At age 16, J. Hoberman was old enough to crash the gates when Beatlemania overtook Shea Stadium on August 15, 1965—but, as luck would have it, he never made it in. Three nights later, Bob Dylan played an early electric set three miles south, at Forest Hills Stadium, almost a year to the day after Saturday Evening Post reporter Al Aronowitz introduced the poster boy of Greenwich Village to Lennon, McCartney, Harrison, and Starr at the Hotel Delmonico, now known as Trump Park Avenue. Hoberman was at Forest Hills that night, as was Village Voice reporter Jack Newfield, who “compared the voluble struggle pitting Dylan’s old and new fans” to a “doctrinal fight between Social Democrats and Stalinists.”

He might not have known it at the time, but the teenage Hoberman, enjoying “the tumult” out in Queens, was witnessing his hometown in the midst of a transformation, one that would reshape New York City into a wellspring of revolutionary potential, a nexus of high art, popular culture, and agitprop. For an outer-borough boomer born in 1949, such coincidence is the hard stuff, of obvious world-historical importance, almost begging for pushpins in a corkboard to be tied together with string. But Hoberman is too genteel to be a crank and too scholarly to write an autobiography. Still, he can’t help but adopt the first person in the footnotes of his latest book, Everything Is Now: The 1960s New York Avant-Garde—Primal Happenings, Underground Movies, Radical Pop, a sentimental education for his generation of cultural observers as much as a meticulous history of a time and place in which some believed that art could change the world.

Young as he was back then, Hoberman’s an old head now, a veteran of The Village Voice in its heyday and an éminence grise of a dying art. Fresh from a stint of “bumming around Mexico,” Hoberman published his first piece of film criticism in the Voice in 1972, a belated appreciation of Jack Smith’s Flaming Creatures nine years after its premiere at the Bleecker Street Cinema, thus initiating his four-decade association with the paper. In Everything Is Now, this rite of passage into professionalism—and, therefore, adulthood—signals the precise moment when the ’60s called it a night, delimiting a timeline that is more personal than definitive: “In a sense,” he writes, that article “planted the seed for this book, which I consider a memoir, although not mine.”

Hoberman’s interest in downtown Manhattan during the years of Mayors Robert F. Wagner Jr. and John Lindsay serves the greater cause of expanding the multivolume study of film and postwar politics that has consumed much of his career. He is more generalist than not, having also written books on Dennis Hopper, Yiddish cinema, and Duck Soup, among other topics, but the New York underground has preoccupied Hoberman since at least his first monograph, published by Anthology Film Archives in 1981. 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.

There has been no shortage of panegyrics to the scene below 14th Street that welcomed the Beats and incubated folk, free jazz, art rock, pop art, minimalism, conceptualism, the New York schools of painting and poetry, the mimeograph revolution, experimental theater, performance art, and independent cinema. Hoberman’s intervention is to center the role of film in this moment without downplaying or overstating the influence of concurrent innovations in adjacent media; he accomplishes this by means of a geographical specificity that elucidates the ease with which like-minded people were simply hanging out.

The gossip is juicy and the details are rich. In 1959, drummer Max Roach punched Ornette Coleman in the jaw backstage at the Five Spot, offended by the Texan saxophonist’s atonal method. Around the same time, the folk singer Dave Van Ronk used to scavenge roaches off the floor of the Five Spot’s telephone booth to reroll in his apartment across the Bowery, knowing the jazzmen “had really good dope.” A decade later, in 1969, having stumbled out of the Lion’s Head next door, Van Ronk was dragged into the Stonewall Inn during the riot and beaten unconscious by police. Bob Dylan helped Jane Jacobs write “Listen, Robert Moses,” the official protest song of the Joint Committee Against the Lower Manhattan Expressway in 1962, the year before documentarian Frederick Wiseman got his first film credit, as producer on Shirley Clarke’s The Cool World. Voice photographer Fred McDarrah’s iconic 1959 photograph of Jack Kerouac was taken in the same East Third Street rowhouse that would become, several years later, Sun Ra’s communal pad, “the Sun Palace,” where drugs, alcohol, and women were banned, and it was the Fugs who gave Jimi Hendrix the fuzz box that he used throughout his five-sets-per-day residency at the Cafe Wha?. That many of these connections are tossed off in the notes is a testament to the depth of Hoberman’s documentation, a gift to the freaks who thought they’d heard it all before, even if they may struggle to follow the onslaught of proper nouns as one paragraph moves to the next. The impression is that of a city bursting with creative fraternization, a direct challenge to the midtown world of vultures in gray flannel suits who were already circling for a bite.

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The 1960s began in New York City, according to Hoberman, on November 6, 1958, when the Brandeis University Club of New York hosted the forum “Is There a Beat Generation?” at the Hunter College Playhouse; it ended 13 years later, “when Diane Arbus committed suicide in her Westbeth apartment and John and Yoko took a place just around the corner on Bank Street, when the upstate Attica prison exploded (and Sam Melville was killed) and when WR: Mysteries of the Organism had its premiere at the New York Film Festival.” The overarching narrative is one of competing and convergent subcultures coalescing into a loosely defined counterculture—a term that first appeared in the pages of The Nation, Hoberman notes, coined by the historian Theodore Roszak—which, by the end of the decade, had gone mainstream.

While New York was not alone in accommodating this shift (the contributions of San Francisco and Los Angeles, especially, have not been ignored), the particular combination of urban blight and renewal, integration and gentrification, and proximity to legacy institutions that could be enlisted as foils, enemies, and ultimately benefactors created the conditions in which much of the most venerated American art of the late (or post-) modernist period grew up from the cracks in the pavement. Many of Hoberman’s protagonists (Andy Warhol, Claes Oldenburg, Lenny Bruce) are by now household names, but even more are not (such as Barbara Rubin and Ken Jacobs), at least outside of local institutions—Anthology, Film Forum, the Millennium Film Workshop, and a few others that continue to do the hard work of preserving the homegrown legacy of independent film. Prominent among these names is Jonas Mekas, whose work as practitioner, champion, and critic of independent cinema served as a progenitor for Hoberman’s own enterprise as a writer. In addition to cofounding Film Culture in 1954, the Film-Makers’ Co-Operative in 1962, and the Film-Makers’ Cinematheque (now Anthology) in 1964, Mekas debuted his “Movie Journal” column for the Voice in 1958; he left the paper for the SoHo Weekly News two years after Hoberman’s first byline, allegedly because an editor took a pencil to his copy for the first (and only) time.

Experimental movies were “illuminating and opening up new sensibilities and experiences never before recorded in the American arts,” Mekas wrote in his “Movie Journal” column for May 2, 1963: “It is a world of flowers of evil, of illuminations, of torn and tortured flesh; a poetry which is at once beautiful and terrible, good and evil, delicate and dirty.” For Hoberman, films made on Super 8 and 16-millimeter stitched together the divergent threads of artistic production in their time and place, making New York a capital not only of independent cinema but of experimentation across and between various media, some of them completely new. In addition to capturing crucial moments of civil disobedience—the “Folk Riot” (or “Beatnik Riot”) at Washington Square Park in 1961, the Garbage Strike of 1968—filmmakers from Robert Frank and Ron Rice to D.A. Pennebaker and Paul Morrissey defined the aesthetics of the counterculture and eased its route to commercialization, even though many of them did not reap the rewards for themselves. The cultural capital of Allen Ginsberg, William Burroughs, Lou Reed, John Cale, Sol LeWitt, Nam June Paik, Carolee Schneemann, Yayoi Kusama, Dan Flavin, Robert Smithson, Donald Judd, or even Norman Mailer might be considerably lesser if not for handheld cameras’ innovative record of the era’s revolutionary fervor in all its vanity, hedonism, obscenity, and idealism.

Hoberman’s story here isn’t necessarily anchored by a central argument; instead, he draws readers to their own conclusions by means of information and exposition organized to emphasize historical simultaneity and ironic juxtaposition. For instance, in October 1969,

six explosions rock Macy’s Department store over four days; the Guerrilla Art Action Group (GAAG) stages its first action event at the Museum of Modern [Art], replacing Malevich’s White on White with their own manifesto (and thus Lil Picard thought, “re-revolutionizing” the original painting); the Art Workers’ Coalition organizes a Moratorium of Art to End the War in Vietnam; the perennial last-place New York Mets win the World Series; Rat reviews Godard’s Le Gai Savoir; Jack Kerouac dies, age forty-seven; the Village Voice runs a piece on R. Crumb; Kusama licenses her name to a new sex tabloid, Kusama’s Orgy; and No President opens for a midnight run at the Bleecker Street Cinema.

Rather than editorializing, Hoberman winks: The Cricket, a jazz-oriented Black nationalist zine edited by Amiri Baraka, A.B. Spellman, and Larry Neal, praised Ornette Coleman and Sun Ra on the grounds that “Our music must bring down the white empire.” But a “significant portion of the Free Jazz audience,” Hoberman quips, “was white.” The availability of extensive archival material from the alternative press—The Village Voice, the East Village Other, and Rat—in contrast with contemporaneous reports from The New York Times affords Everything Is Now the conversational quality of an oral history, substantiating the magnitude of the downtown renaissance with an authoritative intimacy.

The inevitable question: What happened to New York? When did art become so ancillary to the city’s identity? Why is it so hard to afford living in the environs of what Warhol dismissed as “Babushkaville,” and how did we all become so complacent? Hoberman offers a familiar explanation: Vietnam, Kent State, and the Manson Family “battered” the counterculture; “magical thinking” took hold; even as the European auteurs who flooded Manhattan art houses extolled the influence of New American Cinema, “underground movies lost relevance” while “Ridiculous Theater grew more respectable”; the press soured on Dylan, John, and Yoko; the art market consolidated, and the colonizers of SoHo capitalized on real estate holdings and institutional legitimacy. The addresses that Hoberman cites invite readers to take a look for themselves: The Polish National Home on St. Marks Place, where the Fugs and the Velvet Underground took turns as house bands, is currently occupied by takeout chains for NYU students, and what was once Mekas’s Cinematheque, at 80 Wooster Street, now houses a storefront for TheRealReal, an online retailer that resells designer clothing. Most of the venues in which this revolution took place are long gone, and it’s hard to imagine them—or anything similar—coming back anytime soon.

But Hoberman is less concerned with the financialization of the city, which came later, than with the eagerness of these artists to engage in direct, often violent conflict with the status quo—and sometimes with each other. In defense and extension of their artistic freedom, this generation courted police brutality in protests, performances, screenings, openings, and busts, suffering injury, arrest, eviction, and imprisonment for the right to live and express themselves as they pleased. That some of this resistance was undergirded by naïveté, hypocrisy, narcissism, and a nihilistic desire for chaos does not diminish the value of art as a means for action and a voice of dissent. The revolution was short-lived and incomplete: Once the Fillmore East came to Babushkaville, Hoberman asks, who would bother clashing with the pigs at “Grand Central [Station] on a weekend night when one could see rock stars in a Second Avenue movie palace accompanied by a light show spectacle beyond anything found in the Museum of Modern Art?”

The author’s sympathies are evident. Stopping short of a call to action, Everything Is Now valorizes the antagonism of art in the 1960s—if not necessarily for the sake of societal transformation, then for that of art itself. The “acid fascism” of the decade’s end has given way to something less psychedelic but not more anodyne. It is unlikely that nudity, public sex, animal corpses, or burning flags will back the Man up against the wall this time around, nor does Hoberman endorse violence. The continued demonstrations of climate activists, Nan Goldin’s PAIN, Writers Against the War on Gaza, and organizations like ACT UP before them, suggest that revolution is a work in progress, though a parallel insurrection in the realm of aesthetics—let alone the incipience of a movement—appears conspicuously absent. Nevertheless, the failure of all but an exceedingly few artists, filmmakers, musicians, and writers today to even give it a shot, whatever the cause, is a remarkable loss for us all.