If a Bohemian Falls in the Forest ...
Is there currently an American bohemia? Last week the official organ of
American cultural bohemianism, the Village Voice , was sold to
speculators without a complaint from its once fiercely anti-capitalist readers
and staff. Also last week, the Chronicle of Higher Education proclaimed
the death of American intellectual bohemianism: A junior professor of English
at Princeton bemoaned the fact that his most brilliant students are being lured
into high-paid consulting jobs (higher-paid than his!), rather than pursuing
the life of genteel poverty demanded by academic or artistic careers. Oh sure,
he says, he knows the occasional Ivy Leaguer who works nine-to-five so that she
can rush off at night to read Gilles Deleuze or play rock 'n' roll. But she's
an anachronism. New York, at least, is "postbohemian."
Now, people have been proclaiming the death of bohemia ever since a
19 th -century Parisian, Henri Murger, wrote a book that would become
an opera that would become synonymous with the artistic life right up to the
moment when the whole concoction was boiled down to corn syrup in the Broadway
musical Rent . Jerrold Seigel, the author of an excellent history of
bohemianism, Bohemian Paris: Culture, Politics, and the Boundaries of
Bourgeois Life 1830-1930 (1986), says that when people go around saying
bohemia is dead, what they usually mean is that they can't see how to wiggle
free of commercialism and convention: "People experience bohemia as a form of
authentic existence." Bohemia is a state of mind, says Seigel. It's not just
the collective experience of radicals and artistes in the cafes of Paris or the
lofts of Williamsburg, Brooklyn. Bohemianism is a life self-consciously
positioned on the margins in order to express ambivalence about the
mainstream.
But does the aggregate of people who happen to be living the bohemian
lifestyle right now add up to an actual bohemia? That's a tougher question.
Seigel also says that bohemians have a role to play in society: Theirs is to
act out the bourgeoisie's quashed longings and confusions. Bohemians should be
mirrors in which we see what we might have been, had we dared.
So who's doing that today? Obviously, we can rule out the hipsters paying
exorbitant sums to inhabit gentrified downtowns and sport the latest iteration
of poverty chic. But there are people all over America living lives quietly on
the fringe. We get a glimpse of them in a forthcoming book by New York
Times rock critic Ann Powers. Weird Like Us: My Bohemian America
(Simon & Schuster, $23) is a charming, rambling account of her coming of
age as a music-store clerk/riot-grrrl punkster/aspiring writer in Seattle and
San Francisco, interspersed with interviews of her old friends. Bohemia, Powers
admits, is geographically dispersed. It looks moribund. But, she says, it
thrives sight unseen. It is "everywhere somebody opens a used-record shop, a
laundromat-café, and a punk rock bar." It's a "floating underground, which is
really more a life path than a place. ... It is a challenge undertaken in
privacy ... to confront and reinvigorate the premises of society, the
definitions of kinship, labor, love, leisure, consumerism, and identity
itself."
Here's the problem with this definition: Can bohemia exist "in privacy"?
What if society isn't aware that its premises are being reinvigorated, its
contradictions being dramatized? What if the bourgeoisie, whom the bohemians
are supposed to épater , seems un- épater -able? What if it just
doesn't give a damn? If there is a bohemia today, it seems to be neither hated
nor celebrated. This strikes Culturebox as a mortal condition. The great
bohemias of history--Murger's and Charles Baudelaire's 19 th -century
Paris, Bloomsbury, the French and German Dadaists, the Surrealists, the Beats,
the indie rock scene--were flamboyant and self-enthralled. They hogged the
limelight. They made themselves seem the center of the artistic universe. In so
doing, they really did change the world.
There was a moment about a decade ago when the group-house dwellers and
music-store clerks whose lives Powers details so minutely rose to the level of
a bohemia. The streets of Seattle opened up and gave us Kurt Cobain; New York's
Strand bookstore yielded Mary Gaitskill; video-store culture belched forth
Quentin Tarantino and Kevin Smith. Now, however, when Powers returns to her old
music store, she is bewildered by how little she finds. "I could see no sign of
the Planet attitude, no surly looks in the eyes of the kids behind the cash
register," she writes. Then she thinks she understands: "I realized that I was
on the other side of it now. To the sly members of the cultured proletariat I
looked like an average customer, not a fellow traveler who knew and approved of
their tricks."
Perhaps. What Powers describes sounds frankly too subterranean to amount to
a bohemia anymore. At best, the stone-faced attitudes of retail-outlet clerks
have become the manifestation of a subculture that is soon to disappear, like
all the other subcultures that have faded into history. One of the most
remarkable facts about this turn of the century, so far, is that if you want to
be on the cutting edge, you have to leave the margins for the center. That, the
domain of American industry and entrepreneurship, is where the interesting
ideas--the innovation, the subversion, the re-imagining of the boundaries of
society--are coming from. That's the bohemia of the moment. Great American
bohemias have bubbled up from the depths in the past, and more surely will in
the future. But there's nothing going on down there right now.
