Everything Is Now

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 include Amiri Baraka, Bob Dylan, Allen Ginsberg, Yoko Ono, Nam June Paik, Carolee Schneemann, Andy Warhol, and many more. 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.

J. Hoberman was for over three decades a film and culture critic for The Village Voice. His previous books have explored the subculture of midnight movies, the rise and fall of Yiddish-language cinema, the international Communist avantgarde, SoHo performance art, and the underground filmmaker Jack Smith. His "found illusions" trilogy—which includes The Dream Life, Make My Day, and An Army of Phantoms—used Hollywood to refract the history of the Cold War.