Everything Is Now : The 1960s New York Avant-Garde—Primal Happenings, Underground Movies, Radical Pop

A groundbreaking cultural history of 1960s New York, from the legendary writer on art and film

A groundbreaking history of New York City cultural life in the 1960s from renowned film critic and longtime journalist

Comparable to Paris in the 1920s, 1960s New York City was a cauldron of avantgarde 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 are penniless filmmakers, jazz musicians, performing poets, as well as less classifiable and hyphenate artists. Most were outsiders. They include Albert Ayler, Amiri Baraka, Shirley Clarke, Jackie Curtis, Bob Dylan, Allen Ginsberg, Yayoi Kusama, Boris Lurie, Jonas Mekas, Yoko Ono, Nam June Paik, Barbara Rubin, Ed Sanders, Carolee Schneeman, Jack Smith, Sun Ra, 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, largely free of established institutional support, was taboo-breaking and confrontational. Often and to a degree unimaginable today, artists conflicted with the law.

By the mid ‘60s these subcultures were cross-pollinating and largely self-sufficient, coalesced into an entire counterculture that changed the city, the country, and the world.