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Underground films, transvestites, hippies and freaks, businessmen and secretaries checking out the other side of life, plastic people and people wearing plastic clothes. Smoking the pin joints of Colombian weed sold illegally by a brother hanging on the corner. Go ahead and blush middle America, just don’t call the cops on the party. The Lower East Side loves you and so does the Village. The streets belong to the people and the people belong in the streets; and the theaters and bars, the Factory and its knockoffs. Why be normal? Harry Smith, Bob Dylan, Andy Warhol, Velvet Underground, Jack Smith, Sun Ra, Amiri Baraka, Jonas Mekas, Lenny Bruce, Peter Schumann, Albert Ayler….you get the picture, I hope.

J. Hoberman wrote for the Village Voice for over three decades. His criticism described and detailed the underground and unknown subcultures of the city of Manhattan, revealing a wonderland of the weird, the wonderful and the wishful; he was a critic, observer and even a participant and his columns in the Voice were not to be missed. As a teenager living far from New York City I looked forward to the weekly appearance of the Voice in my local bookstore which, for me was part of the Post Exchange on a US military installation in Frankfurt am Main, Germany. Hoberman’s column was but one reason, but it remains a memorable one. His recently published history of the period briefly described in the first paragraph, titled Everything Is Now:The 1960s New York Avant-Garde—Primal Happenings, Underground Movies, Radical Pop, provides the........

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