In 1960’s New York, the past was a foreign country — they sure did things differently there

Everything Is Now: The 1960s New York Avant-Garde — Primal Happenings, Underground Movies, Radical PopBy J. HobermanVerso Books, 464 pages, $35

J. Hoberman is one of our best and most prescient cultural critics — and after a dozen or so books, his latest, Everything Is Now: The 1960s New York Avant-Garde — Primal Happenings, Underground Movies, Radical Pop — 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 — a probability map of the universe devised by the character played by Richard Kind in the Coen Brothers film A Serious Man — and here, Hoberman connects all the dots for you.

The book is an exhaustive (if not exhausting!) 400-plus page trawl through the New York 60’s avant-garde past — a year-by-year,  blow-by-blow account of all the highs and lows of the city’s radical underground film, music, theater, painting, and architectural design scenes written by the former chief film critic of the Village Voice.

It is a staggering accretion of names, dates, and descriptions of many key works (paintings, albums, films and theater events) that emerged and flourished in and around New York circa the Swinging 60’s, coupled with canny analysis of many landmark events still burning bright in the minds of a handful of cultural historians, devotees of the transgressive arts — and even a few of the artists themselves still walking the earth.

Like the city itself, it is simultaneously jam-packed with everything and nothing, documenting every florid cultural innovation in the  artistic hothouse of New York while also putting them in context with simultaneous world historical events to capture the living artistic heartbeat, the very zeitgeist of the city in that epoch. It is an invaluable guide book for anyone remotely involved in or interested in the arts outside of the mainstream corporate pablum pumped Big Brother-like out of every ubiquitous media orifice.

A plethora of Jewish artists

I first became aware of Hoberman before I moved to New York in mid-1977 through Art Spiegelman’s Arcade: The Comics Review, several issues of which contained Hoberman’s ongoing “Space Age Confidential” essays. Upon my arrival in the city, I found his movie reviews in the Village Voice sharp, witty and to the point, confirming his huge intellectual storehouse of cultural knowledge and awareness. And when Hoberman succeeded Andrew Sarris as chief film critic in 1988 I was happy, as I felt I could trust his critical recommendations of what films might be worthy plunking down a few shekels for (those were the days).

A plethora of NYC-based Jewish artists, theorists, and impresarios, including Bob Dylan, Lenny Bruce, Allen Ginsberg and Lou Reed, figure prominently in this book. But perhaps most important for me are the pioneering underground filmmakers Ken Jacobs and Barbara Rubin. Jacobs boldly took filmmaking into uncharted sensorial realms with his ghostly Nervous System double-image stroboscopic film projections, which the artist himself once described as “beyond human endurance.” Several of his films specialized in re-contextualizing found footage, which figured largely in 1963’s seminal underground touchstone Blonde Cobra.

I originally met Ken on a plane trip to Munich in 1992 for John Zorn’s First Festival of Radical Jewish Culture, which led me to collaborate with Jacobs on one of his Nervous System Projections at the old Knitting Factory on Leonard Street. Our collaboration was entitled “The Marriage of Heaven and Hell” after William Blake, and I supplied live solo guitar improvisation as the soundtrack to his colorized and glacially slowed-down projection of a Mummer’s Parade. In attendance were underground film maven Jonas Mekas and cartoonist Art Spiegelman, who looked askance at me after our performance (apparently I just wasn’t noisy enough).

Barbara Rubin was a major cultural catalyst — a supremely confident high school dropout from Queens by way of an early mental hospital stay — who crossed the river into Manhattan and was embraced by Lithuanian underground movie rabble rouser Jonas Mekas and his Filmmaker’s Cinematheque. Rubin connected the Velvet Underground to Andy Warhol and played the role of muse to Bob Dylan (she’s pictured on the back cover of Bringing It All Back Home looming over Dylan at the piano and cradling his head). She organized and mounted the groundbreaking International Poetry Incarnation at London’s Royal Albert Hall with a soused Allen Ginsberg and other poets holding forth before an audience of 7,000 as immortalized in Peter Whitehead’s 1965 doc Wholly Communion.

Most importantly, she made her own outrageous film, 1963’s Christmas on Earth (originally known as C–ks and C–ts),  which featured almost gynecological examinations of naked bodies engaged in gay and straight sex. The film is the antithesis of erotic, yet was routinely banned from many a theater in New York. After a failed communal living experiment with Ginsberg, Peter Orlovsky and others, Rubin renounced her freewheeling Bohemian lifestyle to become a strict Orthodox Hasidic follower of the mystic Rabbi Nachman of Breslov. She eventually married a French-Jewish painter, and died at 35 in the south of France while delivering her fifth child.

Hoberman also expounds at length upon Boris Lurie’s fascinatingly intense NO!art movement. A few years ago I was invited to stay and perform in a fantastic artist’s commune on the outskirts of Wien installed in a gated, disused factory complex. This little village was honeycombed with retrofitted studios and apartments and boasted a bucolic stream running close to the old factory grounds. There was a screening room, a vast communal kitchen, huge ateliers and living spaces, and even an indoor archery range. They also had a voluminous library of art-related books, where quite by accident I stumbled across a catalog of the work of Boris Lurie, who, in 1959, along with fellow Jewish artists Sam Goodman and Stanley Fisher, created a formidable  anti-Pop Art, anti-capitalist, pro-Jewish Art for Art’s sake movement based out of the East Village’s March Gallery.

Lurie and his cohorts sometimes referred to their Holocaust-themed paintings and drawings as Jew Art. Their work was bold and shocking, particularly Lurie’s collages, which mixed swastikas and cheesecake images from the crumbling pages of tattered men’s magazines. Until I walked into this communal library in Wien, however, I had never before heard of this artist, whose work struck me as a revelation. And yet Lurie’s NOart! lives again in Hoberman’s book.

Art vs. Commerce

Even though I am a card-carrying avant-guitarist, songwriter and composer based in NYC who kept abreast of the city’s avant-garde scene even while I was growing up in Syracuse via an airmail subscription to the Village Voice, I was overwhelmed by the sheer accumulation of detail that piles up in Hoberman’s survey of what began as mere artistic hiccups, virtual wrinkles in time, tiny revolutions in the night on the Bowery or the Lower East Side or any number of locales. Many of the details included will send professional hipsters scurrying to YouTube or Wikipedia or Google to further flesh out the CVs of various artists and their artifacts as well as their ongoing resentments and feuds (which Hoberman, in a brilliant turn of phrase, labels as “the narcissism of small differences”).

It would be darned helpful if Verso published this book with an ancillary DVD of highlights from many of the underground movies mentioned, or a catalog with reproductions of many of the paintings and sculptures Hoberman refers to, and also a CD containing some of the music of the many musicians referenced (including Sun Ra, Bob Dylan, the Fugs, Moondog, the MC5, the Velvet Underground, the Godz, Ornette Coleman and Albert Ayler).

All of which brings us to a crucial crossroads — namely, the nexus of Art and Commerce.

Most of the avant-action described herein took place in an era when rents for artists in NYC were dirt cheap, and huge loft spaces could be procured below Houston Street for a song. This has obviously changed — affordable workspaces for artists in the city are a thing of the distant past, and overall gentrification has made it all the way out to Bushwick, Red Hook, Greenpoint and beyond (The price of a cup of fairly bitter coffee in my West Village local is fast approaching five bucks). For most Gen Z’ers reading this book, pursuing a career as a creative artist or musician or actor today is barely an option, if not unthinkable.

And yet, in Hoberman’s recounting of events, there did not seem to be all that much careerism on the part of many of those huddled artists yearning to be free. The joy was in the sheer act of creation itself. Every day of the decade seemed to bring another daring innovation in movies, pop music, theater, painting and design — “styles of radical will” (the title of Susan Sontag’s 1969 collection of essays) — morphing into kaleidoscopic new forms at dizzying speeds. The newfound mass popularity of LSD, which began as a West Coast rite du passage under Ken Kesey and the Merry Pranksters — “Can you pass the Acid Test?” — was a major evolutionary accelerator, promoted relentlessly by psychedelic tub-thumper Timothy Leary with the drug as a sacrament and the acid trip as a religious experience.

And with the shadow of the Bomb and the almost universally despised War in Vietnam looming large over all this volcanic art activity there was a lot of corresponding political engagement: Yippie street actions and disruptive provocations; Emergency Committees with Capital Letter Acronyms for groups consisting of two or three angry artists (at best) picketing MOMA; massive anti-war demonstrations; jeremiads and denunciations on high from the mainstream media both Left and Right; and actual crimes committed (a wave of bombings) against property and innocent people by anarchic factions and individuals, some of them truly frightening (I’m thinking here of the Motherf–kers and their more vicious offshoot the Crazies, whose violent rhetoric was taken to the limit by Warhol’s disaffected assailant Valerie Solanas). “FUN CITY,” in other words (Mayor John Lindsay’s phrase, coined in 1966 on the first day of a paralyzing transit strike).

This is an essential book. You could teach ten different classes on just about every aspect of the history of New York City in the 60’s using Everything is Now as a key foundational textbook. The best parts are when Hoberman inserts himself into the frame with “You Are There” first-person descriptions of performances he witnessed — especially a nearly empty screening in the loft of flamboyant underground film director and  personality Jack Smith (Flaming Creatures), who along with Taylor Mead, Ron Rice, Charles Ludlam, Kenneth Anger, and other notables constituted a pantheon of campy stars and directors who dragged subterranean gay culture aboveground, and whose influence spread worldwide.

As Hoberman’s book consistently reminds us, to paraphrase Lou Reed, those sure were different times.