Everything Is Now Primal Happenings, Radical Music, Underground Movies, and the 1960s New York Avant-Garde

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.

J. Hoberman was for over three decades a film and culture critic for The Village Voice. His previous books have explored the subculture of midnight movies, the rise and fall of Yiddish-language cinema, the international Communist avantgarde, SoHo performance art, and the underground filmmaker Jack Smith. His “found illusions” trilogy—which includes The Dream Life, Make My Day, and An Army of Phantoms—used Hollywood to refract the history of the Cold War.