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Everything Is Now:The 1960s New York Avant-Garde—Primal Happenings, Underground Movies, Radical Pop
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A groundbreaking cultural history of 1960s New York, from the legendary writer on art and film
Like Paris in the 1920s, New York City in the 1960s was a cauldron of avant-garde 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 here are penniless filmmakers, jazz musicians, and performing poets, as well as less classifiable artists. Most were outsiders at the time. They include Amiri Baraka, Bob Dylan, Allen Ginsberg, Yayoi Kusama, Yoko Ono, Nam June Paik, Carolee Schneemann, Jack Smith, 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, was taboo-breaking and confrontational.
As J. Hoberman shows in this riveting history, these subcultures coalesced into a counterculture that changed the city, the country, and the world.
Reviews
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Everything Is Now is a completist guide to arguably the most inventive scene of a tumultuous decade. Its densely packed pages offer vivid and timely anecdotal lessons on the impact, suppression and self-obliteration of radical art...The book ends, finally and charmingly, with the story of how Hoberman himself entered the narrative: the dazzled bystander who became a participant in, and then a chronicler of, and now the authoritative historian of a brilliant and disturbed place and time.
, The New York Times -
I can’t remember the last book I’ve read that contained so much information so tightly packed, or in which the distillation of vast research offered such relentless ricochets of association, connection, and allusion. Although its meld of journalistic detective work, insightful analysis, and keen critical judgment might suggest a straightforward nonfiction account, it’s a work of obsession and devotion that finds a distinctive and original form—a hectic informational voracity—for its passionate archivism...as jubilantly overstuffed as its subtitle.
, The New Yorker -
A serious effort of research, reporting, and criticism written with the enthusiasm of a fan, Everything Is Now feels like the culmination of a life’s work, the New York book that Hoberman was born to write.
, The Nation
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The book is in conversation with Robert Caro’s The Power Broker (1974), with its subject, the notorious New York public official Robert Moses, something of a recurring villain here. Space is given to how artists reacted to Moses’s absurd plan to carve an expressway through Lower Manhattan and the Moses-overseen 1964 World’s Fair, where Warhol made a mural of the NYPD’s most wanted men, rapidly painted over. Caro’s book is subtitled “Robert Moses and the Fall of New York”; in Everything Is Now, Hoberman reconstructs the New York that fell.
, Art Newspaper -
In the astonishing “Everything Is Now: The 1960s New York Avant-Garde—Primal Happenings, Underground Movies, Radical Pop,” J. Hoberman assumes the roles of Google Earth satellite, Leica Rangefinder and time machine...What Mr. Hoberman has rendered is a blueprint to an explosion, the schematic to a zeitgeist.
, Wall Street Journal -
A striking countercultural history of New York City. [Everything is Now] is a thrilling conjuration of a head-spinningly innovative time and place.
, Publishers Weekly -
A fast-paced ride
, Christies -
Nobody in America writes as well about culture and film as J. Hoberman
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The dish, plus the mentions of virtually every downtown address where people lived and worked, gives a vivid sense of the ’60s avant-garde as a physically and personally close-knit group and the art they created as a collective enterprise. Minutely detailed descriptions of movies, plays, concerts, and “happenings,” from underground classics (the Living Theatre’s Paradise Now) to the truly obscure (Barbara Rubin’s multimedia event, Caterpillar Changes), also make palpable the period’s anything-goes ethos.
Kirkus Reviews -
Everything Is Now is a propulsive account of New York’s counterculture in the 1960s. It’s all documented by legendary cultural critic J. Hoberman, whose authoritative and evocative writing welcomes readers into the city’s exclusive art-world circles as guests rather than outside observers. It makes for a compelling, dishy read that’s also deeply researched.
A.V. Club -
Back in the 1960s, New York City was a haven for the avant-garde, whether it was in the shape of subcultural movements like fluxus and guerrilla theater or venues like coffeehouses, bars, and lofts. Hoberman’s cultural history is a thorough account of the New York underground, complete with rich, minute details about what the city once was.
The Millions -
We look to history to chart the future. I came to this basic reaffirmation while reading J. Hoberman’s latest, addicting, grand cultural history, Everything Is Now: The 1960s New York Avant-Garde—Primal Happenings, Underground Movies, Radical Pop. The snake of a title promises a lot to chew on—and the book delivers...With the final line of the book, Hoberman hauntingly clarifies what he has written: 'a memoir, although not mine.'
, Art in America -
J. Hoberman is one of our best and most prescient cultural critics - and after a dozen or so books, his latest, Everything is Now - stands as his magnum opus. Epic in scope, it is a vast New York-centric taxonomy and throw-down of arcana to rival the Mentaculus.
, The Forward -
Hoberman, a veteran culture critic, takes an in-depth look at the ‘60s New York arts scene — including Beat poets, experimental filmmakers and guerrilla theater — and how its rebel spirit spread throughout the country and the world. The book is also a reminder of a time when art truly mattered and definitively shaped the culture at large in New York and beyond.
, Los Angeles Times -
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.
Counterpunch -
The book offers a roll call of those artists, performers, musicians, filmmakers, photogs, writers, playwrights, and uncatagorizables who shook off the gray conformity of the Eisenhower years for the riotous spectrum of the Sixties...Hoberman has gathered them, and literally hundreds more, to help make sense of it all now.
The Village Voice -
An indispensable account of the cultural trailblazers who made pivotal use of their moment... The sheer amount of information packed into Everything Is Now can be overwhelming. That’s not to say that the experience of reading the book is necessarily unpleasant—rather, Hoberman’s book is so dense with facts that it could induce a sort of overstimulation. I noticed on the back cover that a Guardian critic’s blurb for The Dream Life, one of Hoberman’s previous books, mentioned that it was so invigorating that the reader 'had to ration [themselves] to a chapter a week.' I had a similar experience reading Everything Is Now.
, Brooklyn Rail -
Meticulous, yet deeply readable, Everything Is Now foregrounds iconic figures like Andy Warhol, Yoko Ono, and Jack Smith, alongside the forgotten venues, marginal personalities, and ephemeral happenings that animated this vibrant scene.
, Screen Slate -
Everything is Now is an expression of gratitude for the more intimate (and much more affordable) city that the author, like all New Yorkers of every age, once knew.
, The Film Stage -
Legendary film critic Hoberman reconstructs New York City’s radical artistic scene from 1959 to 1971, when low rent and high ideals collided to generate revolutionary creativity...An indispensable cultural history.
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