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Everything Is Now: The 1960s New York Avant-Garde--Primal Happenings, Underground Movies, Radical Pop
A groundbreaking history of New York City cultural life in the 1960s from renowned film critic and longtime journalist
Comparable to Paris in the 1920s, 1960s New York City was a cauldron of avantgarde ferment and artistic innovation. Boundaries were transgressed and new forms created. Drawing on interviews, memoirs, and the alternative press, Everything is Now chronicles this collective drama as it was played out in coffeehouses, bars, lofts, storefront theaters and ultimately the streets.
The principals are penniless filmmakers, jazz musicians, performing poets, as well as less classifiable and hyphenate artists. Most were outsiders. They include Albert Ayler, Amiri Baraka, Shirley Clarke, Jackie Curtis, Bob Dylan, Allen Ginsberg, Yayoi Kusama, Boris Lurie, Jonas Mekas, Yoko Ono, Nam June Paik, Barbara Rubin, Ed Sanders, Carolee Schneeman, Jack Smith, Sun Ra, Andy Warhol and many more.
Some were associated with specific movements (Avant Rock, Destruction Art, Fluxus, Free Jazz, Guerrilla Theater, Happenings, Mimeographed Zines, Pop Art, Protest-Folk, Ridiculous Theater, Stand-Up Poetry, Underground Comix and Underground Movies). But there were also movements of one. Their art, rooted in the detritus and excitement of urban life, largely free of established institutional support, was taboo-breaking and confrontational. Often and to a degree unimaginable today, artists conflicted with the law.
By the mid ‘60s these subcultures were cross-pollinating and largely self-sufficient, coalesced into an entire counterculture that changed the city, the country, and the world.
Comparable to Paris in the 1920s, 1960s New York City was a cauldron of avantgarde ferment and artistic innovation. Boundaries were transgressed and new forms created. Drawing on interviews, memoirs, and the alternative press, Everything is Now chronicles this collective drama as it was played out in coffeehouses, bars, lofts, storefront theaters and ultimately the streets.
The principals are penniless filmmakers, jazz musicians, performing poets, as well as less classifiable and hyphenate artists. Most were outsiders. They include Albert Ayler, Amiri Baraka, Shirley Clarke, Jackie Curtis, Bob Dylan, Allen Ginsberg, Yayoi Kusama, Boris Lurie, Jonas Mekas, Yoko Ono, Nam June Paik, Barbara Rubin, Ed Sanders, Carolee Schneeman, Jack Smith, Sun Ra, Andy Warhol and many more.
Some were associated with specific movements (Avant Rock, Destruction Art, Fluxus, Free Jazz, Guerrilla Theater, Happenings, Mimeographed Zines, Pop Art, Protest-Folk, Ridiculous Theater, Stand-Up Poetry, Underground Comix and Underground Movies). But there were also movements of one. Their art, rooted in the detritus and excitement of urban life, largely free of established institutional support, was taboo-breaking and confrontational. Often and to a degree unimaginable today, artists conflicted with the law.
By the mid ‘60s these subcultures were cross-pollinating and largely self-sufficient, coalesced into an entire counterculture that changed the city, the country, and the world.
464 pages, Hardcover
Published May 27, 2025
57 people are currently reading
759 people want to read
About the author
J. Hoberman
40 books81 followersAuthor bio from Verso Press:
J. Hoberman served as the senior film critic at The Village Voice from 1988-2012. He has taught at Harvard, NYU, and Cooper Union, and is the author of ten books, including Bridge of Light, The Red Atlantis, and The Dream Life.
J. Hoberman served as the senior film critic at The Village Voice from 1988-2012. He has taught at Harvard, NYU, and Cooper Union, and is the author of ten books, including Bridge of Light, The Red Atlantis, and The Dream Life.
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Displaying 1 - 13 of 13 reviews
July 21, 2025
So far, this has mostly been a barrage of (mostly) well-known names, addresses, quotes from published reviews/articles, and not terribly surprising gossip. I'm not sure how much more I need. For the artists I'm interested in, I keep itching to switch to a more detailed study.
Update: this got better, with some more extended descriptions of major cultural events. But the constant spray of barely connected gossip is still exhausting.
Update: this got better, with some more extended descriptions of major cultural events. But the constant spray of barely connected gossip is still exhausting.
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June 28, 2025An informative list of people and events from Hoberman’s perspective but little to no analysis. A good reference book to accompany others. Jill Johnston’s Privileged Information would be a strong counterpoint.
June 22, 2025
Remarkable history. And a whole list of films I've got to see or re-see (at least those that aren't lost).
June 2, 2025
My review in the Arts Fuse:
https://artsfuse.org/310999/june-shor...
J. Hoberman, for years the reigning film critic at the Village Voice, might be the Siegfried Kracauer of the 21st century. Plus, he’s more entertaining.
Like the renowned expatriate German film theorist whose From Caligari to Hitler: A Psychological History of the German Film (1947) remains the consummate text on the historical and cultural interpretation of cinema, Hoberman has applied similar acuity — with his own brand of sardonic irony — on how Hollywood has reflected US political turmoil. His so-called “Found Illusions” trilogy — The Dream Life (2003), An Army of Phantoms (2011), and Make My Day (2019) — traced the secret history of the Cold War from 1945 to 1990 on the silver screen, while Film After Film (2013) took a sneak peek at the new millennium.
But his latest book, Everything Is Now: The 1960s New York Avant-Garde—Primal Happenings, Underground Movies, Radical Pop (Verso Books), has both a broader and narrower focus. In it, he covers the extended play version of the 1960s — from 1958 to 1971– as refracted in the avant-garde art scene in New York City. The national and world historical events have an eerily familiar feel, while the artistic echoes are works and movements far more ambitious, subversive, absurd, and assaultive than anything our tepid culture could dream of today.
The former includes an unending litany of assassinations, war crimes, riots, corruption, oppression, outrages, massacres, cruelty, censorship, and stupidity that reminds us that, as awful as things are now, they were just as bad before. The latter boasts a line-up of some of America’s most significant — and at times, silliest and most sanctimonious — artists: John Cassavetes, Ornette Coleman, Andy Warhol, Bob Dylan, Shirley Clarke, Norman Mailer, Amiri Baraka, Yoko Ono, Yayoi Kusama, Allen Ginsberg…
At times, Hoberman gets bogged down in the details. That’s understandable. A native New Yorker, he lived through this chaos as a young observer, and his occasional cameos in the book are always pointed and amusing. Like at the end, when he bumps into Alejandro Jodorowsky at a bookstore in 1971 after a second viewing of the director’s hallucinogenic Western El Topo (I ended up seeing it myself five times) and finagles a visit with the director in Mexico. He wrote a hilarious piece about it and, to his surprise, the Village Voice accepted it. That was in 1972 — he’d continue writing there for the next four decades.
–Peter Keough
https://artsfuse.org/310999/june-shor...
J. Hoberman, for years the reigning film critic at the Village Voice, might be the Siegfried Kracauer of the 21st century. Plus, he’s more entertaining.
Like the renowned expatriate German film theorist whose From Caligari to Hitler: A Psychological History of the German Film (1947) remains the consummate text on the historical and cultural interpretation of cinema, Hoberman has applied similar acuity — with his own brand of sardonic irony — on how Hollywood has reflected US political turmoil. His so-called “Found Illusions” trilogy — The Dream Life (2003), An Army of Phantoms (2011), and Make My Day (2019) — traced the secret history of the Cold War from 1945 to 1990 on the silver screen, while Film After Film (2013) took a sneak peek at the new millennium.
But his latest book, Everything Is Now: The 1960s New York Avant-Garde—Primal Happenings, Underground Movies, Radical Pop (Verso Books), has both a broader and narrower focus. In it, he covers the extended play version of the 1960s — from 1958 to 1971– as refracted in the avant-garde art scene in New York City. The national and world historical events have an eerily familiar feel, while the artistic echoes are works and movements far more ambitious, subversive, absurd, and assaultive than anything our tepid culture could dream of today.
The former includes an unending litany of assassinations, war crimes, riots, corruption, oppression, outrages, massacres, cruelty, censorship, and stupidity that reminds us that, as awful as things are now, they were just as bad before. The latter boasts a line-up of some of America’s most significant — and at times, silliest and most sanctimonious — artists: John Cassavetes, Ornette Coleman, Andy Warhol, Bob Dylan, Shirley Clarke, Norman Mailer, Amiri Baraka, Yoko Ono, Yayoi Kusama, Allen Ginsberg…
At times, Hoberman gets bogged down in the details. That’s understandable. A native New Yorker, he lived through this chaos as a young observer, and his occasional cameos in the book are always pointed and amusing. Like at the end, when he bumps into Alejandro Jodorowsky at a bookstore in 1971 after a second viewing of the director’s hallucinogenic Western El Topo (I ended up seeing it myself five times) and finagles a visit with the director in Mexico. He wrote a hilarious piece about it and, to his surprise, the Village Voice accepted it. That was in 1972 — he’d continue writing there for the next four decades.
–Peter Keough
June 23, 2025
A barrage of proper nouns barely concatenated by writing.
March 10, 2025
If you're at all interested in this era of art, this is a fantastic read. It's full of details and helps make sense of the various movements taking place in the era.
April 11, 2025
My thanks to NetGalley and Verso Books for an advance copy of this history showcasing the amazing creative acts and adventures that took place during the 1960's in the only place big enough, brave enough, and broken enough to do so, New York City.
My father was a fan of The Village Voice, a paper he read pretty much up until he passed away. He loved the comics, perused the articles, read the reviews, but it was all the ads that he loved. Every small club, every galley opening, every book signing, he looked at. If it sounded interesting he would cut it out, and ask me about who these people were. I love the fact that he thought a guy working in bookstores and a record shop in Connecticut was on top of the zeitgeist, but that was my father. In his youth, once he found books and movies and more importantly a world outside of the Bronx neighborhood he lived in, my father was constantly wanting to know more. He would go to events, sometimes with my Mom on dates, if it seemed safe, by himself if it didn't. I think in many ways he was an artist, who never found his medium. This would come out casually about seeing this, or hearing that, before marriage, and children and a need to make money stopped this. It sounded magical. After reading this book, I know it was. Everything Is Now: The 1960s New York Avant-Garde Primal Happenings, Underground Movies, Radical Pop by J Hoberman is a look at the art, the places, the people, the times, the mistakes and the legacy of a decade in New York, where movements were made, art created, and the world was changed.
The author is a longtime film critic with the aforementioned The Village Voice as well as an educator and writer. To tell his tale Hoberman draws on many of the papers of the time, the Voice, other weeklies, autobiographies, stories and interviews. The covers the scene in New York from Free Jazz to the early birthing pains of glam and punk, from Beatniks to MFers. Hoberman looks at the small start, the opening of clubs complete with snapping fingers in lieu of clapping, so as not to get neighbors mad at all the noise. Folk, jazz, free music, and other forms of music, and noise. Plays, and performances, poetry readings, writings, even underground movies, many filmed in the decaying buildings and neighborhoods in the city. Many of the names will be familiar, Ornette Coleman, Norman Mailer, Allan Ginsberg and others. The book starts with the forming of the culture, and moves into it being a movement, with political power, which of course brought political pressure, both changing the world, and changing the scene in numerous ways.
Hoberman has done an incredible job in bringing all this together, especially in covering all sorts of different mediums and styles. This and trying to get stories to agree must have taken quite a long time. The writing is very good, sticking to areas, and not jumping around, explaining what was happening in the world, the neighborhoods, and in the scene. The mix of people is good famous, infamous and people who time has unfairly forgotten. Hoberman has a nice style, and never overwhelms the reader, actually I was busy making notes for stuff to catch up with again, or for works and pieces I had never heard of. A really fascinating book.
A book that can cater to a lot of different readers. History, cultural history fans, music, comic, movies and much more. A book that will introduce people to a lot of great works, and make some wonder how it all went away.
My father was a fan of The Village Voice, a paper he read pretty much up until he passed away. He loved the comics, perused the articles, read the reviews, but it was all the ads that he loved. Every small club, every galley opening, every book signing, he looked at. If it sounded interesting he would cut it out, and ask me about who these people were. I love the fact that he thought a guy working in bookstores and a record shop in Connecticut was on top of the zeitgeist, but that was my father. In his youth, once he found books and movies and more importantly a world outside of the Bronx neighborhood he lived in, my father was constantly wanting to know more. He would go to events, sometimes with my Mom on dates, if it seemed safe, by himself if it didn't. I think in many ways he was an artist, who never found his medium. This would come out casually about seeing this, or hearing that, before marriage, and children and a need to make money stopped this. It sounded magical. After reading this book, I know it was. Everything Is Now: The 1960s New York Avant-Garde Primal Happenings, Underground Movies, Radical Pop by J Hoberman is a look at the art, the places, the people, the times, the mistakes and the legacy of a decade in New York, where movements were made, art created, and the world was changed.
The author is a longtime film critic with the aforementioned The Village Voice as well as an educator and writer. To tell his tale Hoberman draws on many of the papers of the time, the Voice, other weeklies, autobiographies, stories and interviews. The covers the scene in New York from Free Jazz to the early birthing pains of glam and punk, from Beatniks to MFers. Hoberman looks at the small start, the opening of clubs complete with snapping fingers in lieu of clapping, so as not to get neighbors mad at all the noise. Folk, jazz, free music, and other forms of music, and noise. Plays, and performances, poetry readings, writings, even underground movies, many filmed in the decaying buildings and neighborhoods in the city. Many of the names will be familiar, Ornette Coleman, Norman Mailer, Allan Ginsberg and others. The book starts with the forming of the culture, and moves into it being a movement, with political power, which of course brought political pressure, both changing the world, and changing the scene in numerous ways.
Hoberman has done an incredible job in bringing all this together, especially in covering all sorts of different mediums and styles. This and trying to get stories to agree must have taken quite a long time. The writing is very good, sticking to areas, and not jumping around, explaining what was happening in the world, the neighborhoods, and in the scene. The mix of people is good famous, infamous and people who time has unfairly forgotten. Hoberman has a nice style, and never overwhelms the reader, actually I was busy making notes for stuff to catch up with again, or for works and pieces I had never heard of. A really fascinating book.
A book that can cater to a lot of different readers. History, cultural history fans, music, comic, movies and much more. A book that will introduce people to a lot of great works, and make some wonder how it all went away.
June 18, 2025
I’m in the East Village, the setting for a lot of the book. Actually I found a copy in a LITTLE FREE LIBRARY in the hood. It’s an uncorrected proof paperback that had not been read.
Anyway, it’s a bit of cornucopia of names, types of art, descriptions of movies, and music.
I learned a lot of stuff about my hood. I’ve been in NYC since 1984. In that time I have met, worked with, or seen around various characters in the book who survived. I used to see Ginsberg on the street occasionally and Jonas Mekas a lot since I was living around the corner from that Anthology Film Achieve and was a member for years.
So people interested in underground movies, theater, art, would find a lot of information in the book.
Not enough Phil Ochs, I guess Hoberman didn’t like his work.
Anyway, it’s a bit of cornucopia of names, types of art, descriptions of movies, and music.
I learned a lot of stuff about my hood. I’ve been in NYC since 1984. In that time I have met, worked with, or seen around various characters in the book who survived. I used to see Ginsberg on the street occasionally and Jonas Mekas a lot since I was living around the corner from that Anthology Film Achieve and was a member for years.
So people interested in underground movies, theater, art, would find a lot of information in the book.
Not enough Phil Ochs, I guess Hoberman didn’t like his work.
August 24, 2025
This is truly one of the most engaging and well researched books I have read of late, and the only reason I don't add the extra star is that it's perhaps so well researched as to become overwhelming in the long run. Hoberman's previous books have certainly placed him in a remarkable position to follow the ins and outs of the various "scenes" from the late 1950s all the way through to the early 1970s. I probably will go back to this text frequently for references on what was happening in certain moments depending on what topics arise in other books I am reading.
July 8, 2025
This is a behemoth of a subject to tackle, and Hoberman writes much of it from the perspective of having seen some of the seminal activity happening in New York. What is of interest to me is the quirky details of some events, and stories of some of the people who made New York the center of counter-culture during the 1960s.
one typo: Michael Snow's film is "New York Eye and Ear Control" not earth.
one typo: Michael Snow's film is "New York Eye and Ear Control" not earth.
August 1, 2025
Whew...there was a lot going on in the 1960s New York avant-garde! Making sense of it is no easy feat. Somehow, strategically organizing 100s (1000s?) of reviews, news clippings, advertisements, listings, etc. from countless periodicals, underground newspapers (most prominently the Village Voice), "straight" newspapers, and whatever else he could get his hands on, Hoberman tells this vital cultural story in a coherent manner. A fun and exhilarating read.
July 14, 2025
4,0 ⭐️
October 27, 2025
How many more of these dense and insightful cultural histories can Hoberman have in him? This reads as the last chapter in the monumental achievement that is his exploration of 20th century American history as reflected in popular (and not so popular) art. Something to cherish.
Displaying 1 - 13 of 13 reviews