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

Film critic Hoberman (Make My Day) offers a striking countercultural history of New York City. Postwar Manhattan, due to the depopulation wrought by “urban renewal,” was an oasis of “cheap rents” that turned the island into “perhaps the greatest facilitator of artistic innovation” of the modern era, according to Hoberman. He begins in 1959, with the opening of the Gaslight Poetry Cafe, a “dank basement” in the West Village where older Beats like Jack Kerouac commingled with a new wave of poets and provocateurs, among them poet Diane di Prima and director John Cassavetes. That same year elsewhere in the city, experimental performance groups like the Living Theater began to stage the first “happenings,” and Ornette Coleman debuted his groundbreaking Quartet, which “abstracted jazz into pure sound.” Hoberman tracks these various scenes and artists across the ’60s with a focus on their clashes with power, including the 1961 Beatnik Riot (inspired by a young Bob Dylan), Robert Moses’s crackdown on the Village ahead of the 1964 World’s Fair, and the emergence of the Lower East Side’s Pop Art scene, spearhead by Andy Warhol’s sharp critique of “America’s ‘business’” as “the making of illusions.” By the end of the decade, New York Bohemia had “broken containment,” Hoberman astutely notes, becoming both a globally influential style of political art-making but also a caricature of itself (with suburban teens playing at being punks). It’s a thrilling conjuration of a head-spinningly innovative time and place. (May)