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dot_fennel"There is no 'alternative,' ever," intoned Tom Frank, one of the ideologues of today's cultural underground, in an essay that helped him secure a book contract with a major publishing house. Young would-be bohemians lapped up his pronouncements. It was easier for them to refuse a legacy that had lost its shape than to figure out what its newest permutation might be.Yet the loss of clear markers around bohemia actually creates an opportunity that only cowards could refuse, because the same boundaries have been loosed around conventional society. The mainstream has always been more myth than lived experience, and everyone struggles to adjust their imperfectly shaped circumstances to its mold. Bohemia is the countermyth, the other side of our shared story.
Some spiritually minded liberals are negotiating the moral sphere, trying to get what they can out of ancient religious traditions while sidestepping their equally ancient failings, like sexism. Most of us, however, have lost the thread of this conversation, unable to take it into the secular realm, where we've all agreed to keep out of each other's worldviews.To get our moorings, we can look to bohemia, the floating underground, which is really more a life path than a place. That its facade is out of fashion only makes it easier to get to what's inside.The bohemia that survives today is the one that escapes cliches, because it is not a show staged for others. It is a challenge undertaken in privacy, with the decision to engage coming after the infatuation with the sparkly sheen has worn off. From the sketch artists of Henri Murger's time to today's website iconoclasts, bohemians have preoccupied themselves with a challenge that outlasts the milieu's changing costumes and crazes--to confront and reinvigorate the premises of soceity, the definitions of kinship, labor, love, leisure, consumerism, and identity itself. It is time, now, for these serious matters to overshadow the flashy performances of the past.
On a period when she had a lot of casual relationships, many sabotaged by the sense that she was not 'supposed to':
The funny thing about norms is, not that many people strictly abide by them. Yet instead of questioning the rules, most folks condemn their own actions as insignificant or wrong whenever they don't fit. That's what I did in my pirate days, thinking that even the encounters that gave me the most delight were fiascoes when their natural limits set in. And the men who disappointed me were also getting screwed, suffering serious confusion and psychic harm at letting down someone whom they genuinely liked, even sometimes loved, because they couldn't fit into my mold.
Quoting a woman who's now a sex activist and writer:
"This friend of mine and I used to have a joke about the fact that we were not getting what we wanted: it's like, I'm the only one who notices that the CD is over. Just once in my life I wanted the music to end while I was having sex and not notice, because I was so wrapped up in the sex. Now that happens all the time."
In a chapter on work, and the motivations of Powers and her fellow minimum-wage record-store clerks:
On the one hand, [popular music is] about making your own style through creative consumerism (Elvis owning blue suede shoes); on the other, it's about generating your own fun in ways that defy money's power to exclude (Elvis crashing a rich girl's party and charming her with his guitar). To negotiate this paradox, which is incresingly present in all aspects of popular culture, the record-store clerk needs a spark of defiance that feeds every transaction, an attitudinal punch that says this money stuff is just a means to an end. The music industry can charge whatever it wants for the CD jewel box, as long as everyone gets the impression that the music inside is still free.
Loving music had pushed all of us off the track--away from the normal pursuit of career, mate, and family, on an endless quest for that vibrating high, the plunge beyond time that comes only when you submerge yourself beneath the waterline of amplified sound. We were addicts, in a way, but also adepts, enlightened by a noise most people considered no more than a pleasant distraction. What was left for us but to practice our art of listening?
Reuse allows things to retain their value as they circulate. An object's worth does not diminish with each hand it passes through; in some cases, as with collectibles, it may increase, and usually it stays the same. [...] It doesn't matter if something returns in two weeks' time; that simply gives someone else the opportunity to enjoy it for a while. Instead of the traditional model of scrimping or the yuppie game of showing off, both of which rate people by how much they can obtain, reuse lends status to those who share. You're not somebody in the social milieu of a Buffalo Exchange store until you offer up clothes as cool as the ones you're walking out with. At the heart of this circular economy is a notion that Americans fantasize about but rarely believe; that where we live, there's enough to go around.
The explorations that lead bohemians to nurture new value systems usually begin in youth, and the search for alternatives doesn't magically stop after college. In fact, it intensifies as responsibilities grow. The perception of adulthood as the phase when questioning gives way to cool contentment doesn't make sense in an era when no basics, not your dress code nor your family structure nor the shape of your career, are solidly in place. Slackers refuse to act like grown-ups because they believe that to do so would be to lie.
The central tenet of bohemian life--that our everyday choices must be constantly reassessed and renewed--contradicts the assumption that maturity tames doubt and wanderlust. The dominant notion of adulthood is all tied up with the concept of settling: fixing your position in life and then making do with it.
What few people have grasped is that the endless adolescence of Generation X was never meant to be taken literally; it is a kind of ritual, the public interrogation of a myth. On one level, this has meant scrambling and unscrambling the images, scrutinizing vintage and contemporary visions of growing up to get at their changing meanings. We are trying to distill some truth from these stories and signs, to see what it might be like to reach adulthood free of habit, without our suits already picked out.
The indie scene of the 1980s and 1990s, the very one belittled for adopting boyish clothes and girlie haircuts, is the most upstanding, self-sufficient, and, arguably, mature scene rock has yet produced. Perfecting the do-it-yourself ethic punk had introduced, indie rockers make their own records, book their own clubs, publish their own fanzines, and tour in their own bands. Many indie players associated this autonomy with adolescence, partly because many were high-schoolers when they joined the scene, but also in deference to rock's portable teenage cosmos. Emphasizing the freedom that comes with thinking your own thoughts for the first time, and trying to keep that freshness going as they mature, form communities, and take on obligations, indie rockers strive for a practical version of the 1960s youth ideal.
If there is no outside, then perhaps the best use for the myth of indie independence is the way it helps people remember their principles in the face of compromise.
Rebellion and compromise are complementary actions in developing an independent worldview, just as running and stretching develop an athlete's body. One makes you strong and the other makes you flexible. The poets and the punks who refuse to stretch often end up cramped, giving up hope and the human desire for contact with strangers. Eventually, they sell out, too, by accepting the dominant view that they can't dent the larger scheme of things. Meanwhile, some of the sellouts they've scorned do get soft and lose sight of their origins. Others, though, stay vigilant, pushing toward a finish that nobody can predict. That's where I'm headed, I hope, chased by a sellout past that I'm learning to be proud of.
We have fallen back, toward the dark side of the cycle of breakthrough, negotiation, and exile. Corporate rock still sucks, and gay people still get bashed for holding hands on the street. The plentiful evidence that bohemian values have affected the mainstream [...] is often overlooked. Sometimes it feels as if we've been waiting to let the gloom wash over us, and mourn a utopia we could never bring ourselves to believe in.Maybe a lot of this seems facile out of context. In her introduction, Powers talks about how friend after friend that she talked to said, "There really aren't bohemians anymore," or, "I'm not a bohemian; I've got two kids!" and so on. She doesn't agree. As I read her arguments, I thought about how I hesitated even to buy the book, standing there in Raven Used Books thinking "oh, I just want to buy this so I can flatter myself that I'm part of the counter-culture, which I'm obviously not. I mean, I work in an office!"In the face of this torpor, I want to propose a radical move. [...] What we need to refuse is the negativity that comes from always defining ourselves against a society we can't help but live within. it's time to stand up for what we are.
Boiled down, this common neurosis says bohemia is so great that nobody whatsoever should be allowed in. Ann Powers, on the other hand, doesn't think that what's inherently good about the lives she details (mostly hers and her friends') can dilute itself by spreading. Admittedly, she has some cool friends; my neurosis crept back on more than one occasion as I read. Mostly, though, I had to put the book down every ten or twenty pages as another fragment of recognition hit me: I do have a value system! I'm not pursuing an adolescence I wish I'd had; I'm going after the life I want now, hindered by the assumption that it's only for teenagers! And so on.
