Bohemians, less in the sense of people from Bohemian, are an ever evolving subculture of artists. The term, as applied to subculture groups, originally comes from enclaves of immigrants from Bohemia immigrating to cities and artists adopting their ways of dress. One of the more prominent subcultures to adopt the moniker of “Bohemian” was that of the 1960s counterculture Hippie movement. Perhaps it is fitting that my decades of self-exploration began with research into their causes and an adaptation of dress. My drifting away from this subculture I feel was linked to the dilution of convictions that promoted drug usage over advocating for alternative lifestyles to mass consumer culture. Granted, this was in the 1990s ; I was a child, Montana isn’t exactly a known for the arts, the 1990s internet was sparse on information, and contemporary media of the time portrayed the movement as the butt of a joke. For example, there is the 1998 episode of the Simpsons where Homer visits a rural Hippie compound. In the decades since the 60s the people of the compound had all left except for two who used the land to grow vegetables for a luxury organic juice to be sold in Springfield. The crux of the episode is when Homer uses the “extra” vegetables he found in the other garden that was covered in a tarp and accidentally doses the town with hallucinogens. In this episode, we don’t see a compound of aging Hippies living a lifestyle of anti-consumerism, but those who remained create luxury goods as a means of diversion from their black market goods. Granted, this is a cartoon and not reality, but it paints an image of how the movement from the 1960s was viewed by the 1990s. The other element of what I encountered in my first foray into researching and embracing anti-consumerist counterculture is that imagery can be marketed as consumption. The DIY second-hand exploration of slowed consumerism was replaced by consumerist facsimiles. Of course, this happened decades before I was coming of age in the 1990s. Abbie Hoffman wrote about this in Revolution for the Hell of It with such lines as talking about when Scott McKenzie’s song San Francisco was played over the radio that it signaled the end of the movement. As, he noted that by then, the movement had left counterculture to become main culture.

Something of note is that the Hippies grew out of the Hipster Beatniks of the previous decades, but where the Beatniks were known for coffee shops in urban areas, the Hippies seemed to shirk off the cities for rural living. If this was in connection to the mainstream culture of the time with people moving to the new post-war suburbs and White Flight is something that is out of my purview of research, but I find this change significant. This change from café enclaves in the city into compounds in rural areas seems to prioritize isolation as a means of exploring independence from the rules of the city. The downside to that is a loss in community building from not having the proximity of like-minded people. Or the ability to perhaps convert people to the counterculture cause due to chance interactions. What we also find when we look at cults in isolation is that isolation can fester the worst elements to the top when it’s hard to leave and there aren’t enough people questioning what is happening.

Jumping back to my personal experiences with subculture and teenage years in Montana, it was intriguing that cultural movements felt like they were decades out of sync to me. This, being the late 1990s/early 2000s, was at that point in time when the internet was still not as connected and social media was in its infancy. 30 years out of time with the Hippie movement and there was still so much vitriol against people that weren’t even there. The conservative backlash of the 1980s was still strong against the revolutionary 1960s. Perhaps it has something to do with the parents teaching their children cultural elements from their formative years. Anyway, with my disillusionment with the consumerist Hippie image that embraced drug usage over revolutionary counterculture, it is interesting to note that there has been a resurgence of this imagery through the Boho aesthetic. Although I think the French slang of Bobo paints a better picture of this aesthetics application. Bobo, standing for Bourgeois Bohème, or rich Bohemians, is the idea that the rich adopt the image of the creative counterculture through consumption of the image. The aesthetics associated with this Bobo scene still seem to revolve around a false sense of rural living, much like the Hippies were interested in. Although, the color has been drained. Tie-dye natural fabrics have been replaced with white (or off-white) natural fabrics. Sad beige clothes for sad beige [people]. Of course, the realm of these “natural fabrics” can become muddied when the image takes form over substance. Expensive clothing to mimic fabrics of rice bags from the Great Depression takes on a new form when it is sold at prices that many can’t afford. Whereas I usually can’t afford the things of the Bobos, I do like to look through their smalls. The little objects in their shops like the local organic soaps, wooden-handled tools, local ceramics, sealing waxes and things. As these smaller items seem to move in a direction not quite in mass consumption, but in supporting small artisans. But still, the image promotes a rural image. Like Marie Antoinette playing farmer.

Struggling in my search for the urban bohemians might be connected to the cyclical evolutions of cities. Bohemian artists move into poor immigrant neighborhoods. If they displace or blend in with the existing population is up for debate. But the following population of people looking to capitalize upon the thriving culture of the neighborhood definitely displace the poor, the immigrants, and the artist bohemians. And then we have the developers come in, raze everything, displace everyone, and build new. Because for them, the sites of activity are geographic and not linked to people nor affordable spaces. So, as I search for my hopefully like-minded urban bohemians I feel like I am always wandering into the spaces they have either just been vacated from, or have not yet arrived. These spaces paired with these developers and bankers and money-makers crashing the economies and crushing levels of inflation of my late teens, 20s, and now my 30s create a difficult sphere of community. I think it is hard to be a bohemian dreamer when Capitalism does all it can to either eliminate that artistic drive or exploit it. Passions are not allowed in favor of side-hustles. My architectural opinion is also that these spaces of developers have been turned from not being about improvement through modification, like the working-class immigrant buildings and artist bohemians accomplish while tenants, but replacement through diminishing quality of space. Again a sense of image of substance. Granted, I think we’re also running into another tenant of that issue I brought up in a previous post. A mistake of the 20th C was that we (read as mostly Americans) focused our building efforts in detached, isolating, single-family suburban homes. We cut off the stalk of bohemian growth before it had a chance to flourish. The internet has become the bastion of community for the suburbanite bohemian. (Is it ironic to write about searching for like-minded people outside the digital realm through the use of the digital realm ? Probably.) In my recent wanderings through the UK and looking at the workforce housing built up in the Victorian era, it seems that this housing format has a bad reputation that isn’t exactly warranted. (This topic feels like it might turn into a massive post in the coming time.) What I have noticed is that in all the museum exhibits interviewing the people who grew up in these dense urban housing areas, they say that once they moved to their detached single-family homes that the sense of community vanished. Conspiracy theory : was this social engineering to defang the growing working-class movements ? The elimination of community through isolation came with homes that had higher maintenance cost. This required people to work more to stay in their isolation. Which, I would argue, seems to have accomplished a great derailing of brewing 20th C leftist movements in the second half of the century. Another looming component to perhaps why it is so hard to find my bohemian compatriots is that our counter-culture has been co-opted to be marketed in such a way that authenticity is difficult to determine. The Capitalist machine has discovered the formula for rebellion and marketed it as image. Late-90s and early 00s MTV was full of great commentary on this with shows like Daria or their Josie and the Pussycats film, but then they turned into a reality show hellscape. The spectacle of consumption over artistic expression.

I should probably also work on my social anxiety skills and chat with the interesting people I see at jazz shows.

So, as I search for my urban bohemains I find faults in the structres of our homes. That idiom of “be the change you want to see in the world” gets heavy when it feels like the weight of the Capitalist systems are pitted against making that change impossible.