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The Sixties Come Back to Life in "Everything Is Now"
J. Hoberman’s teeming history of New York’s avant-garde scene is a fascinating trove of research and a thrilling clamor of voices.
Literati (Truman Capote, Mary McCarthy, George Plimpton) cavorted with the glitterati (Yves Saint Laurent, Gloria Vanderbilt, Diana Vreeland), stars (Bette Davis, Muhammad Ali), and rubbed up against neighborhood characters (Tuli Kupferberg, Phil Ochs), although Senator Kennedy spent the evening with a millionaire discussing his slum program for Bedford-Stuyvesant. The mainstream press and even television reported copiously on the artistic and political doings downtown, and the presence of celebrities helped greatly—particularly as rock took the place of folk, and the Village world, with performances by the Rolling Stones and the Doors, Janis Joplin and Jimi Hendrix and the homegrown stars the Velvet Underground, converged with pop life at large. The political arena developed its own media stars, above all, Abbie Hoffman, who co-founded the Yippies (the Youth International Party) and whom a Times writer likened to Shakespeare in his ‘”genius for reaching a multi-level audience.” A spontaneous “Yip-In” at Grand Central Station, in 1968, provoked what Hoberman calls a “police riot”—the entrapment and beating of protesters and reporters who attended.
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