In Weird Like Us, Ann Powers asks what it means to be a modern bohemian.
by Jesse Fox Mayshark
About seven years ago, I was in a band in upstate New York with a guy named Eric who worked at the local Border's bookstore. He didn't like the job or the company, both of which he considered soul-numbing, but he did like books. So instead of quitting, he started taking orders from friends. If you wanted a hardcover copy of the collected works of Aristophanes, say, or something by Pynchon or Faulkner, Eric would procure it for you. Free of charge. (To my knowledge, nobody ever asked him for John Grisham or Anne Rice. It would have seemed déclassé.)
Eric, who played guitar and sang, wrote a pop tune for our band about his chain-store rebellion. It was called "Stealing." During shows at local clubs, he'd sometimes cart out whole boxes of "liberated" books and hurl them into the audience. A few people who weren't paying attention would inevitably get hit in the head by some three-pound piece of German expressionism or Middle Eastern art history. We thought this was funny, and a little daring, and maybe even a tiny blow against the empire.
What didn't occur to any of us was that Eric's larceny might be part of a national trend, an unorganized assault on corporate America by its underpaid, overeducated flunkies. So I couldn't help smiling when I read the following sentences in a new book called Weird Like Us: "The world of workplace subversion is bigger than you think. In offices and stores everywhere, employees stage mini wildcat strikes, abscond with huge quantities of company property, and generally chip away at the institutional structures that support but also oppress them."
The subtitle of the book is My Bohemian America, and it was written by a woman named Ann Powers. In her day job, she's one of the top rock music writers in the country, currently on staff at the New York Times and an alum of both the Village Voice and San Francisco's SF Weekly. The book, part memoir and part sociography, is an attempt to make sense of her own life in the context of the society that produced it. A determined rebel who, in her 30s, suddenly found herself working in the mainstream she had so long mistrusted, Powers wanted to understand what her experiences in the cultural vanguard really meant.
Organized in chapters dealing with specific subjects—family, sexuality, drugs, careers—Weird Like Us recounts the attempts of people on society's margins to recast the culture in both large and small ways. She concludes that however muddled or even unintentional the acts of subversion may be, they are ultimately more important than either the people committing them or the people decrying them realize. Toward the end of the book, she writes, "That's why I've offered stories that would otherwise have gone by unnoticed—personal epiphanies and battles still raging, meaningless if you think only in terms of impossible revolution, but crucial to the incremental process through which society actually changes."
Powers, speaking by phone from her Brooklyn home shortly after returning from the South by Southwest music festival, says the word "bohemia" lodged in her head as soon as she started thinking about writing a book.
"I don't really remember when exactly I settled on using that word—very early on in the process," she says. "I initially was going to call the book My Bohemia. I remember getting very excited and looking on Books in Print, and being like 'Oh my god, this is a great title.' And subsequently I realized there's a million 'Mys': My this, My that. But that word just really worked for me somehow.
"And it's funny, because as I started to work on the book I realized it's a problematic word for a lot of people. They felt like it was outdated, they didn't want a label like that, nobody seemed to feel like it fit them. That made it all the more interesting in a sense: Why is it that this is a term that endures if it's so difficult for people to accept?"
Geographically, Bohemia is a region in Eastern Europe, mostly contained within the modern Czech Republic. But conceptually, it acquired a new meaning in Paris cafés of the 1830s, where it was applied to the young intellectual rebels of the day (romanticized by Victor Hugo in Les Misérables). Cemented in the vernacular by Puccini's La Bohème, "Bohemia" came to represent not a place but a way of life—one that defined itself in opposition to cultural norms and assumptions. Over time, it also became a collection of clichés: black turtlenecks, bad beat poetry, coffeehouses and cigarettes, trust-fund babies slumming it in the Village or Haight-Ashbury. Powers suspects that's why so many of her friends, who have resisted those stereotypes as much as they have the white-collar world, don't think of themselves as bohemians. By using the word, she sought to reclaim it.
"As I started to explore the history of bohemia and look at how it has changed or not changed throughout the years, I really became more attached to it," she says, "because I wanted to write about this period of time and this life and these choices within the context of a history."
So what is American bohemia, circa 2000? In Weird Like Us, it's wayward twentysomethings forming unofficial "families" in low-rent group houses; it's "sex radicals" like Carol Queen challenging the whole idea of sexual identity; it's workplace subversives building an underground barter economy; it's recycling discarded clothing, furniture, and music as a way of reinventing culture. And even though Powers has lived her adult life in New York and San Francisco, the magnetic poles of coastal hipness, she says it's something that happens everywhere. As she writes in the book's introduction, "I've found it in all the places I've traveled in between: Austin, Minneapolis, Knoxville, Chicago..."
Wait a minute. Knoxville?
Powers laughs. "I'll tell you my Knoxville story, which I have related with pleasure many times to many friends."
In 1992, she and her then-boyfriend (now husband) Eric Weisbard were traveling cross-country and stopped off various places to check out the local scenes. With a day allotted for East Tennessee, they had a choice between Pigeon Forge and Knoxville. For reasons Powers is still not entirely clear on, they chose Knoxville.
"We didn't know anything about it," she says. "So we drove into town and we did our usual thing, which is we look for somebody with a leather jacket or a mohawk or something to ask them what to do in town. We asked these kids and they said, 'Well there's this bookstore over there you might check out.'"
The store was the Printer's Mark, then in its incarnation in the 11th Street Artists' Colony. Powers and Weisbard went in, saw copies of the San Francisco Bay Guardian for sale, and struck up a conversation with owner Brian Miller.
Miller remembers the visit well. He notes that Powers and Weisbard wrote about the experience for SF Weekly when they finally reached the West Coast. "It came out a lot in the conversation that night," he says, "that a person doesn't have to move to San Francisco or New York. It's kind of what you make of a place."
He took them to the Snakesnatch Lodge on Market Square, and then directed them to Gryphon's (which Powers recalls simply as "some combination laundromat/bar") to see the Rude Street Peters.
"Then [Miller] let us sleep on the floor of the bookstore," Powers says. "It was so great, it was like a beautiful night, a tribal connection or something in which we had met this kindred spirit and he let us into his world. And it was a great example to me of how bohemia is in places that you wouldn't expect it to be."
Of course, all of those institutions have since vanished. (The exception is the periodically resurrected Rude Street Peters—"I can't believe they're still around," Powers says. "They seemed like they were on the verge of self-destruction back then.") But one of the points of Powers' book is that bohemia constantly renews itself.
"I think that it's going on on several levels, in several avenues," she says. "One of the things the book wanted to explore and assert was the fact that you can be a bohemian and you can have an alternative approach even if you're not out there getting wasted in bars every night or whatever bohemians are 'supposed' to do. In some ways even more so, because as one grows older one necessarily becomes more conscientious and more conscious. So the choices tend to gather meaning as you move through life."
It's an idea Powers has clearly wrestled with. The title of the book's final chapter invokes the great taboo of all social rebels: "Selling Out." Powers ultimately concludes it's a limiting conceit, one that dilutes the ability to offer alternative ways of living.
"I definitely think the concept of the bohemian growing up and settling down is useful," she says, "especially in a time when the Right is so well organized around issues like family values, in the continuity of their movement. Yet the cultural Left has never managed to do that, at least not in recent memory."
Hollywood usually implies that as radicals grow older, they inevitably compromise their principles and buy into yuppie materialism (think The Big Chill or—shudder—the TV miniseries The '60s). But in Powers' experience, it ain't necessarily so.
"You know, I've been doing a lot of radio shows," she says, "and I always seem to get this one call that I really love, it's my favorite phone call. It's usually from some guy in his mid-30s who lives in suburban somewhere, and he's an old punk rocker and he's got a couple kids now, and maybe he's a stay-at-home dad or something. He's trying to make a different kind of life for himself, and he has a family now, and he's trying to work it out. And that guy, that's the guy or woman I'm writing about, and writing for."
It's in those places, quietly, out of sight of the media and pop culture, that Powers thinks bohemia is making the biggest difference. She ends the book with a call to arms, of sorts. "I suggest that bohemians embrace selling out," she writes, "if selling out means moving out, into the culture at large, to risk being misunderstood by the mainstream, and to share our views with those perceived enemies who we expect will undermine us. Instead of despairing, let's see what we can accomplish."
Powers knows the idea may be out of sync with the immediate moment, when everybody's supposed to be making millions via Dow Jones or dot-coms or Regis Philbin. (She admits she and Weisbard have each phoned the Who Wants to be a Millionaire? try-out line. "I got everything until they asked me like four dates from the ancient Roman Empire," she laughs.)
"The culture has changed, and there are certain people who now feel that the only interesting thing in the culture is the center or the mainstream, the people who are making money," she says. "There's all this fascination with the rich. ... So there's a certain kind of person who looks at this book and says, 'Oh those people, they're irrelevant.'
"But I think that's bullshit. I think this momentary fascination with greed and wealth is going to shift again, and then we're going to be left with what we're always left with—which is basic daily life, and it really matters how you live your life or what choices you make."
Or, as my friend Eric sang in the chorus to "Stealing":
"Everybody's stuck
Between the world and what they wanna be
Just say f—- to luck
Do what you want and be who you want to be."
May 11, 2000 * Vol. 10, No. 19
© 2000 Metro Pulse
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