Jon Wiener: From The Nation magazine, this is Start Making Sense. I’m Jon Wiener.  Later in the show: J. Hoberman, the long-time film critic for the Village Voice, talks about the 1960s New York Avant-Garde. But first: the elections coming up before the midterms in 2026 – John Nichols will explain.

Forget the midterms next year, at least for now; the fight against Trump runs through the elections this November — that’s what John Nichols says. Of course he’s national affairs correspondent for The Nation, the author or co-author of more than a dozen books. His latest, co-written with Bernie Sanders, is The New York Times bestseller, It’s OK to be Angry About Capitalism. We reached him today at home in Madison. John, welcome back.

John Nichols: Jon, it’s great to be with you.

JW: The Virginia elections on November 4th are the most important we have this year, and the Democrats really have to win this one. Right now, the Democrats have narrow majorities in both legislative chambers, but the governor is a Republican. Seems like this is probably going to be a close election. Virginia and New Jersey elect their governors and state legislators the first year after presidential elections. I think the original rationale was to decouple state politics from presidential politics. Seems like that isn’t going to work this November.

JN: No, that plan fell apart. As we have developed a more nationalized politics, these odd year elections have become more and more significant as indicators, not just of the sentiment at the time of the election, but perhaps of where things are headed for critical midterms, when control of Congress can flip. The candidates now talk about it that way. They fully acknowledge that if you’re a Democrat, you’re running against Trump. If you’re a Republican, amazingly, even at this point, they’re still running with Trump.

JW: We think of Virginia as kind of a purple state, trending blue, although not trending as much as we’d like. Kamala Harris won 52% of the vote there last year, four years before that, Biden had done better with the 54%. You point out in your new piece for The Nation magazine that last time they had elections for governor in the state legislature, which of course, four years ago, the Democrats lost every statewide office. Glenn Youngkin won governor. That makes us worry. The Democratic candidate this year for governor is Abigail Spanberger. Tell us about her.

JN: She sort of fits the template of a lot of Democratic candidates at this point. She’s pretty moderate, to be honest, not a big lefty, worked in the federal government in the case of span in national security areas, came back to Virginia at a critical point, won a big congressional race in a competitive district, and that was her sort of breakthrough politically. She came on not just to the Virginia stage but the national stage. Because of that victory, she’s seen as somebody who could appeal not just to Democratic voters, but to swing voters and others. She got in the governor’s race very early in Virginia – there’s a real, there is a fight for the soul of the Democratic Party in Virginia. You have a centrist grouping and then you have a more progressive grouping and the progressive grouping, especially concentrated around the Washington DC suburbs, which are a big generator of democratic votes.

And often there’s a split in Virginia, there are often primaries where you have a more liberal candidate, a more conservative or more centrist candidate for governor. In this case, there wasn’t a split. There isn’t a primary. Spanberger has the nomination locked up, and she’s done it with messaging that is overtly critical of Trump. And the other thing is that she has focused in on some issues. Remember, the Republicans in Congress are talking about deep, deep cuts to Medicaid and to other social safety net programs. What Spanberger has done and what the Democrats running in New Jersey have done and other places is simply say at this point, you really need a Democratic governor who’s going to push back.

JW: The Republicans in Virginia are running a Black woman for governor and a gay white guy for Lieutenant Governor. The Democrats have never done that. Let’s start with a Republican candidate for governor, the current Lieutenant Governor, Winsome Earle-Sears, hyphenated last name. If she won, she’d become the first Black female governor in American history.

JN: This is a subtlety here. Back in the late sixties, early seventies, the Virginia Republican party was actually way ahead of the National Republican Party on a lot of civil rights issues and social justice issues. It moved more to the right in the seventies, and that’s – the reality is that this ticket, which has obviously candidates who bring diversity still stands very, very much to the hard right. At this point, voters want to find ways to protect themselves, especially in Northern Virginia, against Trump’s assault on the federal government and on aid to states. And I think that the dominant issue in this race, one will be the defense against Trump’s assault on federal employees. Remember Northern Virginia is a huge number of federal employees, and the second is one that we keep seeing cycle after cycle as a vital issue, and that is abortion rights.

JW: Yeah, let me underline that. Virginia is the only state in the American south without a strict abortion ban. Abortion there is legal through the end of the second trimester, and the Black woman running for governor has an anti-abortion record. Virginians support abortion rights. 71% say abortion should be legal in all or most cases. So the Democrats have a good issue here.

JN: I think they do. And Virginia has become a state that’s socially liberal, and I mean, it isn’t the whole of Virginia. Virginia is a diverse state geographically and ideologically and socially. You’ve got parts of Virginia that really do align much more with traditional southern voting patterns. But Northern Virginia, these vote-rich counties around Washington, DC is a very liberal place. What you’re going to see this year, I think turnout’s going to be up. People draw to the polls, especially out of concern about what Trump’s doing and the impact he’s having. But then when they’re making their choice, I think that abortion rights, LGBTQ rights become a real factor in this. These issues have been battled out in the legislature in recent months and years.

JW: The polls have Democrat Abigail Spanberger ahead by maybe seven points. Seems like a lot. Is this really going to be a contest?

JN: Yeah, it certainly can be. Remember in 2021, there was a sense that the Democrats had a very strong candidate for governor and Terry McAuliffe, who’s somebody very well established in that. And it just fell apart. The Democratic initiative in Virginia fell apart. And it was a real reminder that while Virginia has trended Democratic in recent cycles, recent presidential cycles, it’s still a very competitive state. But Virginia could send a very powerful signal similar to what we saw from Wisconsin, similar to what we saw in the race for mayor of Omaha, where a Republican incumbent was turned out. Similar to what we’ve seen in legislative special elections across the country, Democratic voters seem to be very energized to come to the polls and Republicans seem to be responding not by shifting over, not by crossing the partisan line and backing Democratic candidates, but simply by at a higher percentage than usual, staying home. It’s not showing up.

JW: So that’s Virginia. It’s the only state with a Republican governor that has an election this year. New Jersey is the other state with statewide elections, a long time blue state, we expect the Democrats to continue to win there. But I have to note that last year Kamala Harris got quite a bit less of the New Jersey vote, 52% than Biden had gotten. Biden got 57%. There’s a primary coming up in New Jersey, June 10th, that’s what next week. So we don’t know for sure who the candidates are. Let’s just talk briefly. It looks like the leading Democratic candidate in the polls is a Mikie Sherrill, a woman, member of Congress, a lot like Abigail Spanberger actually in her profile, a moderate, not a member of the Progressive Caucus. Her background is as a Navy helicopter pilot, federal prosecutor. She’s kind of got all the important people behind her and the Republicans are running the guy who ran last time, who’s endorsed by Trump. So that makes it very clear what this one is going to be about.

JN: I think so, although I will counsel, having been in New Jersey that Democratic governor’s race is a really competitive race. I mean there’s a serious fight going on there. You’re right that Sherrill is ahead in the polls, but you have other candidates there. I think somewhat more progressive candidates, Baraka especially, who are competing and doing well. I am going to keep an eye on that primary. I’m also going to keep an eye on the Republican primary, although you’re right, it looks like the candidate they ran last time, is likely to get the nominee again. He has does seem to have Trump’s imprimatur. Here’s where I would counsel to keep a closer eye on New Jersey than some people might expect. In New Jersey, again, we are reminded this is a state that not that long ago elected Chris Christie as its governor. This is a state that can elect Republicans.
And it is a state where last year when Biden really got in trouble after that debate and was looking weak, you started to see polling that suggested that New Jersey could potentially have even crossed the line there on the presidential race. It didn’t. But the Republicans are likely to have a candidate who’s well known, who’s run before. I expect there will be plenty of money on both sides. And so, my argument is watch both Virginia and New Jersey closely, treat them seriously as real contests. And we will see in November whether they produce a clear united message. If they do, I think that will be one of the biggest headlines from an odd year election cycle that we’ve ever had in this country.

JW: So big picture here, Trump’s approval ratings are really bad right now, but that does not mean that Democrats approval ratings are good. Please explain.

JN: Well, it’s not hard to explain. The Democrats in Washington have done an incredibly lousy job of pushing back against Trump and getting organized to do so. Look, in the House of Representatives, the margin is one of the narrowest in history. In the Senate. It’s a little wider, but it’s still a relatively closely divided place. There’s a handful of reasonable conservative Republicans in the House, in the Senate, and if the Democrats were at peak performance level, they might well have been able to block a couple of the cabinet nominees, they might be able to achieve a greater clarity of their pushback against Trump. But that just hasn’t happened, at least not at the level that it should. And so you see across the country, at town meetings for Democratic members of Congress, people in the crowd saying, why aren’t you fighting harder? Why aren’t you doing everything you possibly can to stop what’s going on?

And I do think sometimes from the Washington Democrats, there’s too many excuses, not enough energy. It’s an interesting relationship between the grassroots and the party. People are very critical of a lot of the national Democrats. They like Bernie Sanders, they like AOC. They like some of the people who are really fighting. They liked it when Cory Booker did his long filibuster or semi-filibuster. So they like a fight. They are disappointed in a lot of the Democratic leadership. They’re disappointed on issues, often. Gaza remains a real issue out there, and yet even amidst this disappointment, they’re still willing to show up for a lot – grassroots Democrats are able to carry two thoughts in their head at the same time. One is that they would like their party to be a far more aggressive, far bolder party, far more effective in fighting back against Trump at this point.
At the same time, they still want their party to win. Why this all matters, is that we are at this point now in 2025 when Democrats are recruiting candidates, fundraising starting to get organized for that 2026 midterm election. This is the bottom line, Jon. The midterm election of 2026 will be the most important midterm election in the modern history of the United States. I know we always say every election is important, but I mean, look, here’s what we’re talking about. Does Donald Trump continue to have a Congress that is on his side? Or is it a Congress that will push back? I mean, that’s a critical question of 2026, and 2025 will give us a lot of indication of where we’re headed.

JW: John Nichols—his article on the elections of 2025 appears in the July issue of The Nation Magazine. Thank you, John.

JN: Thank you, Jon. It’s an honor to be with you.

Jon Wiener: Now it’s time to talk with J. Hoberman about the 1960s New York avant-garde. He worked for 40 years as a film critic for The Village Voice, and he’s written many books; I think my favorite is An Army of Phantoms: American Movies in the Making of the Cold War. He also has written for Artforum, The LRB, The New York Times, The New York Review, and The Nation. Last time he was here, we talked about ‘The Secret History of Comic Book Imperialism.’ His new book is called Everything is Now: the 1960s New York Avant-Garde—Primal Happenings, Underground Movies, Radical Pop. Jim Hoberman, welcome back.

J. Hoberman: Very glad to be here.

JW: Your new book is about pretty much everything that happened below 14th Street between 1959 and 1971 – in the world of art, music, theater, movies.  You call it quote “a memoir, but not mine.” I guess that’s because you’re sort of too young for most of this to be your own story. Where were you in ‘62?

JH: In ‘62, I was not getting my bar mitzvah.

JW: [Laughter] And where in the landscape of Greater New York were you?

JH: I lived in Central Queens, which was, at that point, land of the baby boom. I mean, every year I was in high school, a new high school opened up.  It was just phenomenal.  So, a lot of kids.

JW: And while you were a young teenager in Central Queens in 1962, Bob Dylan was living in a friend’s basement apartment on Bleecker Street and released his first album. Yoko Ono had left her loft on Chamber Street to go back to Tokyo for a while. Andy Warhol showed his Campbell Soup Can paintings, and had his studio, the Factory, on East 47th Street.  And Jonas Mekas was living in poverty with his brother on Avenue B. He looms large in your story. Tell us about Jonas Mekas – not exactly a teenager in Central Queens.

JH: No, Jonas was at that time in his late thirties. He has a fantastic life story. I mean, he was a displaced person from Lithuania who made his way to New York, was a poet and a movie buff, and he was working in a factory, and he managed to buy a used 16-millimeter Bolex. He and his brother began trying to make movies.  But before that, they founded a magazine, Film Culture, which was at the time the closest thing that the US had to a Cahiers du Cinéma. It was a serious film magazine that was concerned with what was going on everywhere the world. And he got this gig as the film critic for The Village Voice, and he was kind of like a blogger. I mean, he wrote about whatever the hell he wanted to write about, and he was very opinionated, and he found people and causes to defend. So he was an amazingly influential character in New York in the sixties in creating this underground film scene.

JW: So Jonas Mekas was on Avenue B, the East Village, the Lower East Side. That was a world of old Jews and young Puerto Ricans, basically, where Claes Oldenberg opened a store on East Second Street in 1961. What did he call it?

JH: ‘The Store.’ But he did these happenings. He didn’t like the word “happenings” because those were associated with Alan Kaprow, another artist who was doing them, but he staged these theater pieces in the back room that were called X-Ray Specs. So it was both a store and a kind of storefront theater.  For all I know, he might’ve been living in the back of the store too.

JW: Oldenberg had gone to Yale and then the art school of the Chicago Art Institute. So this is really the elite of the American art world in 1960.

JH: Well, yes and no. I mean because for every Oldenberg who was not just middle class, but upper middle class, I mean, his father was a Swedish diplomat. He escaped the war in Europe altogether. There were people like Boris Lurie, who was another DP who survived three concentration camps and wound up in New York and was doing this very brutal kind of collages, which he called “NO!Art.” And Jonas, of course, was a refugee of sorts. Tuli Kupferberg of the Fugs, and the poet who named the Fugs, also grew up in the poorest district of the Lower East Side, I mean practically in the East River, and his parents were Yiddish-speaking communists. So Oldenberg was, I think, the exception rather than the rule.

JW: And at the store, he sold stuff, didn’t he?

JH: Yeah. If you bought stuff from his store now, you’d be sitting pretty, I mean, yeah, he charged, some of the things were less than a hundred dollars. I think the most expensive might’ve been about $400.

JW: And what were these things?

JH: It was plaster representations of food, but also other things that you might find in a store, cheap appliances and so on, but all handmade–largely by his wife, Patty Oldenberg–and he sold them. It was kind of a ma-and-pa operation.

JW: 1960 and ‘61, of course was a crucial period for the Civil Rights movement in the South. The Freedom Rides organized by CORE, the sit-ins organized by SNCC — and in the Village, jazz drummer Max Roach premiered his “Freedom Now Suite” – this was an album, also a live performance as a benefit for CORE at The Village Gate. Tell us about Max Roach and the Freedom Now Suite.

JH: The Freedom Now Suite was an early example of what would’ve been thought of as protest music. It was jazz, but it was so political that a lot of other jazz musicians, Miles Davis and others, they thought it was crazy what Max Roach was doing. And of course, he was, in jazz terms, part of the bebop elite, had played with all of the – with Dizzy Gillespie and Charlie Parker.  And he and his wife, Abby Lincoln, put together this kind of piece. Actually, when it was staged, it had dance and lighting and everything. It was a real performance, and it was steeped in issues of racial justice, both in the United States and also in South Africa. I mean, there’s a very painful piece, “Elegy for Sharpeville,” which had been this massacre, which happened then. Roach and Lincoln weren’t Black nationalists so much as they were Black internationalists.
There was that kind of protest music, and at the same time, you had something happening a few blocks west in Greenwich Village with various so-called folk singers.

JW: Yeah, the Beatnik Riot, April 9th, 1961, in Washington Square Park. I didn’t know about this. What was the Beatnik Riot?

JH: “The Beatnik Riot” – that’s the name that the tabloids gave it. What had happened was, ever since World War II, there had been sort of impromptu hootenannies in Washington Square around the fountains. This was a kind of Sunday afternoon ritual, and it ceased to be explicitly political. These guys were coming down with their banjos, and anyway, at a certain point, the new Commissioner of Parks, possibly pressured by Robert Moses, who was the guy who redesigned, wanted to completely remake in New York, they decided to ban the singing in the square.  The neighborhood had grown somewhat more middle class, there were all sorts of other things: there were gay guys cruising. There were a lot of African Americans coming down to the village. Many; I talk about that. The Village was really a kind of flashpoint. 
So, incredibly, they tried to ban the singing in the park, and what had happened was organized among the folks. They came in there into the park silently with their instruments, and then at a given signal from Izzy Young, the proprietor of the Folklore Center, kind of a crucial meeting place in the Village, they began to play, and the cops broke it up, and it turned into this incredible brawl, and there were tourists there, and so it was on the front page of all the tabloids, and that’s how it got to be “the beatnik riot.” And the incredible thing is, it worked. The mayor, Robert Wagner, who was running for reelection, suddenly reversed course, and in the end, the music went on.

JW: I want to talk about “The Connection.” “The Connection” is known to people like me as a movie by Shirley Clarke, which opened in 1962. Originally, it opened, not downtown, but at a theater on East 59th Street. It had been a play put on by Julian Beck and Judith Malina at The Living Theater, which was on, they had moved to 14th Street at Sixth Avenue. Some people loved the play, some people hated it, but the movie ran into trouble. The projectionist was arrested, the print was impounded. What was the play, “The Connection,” and what was the problem with the movie of the play?

JH: “The Connection” was billed as a jazz play. When the Becks put it on, various people, Freddie Hubbard, Jackie McLean, there were actual jazz musicians involved, and it purported to be a bunch of junkies and users waiting around somebody’s loft. They’re rehearsing and they’re waiting for their connection to show up with the dope — or as they refer to it many times, in the play, ‘he brings the sh*t.’ And it was dramatized in such a way as that it seemed almost that they had had broken the fourth wall. I mean, it seemed very real to people who came up to that loft; there were rumors, ‘Oh, they’re really shooting up with real drugs,’ and so on. That was part of the mystique, but it was radical in a number of ways. I mean, the use of jazz that the new naturalism and the subject matter.
Anyway, when it was made into a movie a few years later by Shirley Clarke, she took it to Cannes. It was an incredible sensation. First of all. They also thought it was sort of a documentary, although it wasn’t, but this was really the movie, more than Cassavetes, that created the idea of a new American cinema. But when she came back with the movie to New York, it couldn’t be shown. I mean, it was shown somewhere in Arizona, but they couldn’t show it in New York — because in those days, there was still this very, very strict censorship of the movies that came from the State Department of Education, and they wouldn’t allow this movie to be shown for two reasons. One was there’s a brief moment where somebody’s looking at a cheesecake magazine or something, and then there’s the word ‘sh*t,’ which is used many times in this prudish climate. It was enough to get the movie censored, and by the time they worked through it got it shown. This was no longer such a shocking thing. More was to come.

JW: We’ve talked here about the early sixties. Now we have to talk about the late sixties. December 15th, 1969, a billboard went up in Times Square with giant letters that said, “War is over.” This was the height of the Vietnam War.  And in small letters underneath it said, “if you want it. Happy Christmas from John and Yoko.”
A lot of people thought this was ridiculous, including John Sinclair. You call him “Detroit’s biggest beatnik.” John Sinclair said, quote, “you are going to sound awfully stupid trying to tell the heroic Vietnamese people that ‘the war is over if you want it,’ while they are being burned and bombed and blown out of their pitiful little huts and fields.”
What did you think about “The war is over”?

JH: You mean, what did I think about it as a 20-year-old?

JW: That, and today — both.

JH: Well, as a 20-year-old, I think I probably would’ve been kind of a cynic, although I don’t think I would’ve taken the hard line that John Sinclair did. I certainly wouldn’t have understood it at that time as of a piece with Yoko Ono’s art.  I mean, she really was an early conceptual artist, and she was connected with the Fluxus group, and a lot of what they did was conceptual in that it sort of played out in your head, proposing ideas or images. And it’s not just that the billboard went up in Times Square. It went up in probably a dozen other cities.

JW: Around the world.

JH: Around the world. The book has a kind of trajectory where happenings begin in artists’ lofts and out of the way places, and sort of work their way into the center of what came to be called a counterculture, and then finally, in the late sixties, you have happenings just with all political demonstrations. I mean, you have somebody like Abby Hoffman. He’s basically a happenings artist. I mean, he’s learned how to do this on a much greater scale.  And so I think that this is part of that too.

JW: Yeah, I would just emphasize what’s important to John and Yoko about this is the line “if you want it.” This is in New York City. It’s not in Hanoi, it’s in New York City. ‘If you want this war to be over, it can be over’–they are telling Americans.  There’s where I disagree with John Sinclair.
Meanwhile, the great offense against the New York art world came in the galleries in the fall season of 1970, and the offender was Philip Guston. Guston was a 57-year-old hero of the New York School of Abstract Expressionism who showed new paintings that outraged the art world. You point out something I don’t think anyone else has ever noticed about Guston. His show opened the same day The Beatles’ White album was introduced as evidence in the Manson trial.

JH: [Laughter] Yes.

JW: Right. It’s the kind of thing you learn in this book. So who was Philip Guston and what did these new paintings look like, and why did they outrage Hilton Kramer so much?

JH: Yeah, well, Guston was one of the elite painters of the New York School. People thought that, as a pure painter, he was the only rival to Willam de Kooning.  And Guston and all of those guys came out of the thirties. They all had worked for the WPA and so on, and Guston had been, I think, even more of a leftist maybe than Pollock, and de Kooning in any case. In a way he reverted to the style that he had been using in the 1930s when he was very much influenced by the Mexican muralists and by a kind of American surrealism and so on. But his style was pared down. The guy is such a great painter. He’s able to sort of pare this stuff down. It’s very cartoony. It looked like Krazy Kat or something. It’s been pointed out also that it was very similar to R. Crumb, which was who had just started then.
Was he aware of this? Who knows? But in any case, he took, as his subject matter, these kinds of Ku Klux Klansmen, which is something that he painted back in the thirties. They’re both menacing and comical at the same time, and also weirdly universal, as if he identifies with them. I mean, these paintings had a lot to trouble the mind of somebody like Hilton Kramer.  And this was also part of the fact the art world was getting tremendously politicized at this point, and it was easy enough to dismiss like a lot of these other painters, Faith Ringgold for one, to take another, painting her American flags that were not like Jasper John’s American flags. Her American flags had skulls.  And other painters also were much more political. So it was really ghastly that somebody like Philip Guston seemed to abdicate his role as the epitome of high art painting.

JW: I think we should say a word about your sources, because the critics are an important part of the story, and the work of critics was transformed in this decade, starting of course, with The Voice. The Voice was kind of the éminence grise of the downtown counterculture. Tell us a little bit about the other publications that you read for this book.

JH: Well, let me say that it’s not just critics, it’s journalists. I mean, this book could not have been written without the work of all the journalists who were covering this scene in various ways, and even in The Times. I mean, I think The Times had some very shrewd writers, Grace Gluek comes to mind. The Voice, of course, was central because that was the closest thing to the downtown paper of record, and it had some very committed writers. I mean, not just Jonas Mekas, but also Jill Johnston, who was the dance critic and the theater critics, Michael Smith, and others, and so they were reporting on this stuff, and the only way that performances come down to us, there was no videotape then, is by the descriptions, either the scripts or the descriptions. A lot of these things didn’t have scripts, so I felt very indebted to and grateful to all these journalists.
Even Hilton Kramer was out there looking at stuff and thinking about it. I mean, it’s fun for me when people got indignant and so on. I enjoy that, but by the late sixties, The Voice had competition. There was the East Village Other, known as EVO, which was actually founded by poets and was not particularly political. I mean, it was in a sense, it certainly was anti-authoritarian, but it wasn’t political. There was a third paper called RAT, or sometimes referred to as the RAT but RAT was the title, which was founded by Jeff Shero, who had been active in SDS that had the great good fortune to appear just before the Columbia occupation. It took that as its material, and it was very political, and it was staffed largely by high school kids. I mean, it was an incredible paper, and so that pushed, and EVO had to sort of become more political as a result of that. EVO had the underground comics, which that was its great thing, and also some writers who I actually learned to love while I was working on this book – because, Jon, I sat there in the library with the microfilm and went through every issue of these publications, and the crazy thing is that this is a library. I would be the only person using the microfilm. It’s as if ‘it’s not online, so it didn’t happen.’ No. Somebody had the foresight to commit these papers to microfilm, and so I couldn’t have written the book without that.

JW: The book is, Everything is Now: The 1960s New York, and somehow everything is here. It’s overwhelming, it’s exhilarating. Jim Hoberman, thank you for this book, and thanks for talking with us today.

JH: It was my pleasure – really, Jon.