j. Hoberman’s Everything Is Now is an account of the downtown Manhattan underground arts scene in the 1960’s. This was an ideological and aesthetic melting pop with boundaries being pushed in film, music, dance, literature or all of the above at once. Many commentators label the core movement as Fluxus and point to prime movers being LaMonte Young and Yoko Ono. Some will note lesser known but equally or even more figures like Gnostic Saint Harry Smith, his frequent co-conspirator, Qabalist Lionel Ziprin, poet, Smith-fan Ira Cohen and Lamonte Young percussionist, poet and publisher Angus MacLise (who played with Hymenaeus Beta in Father Yod’s Jam Band); occult perspectives were part of the mix as well Gay Liberation. Honestly, it was a gloriously incestuous set up with visionary incendiary results. The posted description of this book is:
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.
