1959, by Fred Kaplan.
There are years so transformative, they stand out on name alone: 1492. 1776. 1968. On the surface, 1959 would not appear to be one of them. But 1959: The Year Everything Changed, by Slate regular Fred Kaplan, begs to differ. This was the year, after all, that Miles Davis recorded Kind of Blue, ditching the rigidity of bebop for a freer style of improvisation. It was when Fidel Castro and a gang of barbudos took over the island of Cuba. And it was when a tinkerer-engineer named John St. Clair Kilby introduced the microchip, a thumbnail-sized piece of technology that would revolutionize the world of computing (and allow for the eventual dissemination of LOL cats to the universe). Not to mention all of the era’s other significant cultural happenings: the Guggenheim Museum opened its doors to the public, Robert Frank’s book The Americans arrived in the United States and MoMA unveiled an exhibit titled Sixteen Americans, a show that helped give rise to artists such as Robert Rauschenberg, Allan Kaprow and Jasper Johns.
“I’ve generally been suspicious of books like this — Cod: The Fish That Changed the World — the idea that everything is affected by one event,” says Kaplan of his broad survey. “But so many of the things that we associate with the late ’60s and the Baby Boomers, they were rooted in the late ’50s — and instigated by a generation that came of age during war and became disgruntled at the phony period that followed.”
1959 is definitely one hell of a yearbook (and one hell of a dishy read), featuring appearances by Norman Mailer, John F. Kennedy, Lenny Bruce, Herman Kahn, William Burroughs, John Cassavetes and Margaret Sanger. (Interesting fact: old Mags got around.) The book captures the era’s high creativity, as well as the high anxiety generated by the Cold War. “[Mort] Sahl put it this way,” writes Kaplan, of the period. “Whenever he saw an airplane approaching, he never knew whether it was going to drop a hydrogen bomb or spell out ‘Pepsi-Cola’ in skywriting.”
With the Gugg celebrating it’s 50th, Frank’s photos on display at the Met and Kaprow’s tires being rethought by William Pope L. at Hauser & Wirth, we figured that there was no time like the present to talk to Kaplan, a veteran jazz writer, who was kind enough to submit to our questioning. Here, he reveals his distaste for art skulls, the type of Picasso he’d like to hang in the loo and why he’d like to dump pig blood all over Robert Indiana’s Love sign.
C-M: If you were to die and come back as a piece of art, what would it be?
KAPLAN: Calvin Tomkins, in his biography of Robert Rauschenberg, wrote that when he went to the Sixteen Americans show, he saw a piece by the artist called Double Feature. It had a man’s shirt with a pocket, so [Tomkins] mischievously dropped a quarter into the pocket. I want to come back as that — so that people can mischieveously drop quarters into my shirt pocket.
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