Adjunct Assistant Professor and Film alum J. Hoberman '81 explores the rich cultural landscape of 1960s New York City in his upcoming book Everything Is Now: The 1960s New York Avant-Garde. Primal Happenings, Underground Movies, and Radical Pop. Set to release from Verso on May 27, 2025, the 464-page volume examines the city's explosive artistic ferment during a transformative decade.
Drawing on interviews, memoirs, and the alternative press, Hoberman chronicles the intersecting worlds of penniless filmmakers, jazz musicians, and performing poets who shaped the city's avant-garde scene. The book features an extensive cast of key cultural figures including Albert Ayler, Amiri Baraka, Bob Dylan, Allen Ginsberg, Yayoi Kusama, Jonas Mekas, Yoko Ono, and Andy Warhol.
Comparing 1960s New York to Paris in the 1920s, Hoberman chronicles how penniless artists working on the margins created a new creative ecosystem. The book pays particular attention to how these filmmakers, musicians, and poets operated largely outside established institutions, producing taboo-breaking and confrontational work that often brought them into conflict with the law.
What began in coffeehouses, bars, and storefront theaters, however, would ultimately reshape artistic expression far beyond New York City. The inter-mingling of all these subcultures, the book argues, resulted in the birth of a new counterculture whose impact would be felt across America and around the world.
Hoberman was a film critic at The Village Voice for over three decades. He has published over a dozen books, with topics ranging from midnight movies, Yiddish cinema, and his "Found Illusions" trilogy, examining Hollywood's relationship to the Cold War.
