My thanks to NetGalley and Verso Books for an advance copy of this history showcasing the amazing creative acts and adventures that took place during the 1960's in the only place big enough, brave enough, and broken enough to do so, New York City.

My father was a fan of The Village Voice, a paper he read pretty much up until he passed away. He loved the comics, perused the articles, read the reviews, but it was all the ads that he loved. Every small club, every galley opening, every book signing, he looked at. If it sounded interesting he would cut it out, and ask me about who these people were. I love the fact that he thought a guy working in bookstores and a record shop in Connecticut was on top of the zeitgeist, but that was my father. In his youth, once he found books and movies and more importantly a world outside of the Bronx neighborhood he lived in, my father was constantly wanting to know more. He would go to events, sometimes with my Mom on dates, if it seemed safe, by himself if it didn't. I think in many ways he was an artist, who never found his medium. This would come out casually about seeing this, or hearing that, before marriage, and children and a need to make money stopped this. It sounded magical. After reading this book, I know it was. Everything Is Now: The 1960s New York Avant-Garde Primal Happenings, Underground Movies, Radical Pop by J Hoberman is a look at the art, the places, the people, the times, the mistakes and the legacy of a decade in New York, where movements were made, art created, and the world was changed.

The author is a longtime film critic with the aforementioned The Village Voice as well as an educator and writer. To tell his tale Hoberman draws on many of the papers of the time, the Voice, other weeklies, autobiographies, stories and interviews. The covers the scene in New York from Free Jazz to the early birthing pains of glam and punk, from Beatniks to MFers. Hoberman looks at the small start, the opening of clubs complete with snapping fingers in lieu of clapping, so as not to get neighbors mad at all the noise. Folk, jazz, free music, and other forms of music, and noise. Plays, and performances, poetry readings, writings, even underground movies, many filmed in the decaying buildings and neighborhoods in the city. Many of the names will be familiar, Ornette Coleman, Norman Mailer, Allan Ginsberg and others. The book starts with the forming of the culture, and moves into it being a movement, with political power, which of course brought political pressure, both changing the world, and changing the scene in numerous ways.

Hoberman has done an incredible job in bringing all this together, especially in covering all sorts of different mediums and styles. This and trying to get stories to agree must have taken quite a long time. The writing is very good, sticking to areas, and not jumping around, explaining what was happening in the world, the neighborhoods, and in the scene. The mix of people is good famous, infamous and people who time has unfairly forgotten. Hoberman has a nice style, and never overwhelms the reader, actually I was busy making notes for stuff to catch up with again, or for works and pieces I had never heard of. A really fascinating book.

A book that can cater to a lot of different readers. History, cultural history fans, music, comic, movies and much more. A book that will introduce people to a lot of great works, and make some wonder how it all went away.

If you're at all interested in this era of art, this is a fantastic read. It's full of details and helps make sense of the various movements taking place in the era.

This is an exhaustive recounting of the history of New York’s Village and underground and its cultural movements. There is so much information packed into each sentence of this book that enthusiasts of any of the underground cultural movements of the 1960s are sure to find some new information here.

The book takes a look at the people, places, and performances that made up movements such as the Beat poets, cinéma verité, vulgar modernism, free jazz, and guerrilla theater among so many others. Hoberman, as an icon himself in the history of the Village Voice, uses local and alternative news publishing sources, in addition to mainstream media, traditional publications, and various other direct sources, to relay the elements of many of these, otherwise lost, performance pieces and personal narratives. He is doing the work of making the ephemera tangible by pulling from contemporary sources for a complex history of cultural movements and performance during this time in New York.

As packed full of information as this book is, there are also a few infrequent asides from the author followed by a final small section connecting stories about the filmmaker Alejandro Jodorowsky with the author and then elegantly connecting the author to the publication that started the whole book and helped to document these movements: the Village Voice. In many ways, this book is as much a love letter to the Voice and its cohorts as it is about the Village in the 1960s. In fact, Hoberman suggests that he “consider[s] a memoir, just not [his],” (p. 406).

I learned so much and was amazed to see just how connected these influential key characters were by people, places, and performances that are lesser known. I thoroughly enjoyed this book and think that it is a good read and a useful resource for anyone interested in the cultural movements of this time period.

I received an advanced reader copy of this book and agreed to right an honest review based on my thoughts about the book. Thank you to NetGalley and Verso Books for the opportunity to read and review this book.

This was a really well done nonfiction book, and enjoyed the history of this and how everything was told. I enjoyed getting to read this and learn about the period in New York history. J Hoberman has a great writing style and was glad I got to read this.