In the intro to Everything Is Now, the nigh-legendary film critic J. Hoberman quotes the Surrealist painter Max Ernst: “Art is not produced by one artist, but by several. It is to a great degree the product of their exchange of ideas with one another.” Hoberman makes the case that 1960s New York provided a frothing petri dish for new and extravagant realms of culture to collide and flourish, insights he gathered partly by reading “virtually every copy of the Voice between late 1958 and early 1972.” Since Hoberman wrote regularly for the paper, from 1977 — kicking off with a review of David Lynch’s Eraserhead — through 2012, and for numerous other publications then and since, he has a profound understanding of the ways in which critics, artists, and audiences interact. And yes, ”legendary” is a term thrown around our bombastic, fact-challenged infosphere like soggy baseballs at a carnival dunking booth, but Hoberman, with his wide-ranging, cross-disciplinary knowledge of film history, has been wittily explicating individual movies and entire genres to a general readership for roughly a half-century now. But you don’t have to take our word for it: In a 1994 Charlie Rose interview, Quentin Tarantino noted that some commentators thought his youthful job at a Venice Beach video store catering to hardcore film buffs was his “film school.” The world-girdling auteur then demurred, saying,
“A closer equivalent would be, it was like my Village Voice, and I got to be J. Hoberman, I got to be Andrew Sarris of the store — be like the little Mr. Critic at the store, putting films in people’s hands and arguing my points of why this movie was good or why that movie was bad.…
Over the decades, Hoberman has drilled down on the good, the bad, the underground, the avant-garde, and the decidedly not ugly — such as this take in Everything Is Now on the 1968 film Kodak Ghost Poems, by the underknown auteur Andrew Noren: “The definitive self-portrait of the male, heterosexual artist as a young boho with a movie camera, it was notable for its lush texture, lyrical idealization of life on the Lower East Side, lust for light, and graphic carnality. Without recourse to a tripod, albeit with a remarkably steady camera, Noren managed to film his lovemaking as it was happening.” Hoberman adds that Eastman Kodak sent the filmmaker a cease-and-desist letter, but in an age when a Swedish arthouse skin flick such as I Am Curious (Yellow) was splitting critical opinion — Vincent Canby liked it; his colleague at The New York Times, Rex Reed, found it a “vile and disgusting Swedish meatball” — Noren’s filmed interactions were “far more clebratory than confrontational, let alone pornographic.”
Everything Is Now is subtitled The 1960s New York Avant-Garde — Primal Happenings, Underground Movies, Radical Pop. And indeed, between its covers you’ll meet such luminaries of bohemia as “the chain-smoking, coffee-swilling, already boozed-up” Jack Kerouac preparing for a spoken-word appearance at a jazz club, which, Hoberman writes, was “judged a disaster,” before he recounts the Beat writer’s triumph “describing the action in a humorous and grandiloquent monologue” for the bleakly charming film Pull My Daisy, which was based on one of Kerouac’s own plays and shot by photographer Robert Frank and painter Alfred Leslie. Hoberman writes, “Frank’s studiedly casual compositions emphasize the minutiae and mild squalor of loft living, punctuating the interiors with occasional poetic cutaways to the street.” The film was shot in Leslie’s loft, in a building on that section of Fourth Avenue once crowded with used-book stores; Hoberman adds the piquant fact that this particular beatnik extravaganza was financed by “a pair of Wall Street investors looking for a tax write-off.”
The book offers a roll call of those artists, performers, musicians, filmmakers, photogs, writers, playwrights, and uncatagorizables who shook off the gray conformity of the Eisenhower years for the riotous spectrum of the Sixties. Sixty years on, has the avant-garde dissipated into the digital miasma of swirling AI permutations? Is the new bohemia flashing before our eyes on TikTok? Will it cause seizures?
The likes of Andy Warhol, Bob Dylan, Charles Ludlam, Carolee Schneeman, Andrew Sarris, Sun Ra, Richard Nixon, Nam June Paik, Edie Sedgwick, Janis Joplin, Jack Smith, and Marshall McLuhan were the influencers of their day, and Hoberman has gathered them, and literally hundreds more, to help make sense of it all now. ❖