Everything is Now: The 1960s New York Avant-Garde with J. Hoberman

Join J. Hoberman in conversation with media curator Steve Seid on Hoberman's latest book, Everything is Now, a groundbreaking cultural history of 1960s New York, from the legendary writer on art and film

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,including Amiri Baraka, Bob Dylan, Allen Ginsberg and Yayoi Kusama. Some were associ­ated with specific movements (Avant Rock, Stand-Up Poetry, 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.

"A serious effort of research, reporting, and criticism written with the enthusiasm of a fan, Everything Is Now feels like the culmination of a life’s work, the New York book that Hoberman was born to write."Andrew Marzoni, The Nation

About the Speakers

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.

For twenty five years, Steve Seid was a Media Curator at the Pacific Film Archive at the University of California, Berkeley. During that time, he presented almost a thousand public programs, featuring experimental media, forgotten film genres, and a sampling of international cinema. He also helped build the PFA’s collection, particularly video art and personal cinemas from the Bay Area. He recently worked on the restoration of Steven Arnold’s Luminous Procuress and ruth weiss’s The Brink. Seid has published Radical Light, Ant Farm 1968-1978, and Media Burn: Ant Farm and the Making of An Image.

Host or Publisher Mechanics' Institute