Al Goldstein, the underground press, and New York in the '60s: legendary art director Steven Heller
Channel: ReasonTV
Date: 2022-11-23

The legendary art director on Greenwich Village in the '60s, the aesthetics of rebellion, and life at The New York Times

https://reason.com/video/2022/11/23/growing-up-underground-with-steven-heller/

As a teenager growing up in Greenwich Village in the late 1960s, Steven Heller improbably became the art director of pioneering alternative publications such as The New York Free Press, Screw magazine, and The East Village Other before eventually moving on to work at The New York Times and teaching at the School of Visual Arts for decades.

He chronicles his youthful misadventures in Growing Up Underground: A Memoir of Counterculture New York. In November, Heller spoke at the Reason Speakeasy, a monthly, unscripted conversation with outspoken defenders of free thinking and heterodoxy in an age of cancel culture and thought police. He regaled the Manhattan audience with tales of arrests on obscenity charges, how design and aesthetics can supercharge the meaning of words and pictures, and why so many in the counterculture adopted exactly the same "uniform of alienation" in the name of individualism.

Produced by Nick Gillespie; videography by Kathleen Lakey; edited by Brett Raney and John Osterhoudt; sound editing by Ian Keyser

0:00 Intro: Growing Up Underground and NYC in the 60s
14:54 How the Boomers Became Individualists
24:49 Al Goldstein and the Making of Screw
32:26 The New York Free Press as the Local Village Voice
40:32 Mel Lyman and the Uniform of Alienation
43:42 Brad Holland and Borrowed Time
47:37 Reviewing and Looking at Heller's Work
1:01:17 A Modern-Day Counterculture?
1:09:31 Audience Question: What are the Negatives of the Long Run Influences?
1:14:00 Audience Question: What Gives You Hope for the Future?
1:16:06 Audience Question: Was There Danger of Repercussion in Printing Taboo Topics?
1:18:54 Repercussions of Modern-Day Cancel Culture