Everything is now The 1960s New York Avant-Garde-Primal Happenings, Underground Movies, and Radical Pop

Film critic Hoberman (Make My Day) offers a striking countercultural history of New York City. Postwar Manhattan, due to the depopulation wrought by "urban renewal," was an oasis of "cheap rents" that turned the island into "perhaps the greatest facilitator of artistic innovation" of the modern era, according to Hoberman. He begins in 1959, with the opening of the Gaslight Poetry Cafe, a "dank basement" in the West Village where older Beats like Jack Kerouac commingled with a new wave of poets and provocateurs, among them poet Diane di Prima and director John Cassavetes. That same year elsewhere in the city, experimental performance groups like the Living Theater began to stage the first "happenings," and Ornette Coleman debuted his groundbreaking Quartet, which "abstracted jazz into pure sound." Hoberman tracks these various scenes and artists across the '60s with a focus on their clashes with power, including the 1961 Beatnik Riot (inspired by a young Bob Dylan), Robert Moses's crackdown on the Village ahead of the 1964 World's Fair, and the emergence of the Lower East Side's Pop Art scene, spearhead by Andy Warhol's sharp critique of "America's 'business'" as "the making of illusions." By the end of the decade, New York Bohemia had "broken containment," Hoberman astutely notes, becoming both a globally influential style of political art-making but also a caricature of itself (with suburban teens playing at being punks). It's a thrilling conjuration of a head-spinningly innovative time and place. (May)

The creative ferment and "cultural craziness" of 1960s New York City. Disruption and confrontation were the rules of the day for the New York City avant-garde, from the Beat Generation in full rebel flower as Hoberman's account begins in the late 1950s to the increasingly violent and politicized counterculture of 1970-71, when it ends. Drawing on interviews with participants and on research in the archives of alternative newspapers, primarily theVillage Voice andEast Village Other, Hoberman repeats plenty of insider gossip, some of it admittedly unverifiable: Bob Dylan and Andy Warhol's putative rivalry over Edie Sedgwick, for example, or the film never released because one of the actors made "several tasteless references to Warhol's sex life." The dish, plus the mentions of virtually every downtown address where people lived and worked, gives a vivid sense of the '60s avant-garde as a physically and personally close-knit group and the art they created as a collective enterprise. Minutely detailed descriptions of movies, plays, concerts, and "happenings," from underground classics (the Living Theatre'sParadise Now) to the truly obscure (Barbara Rubin's multimedia event,Caterpillar Changes), also make palpable the period's anything-goes ethos, although it must be noted that giving equal attention to the epochal and the ephemeral drags down the narrative momentum. Readability is also hampered by Hoberman's jumbled chronological framework; it's typical of his scattershot organization that a lively account of the "quintessentially East Village" Ridiculous Theater productionConquest of the Universe, featuring downtown stalwarts Taylor Mead, Mary Woronov, and Ondine, is followed 60 pages (and many intervening stories) later by the information that director John Vaccaro had fired playwright Charles Ludlam and hired a lawyer to prevent him from mounting a competing production. The abrupt ending reinforces the impression of an author not entirely in control of his material. Hoberman's undisciplined presentation may echo the attitude of its subjects, but it doesn't make for engaging reading. Apparently, you had to be there. Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.