J. Hoberman’s New Book About 1960s NYC Brims with Downtown Delights

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. But while in the throes of its semi-nostalgic, breathless invocation of the exciting art times of the 1960s, I couldn’t help but reflect on those first three titular words in the Now when this book greets us, on how then might become now.

Hoberman has gifted us scintillating analyses of various art epochs in his books on the culture of midnight movies, the paranoid 1960s, or the milquetoast movies of Reagan’s 1980s. The protagonist stalking his latest New York Now is Jonas Mekas, a mentor of Hoberman’s, the grand doyen of the city’s experimental cinema, and a self-styled poet who found beauty in what others had so unimaginatively dismissed as pornography (Jack Smith’s Flaming Creatures), celebrity navel-gazing (Yoko Ono’s still-underrated films), or a waste of space and time (Andy Warhol’s Empire).

Mekas also co-founded New York’s Anthology Film Archives, where J. Hoberman will, in June, present a selection of shorts that he discusses in Everything Is Now. The book, indeed the era, is lined by films that offered up-to-date reflections of the period back to its people: Shirley Clarke’s portrait of the Black gay gigolo Jason; Jack Smith’s and Paul Morrissey’s mordant, hilarious send-ups of cheap-o B-Hollywood glamour; Mekas and Robert Frank’s diaristic films of their friends, shot as if the camera were at last a pencil. There were also the attention-frizzing “Happenings,” wild strobe and light shows, music chaotically blaring out the guitars of the Velvet Underground or Goldie and the Gingerbreads, partygoers doing the Frug as home movies of hot people were projected upon dancing bodies. The key thing here is proximity, the Manhattan jamming of hip-to-hip, café-to-dance-hall, making life in the city so chaotically synchronous. Amid the mishmash of the 1960s, ideas for alternative futures flowed.

Reading Everything Is Now is like facing a rolling avalanche that doesn’t care whether you live(d) or die(d): outrageous events in the downtown diaspora are strung one after the other, popcorn-string-style, with little commentary or judgement from the author. An uprising in Harlem coincides with a run of the Harlem-set Cool World (1963) by Shirley Clarke and produced by Frederick Wiseman; a week later, Warhol and Mekas sit in a building all night filming Empire, the ultimate American film: eight hours of the phallic Empire State Building shrouded in dark, then illumined by dawn.

Downtown a smidge, in 1968, a black-leather-clad Diane Arbus floats out of her 120 East 10th Street apartment to sit in a park with Linda Eastman, the future Mrs. Paul McCartney, where they discuss f-stops. At the Five Spot Café, Harry Smith attracts the attention of Allen Ginsberg as they listen to Thelonious Monk, Smith taking copious notes on how ahead or behind the beat Monk’s piano clumps were. Having befriended one another some earlier toke-filled night, Smith soon plays Ginsberg one of his hieroglyph-strewn films, which compels Ginsberg to convince acid king Timothy Leary, movie goddess Elizabeth Taylor, and a supermarket heiress to invest in Smith’s animated take on The Wizard of Oz. But the project collapses after to the suicide of the fourth and biggest backer, the millionaire son of a horse breeder. C’est comme ça. The failed ’68 assassination of the scene’s Svengali, Uncle Andy, is upstaged by the successful assassination of yet another Kennedy, and Hoberman reports that “Ray Johnson saw the next morning’s Daily News headline ACTRESS SHOOTS ANDY WARHOL, was mugged at knife point, and left New York City never to return.” It is a credit to Hoberman’s phlegmatic wit as a storyteller that he makes hundreds of similarly crazy events in 1960s New York roll along like it’s just the way of all things.

You will want to keep a notebook handy to jot down which of the book’s myriad cultural items you’ll want to discover or revisit. Hoberman correctly identifies the visionary LP Yoko Ono/Plastic Ono Band (1970) as “the culmination of Ono’s long and winding road from John Cage’s class to Chamber Street loft concerts through Fluxus notoriety to countercultural stardom,” and considers Ono’s and John Lennon’s billboards reading “WAR IS OVER! / if you want it / HAPPY CHRISTMAS FROM JOHN AND YOKO” as the ’60s’ “quintessential artwork”—a casual intermingling of the popular, the artistic, and the political that befits the Beatles’ famed 3-part harmony.

Elsewhere, the author revisits the jazz/rock debate by compiling critical hosannas and takedowns of the late-1960s flirtations with R&B and more “commercial” 4/4 beats from jazz artists Miles Davis (In a Silent Way, Bitches Brew) and Albert Ayler (New Grass). In particular, Hoberman made me finally listen to the much-travestied last three albums of Ayler’s too-short life, and I found myself in surprising agreement with the music critic Robert Christgau, who praises Ayler’s later revival of “the funky tenor breaks that filled out early R&B” which so angered jazz purists, then and now. This debate is of no matter to Hoberman, whose taste and encyclopedic glean on US culture is inspiringly omnivorous.

Above all, Hoberman demonstrates the natural fluidity of art, film, music, and writing, which all remain perplexingly siloed from each other to the detrimental of all. It has been nearly 50 years since the great painter-critic Manny Farber opined on the difference between painting and criticism in the pages of Film Comment: “The brutal fact is that they’re exactly the same thing.” He went on to castigate “provincial” US criticism, which, in Farber’s eyes, “doesn’t take cognizance of the crossover of arts… as if there were a law in film criticism that you’re not supposed to get involved in the other art forms.” The status quo remains. Yet ever since his landmark collection Vulgar Modernism, Hoberman has shown that this roping-off is ahistorical. Without cross-pollination, nothing would bloom.

With the final line of the book, Hoberman hauntingly clarifies what he has written: “a memoir, although not mine.” The book charts the unconscious of the shuttered East Village Other and the Village Voice, of Warhol’s Exploding Plastic Inevitables and Jerry Schatzberg’s legendary loft parties, of a propulsive youth-led hope that one could conceivably escape the US Cold War situation, of cold-water apartments and splinter-filled SoHo floors before dreary gentrification, of late nights at the Bleecker, of Dan Talbot’s New Yorker Films, and of the Film-Maker’s Cooperative. I, at 28, have never personally experienced any of that, but the cinematic-novelistic glory of Hoberman’s historical writing evokes them so convincingly as to let me feel as if I had.