangular chaise longe inside a steel and glass house overlooking sun-washed LA) Exhibits today. The first two were excellent as expected, but the latter was a pleasant surprise. A cultural look at Southern California Cool of the fifties from architecture to furniture to painting to music to movies to television.
Hence the spring poem:
March Spring Cool Quintanka
Cool is more than California
pastel architecture all
that plastic jazz. Conformity,
that king of winter cold is dead.
Long live this fresh conformity.
Kokoro Sonzai 2008
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