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Telegraph
12-05-2025
- Entertainment
- Telegraph
Are we too obsessed with the Sixties?
J Hoberman's opening sentence in Everything is Now serves as his manifesto: 'Cultural innovation comes from the margins and is essentially collective.' This book, about the New York avant-garde between 1959 and 1971, proceeds from the idea that art is the product of the scene that incubates it, not the individual who creates it. Divided into sections titled 'Subcultures' and 'Countercultures', Everything is Now covers revolutions in jazz, the Beats, minimalist art and experimental film. Andy Warhol, Allen Ginsberg, Yayoi Kusama, Jonas Mekas, Bob Dylan and Amiri Baraka are among the cast, together responsible for what Hoberman, a veteran journalist and critic, calls 'the normalisation of cultural craziness that characterised the 1960s'. Everything is Now attempts to make sense of that craziness. Hoberman's handling of the material, based on interviews and archival research, is cleverly, strictly chronological, giving us a sense of the wider shifts being enacted through an accumulation of minute details. History takes place in the everyday: film screenings, late-night happenings, unlicensed concerts in venues 'so subterranean one expects Jean Valjean to be their waiter,' as it's put in one (negative) contemporary review that Hoberman quotes. He also persistently establishes the closeness of New York's artistic and political organisers in the 1960s, their shared hangouts, aspirations and troubles with the police. As such, Everything is Now often reads like a catalogue of events, meticulously documented and rapidly narrated. Hoberman's prose is taut, jittery, almost psychedelically compressed. Other writers might have lingered on individual artworks or tried to tell the story of '60s New York through lyrical essays on beloved artists. But Hoberman's voice is more of a sub-machine gun, riddling 400 pages with details of the scene and barely stopping to reload. There's a trade-off to this style. The reading experience can be dizzying, and his scene-setting awkward. 'Ten months after the Beatles played The Ed Sullivan Show and certainly by the time LBJ trounced Goldwater,' begins one sentence. A harsh critic would read the many footnotes as a lack of discipline: as a feat of research it's impressive, but Everything Is Now occasionally gives the impression of celebrating a scene without really explaining why. More importantly, it often risks losing sight of its subject's significance. Hoberman is more interested, at least here, in the connections between the principal actors of the '60s than he is in the works of art they produce. We get more than enough on the apartments John Cale lived in when he moved to New York, but little on what The Velvet Underground actually sounded like. Given the depth of Hoberman's knowledge and his clear love of the material, I found myself wishing he would stop for breath more often. When he lets himself, it's great: he can't help himself from digressing on Bringing It All Back Home (who can?) and its 'fusion of Buddy Holly and Arthur Rimbaud'. And I would have liked to read more about his own history with this stuff; a passage recounting a stay with director Alejandro Jodorowsky in Mexico is one of the most entertaining in the book. Obliquely, Everything is Now works best as a book about real estate and how it changed hands. The artistic 'scenes' Hoberman illustrates wouldn't have been possible without their DIY basement cafes, 30-dollar-a-month 'cold-water apartments' and artists' co-operatives in disused factories. From Robert Moses's urban 'renewal' projects to Hans Haacke's censored artwork Shapolsky et al (a collection of photographs documenting corporate slumlordism in Manhattan), one of the book's strongest undercurrents is the transformation of these spaces from artistic incubators to cash machines for developers. But ultimately, reading Everything is Now, it's hard not to ask: who is this for? Does this particular scene need any more canonising? You can buy Kusama mugs at the Tate; James Mangold recently directed the Bob Dylan biopic A Complete Unknown (previous credits: the Indiana Jones and X-Men franchises). Hoberman came of age during the 1960s, alive but too young to have really participated (he considers the book 'a memoir, although not mine'). The resulting image he creates is something part remembered, part invented, part exhumed. This is the status the decade has for all of us, really – mythic in the good and bad senses. But let's not give Dylan up to Hollywood just yet.
CBS News
27-01-2025
- Entertainment
- CBS News
San Francisco's famed Sam Wo Restaurant may have closed for good
A venerable San Francisco Chinese restaurant with an extensive history has officially closed its doors for the foreseeable future. The Sam Wo Restaurant is believed to have served its first meal soon after the 1906 earthquake at its original location at 816 Washington St. The Chinatown institution has been run by the same family for generations and was reportedly a late-night hangout during the 1950s frequented by such Beat generation poets as Jack Kerouac and Allen Ginsberg. Known for its late hours, no-frills food and surly service, the restaurant gained fame in the '60s as the home of Edsel Ford Fong, who earned a reputation as the "world's rudest waiter." The Sam Wo Restaurant has been featured in numerous San Francisco guidebooks and during its history hosted such notable visitors as China's president, David Letterman and a host of other celebrities. The restaurant's original Washington St. location was shut down due to health code violations and fire safety issues in 2012. It eventually reopened in 2015 on nearby Clay Street. According to reports last fall, the restaurant's lease was set to end in January of 2025. With no buyers stepping up to acquire the business and main chef and part owner David Ho retired, it appears that the establishment had its last day in operation on Sunday. So far, there is no word on the restaurant continuing at the 713 Clay location or elsewhere.
