When I was quite young, some adult told me that smarts are freedom: the smarter you are, the more you can disregard or work around all those things that people have to do. So I started signing up for a new library card every time I went to the library so that I wouldn't have to return the books, and otherwise started looking at the system, so that I could either beat it or ignore it. And I continued this bohemian existence into early adulthood: racking up lots of parking tickets guilt-free because they were attached to the car's VIN and not me; calling my credit card company to tell them that a check was in the mail every single month, so as not to be charged a late fee for being legitimately late.
When I was growing up, in the age of the Commodore64 and Apple2E, beating the system was not very hard. It was easy to miss at least one class every single day of my high school career (and shuffle through the rest of them stoned), as long as I always got the mail before my mother did and got at least a B- or a C+. I remember a time when it was easy to feign that you never got the piece of paper or argue coherently to an actual person that a rule does not apply in this case.
Saying that the check is in the mail actually used to work.
I am not more cunning than the average artist. Lots of my friends figured out how to dump tens of thousands of dollars of credit card debt without going to hell or even getting in trouble. In fact, more than one professor told me to make whatever I want to make, on credit, and then file for bankruptcy.
Who says you don't get career advice in art school?
Every artist living in a big, expensive city who has the time, space and resources to make art knows a certain amount of black magic. But these gypsy spells don't work like they used to. You can't declare bankruptcy over your MFA anymore. Credit card debt is much more frightening. The healthcare thing is harder to game than it used to be. And the worst part is that you are in everyone's database.
Being an old-school bohemian is fundamentally about asserting your individual superiority over a system. The goal is to take everything you need from the system without having to give it anything like your precious time or actual allegiance. When the system is relatively stupid and inefficient, this is easy to accomplish. But the New Bohemian is either going to have to buy in, or stop thinking in terms of individual needs and desires.
To take one example, banking has become too complex and unfair to understand in an arrogantly facile, fuck you kind of way. The increasingly Byzantine fee structure plays heavily to the Old Bohemian in all of us, who wants freedom from the bank and is happier ignoring one's own bank statement; forgetting that the $1.50 you say yes to at the ATM is only half the story; not adding up every single ATM fee over the course of one month or one year. And the impenetrable FICO score seems designed to snare Old Bohemians in a mid-fivehundreds trap of slightly higher premiums for car and health insurance; occasionally getting turned down for apartments; and of course, higher interest rates for those credit cards you shouldn't even have in the first place.
The old-school liberal, indulgent Bohemian model (you are smart enough to get what you need, live how you want and not pay for it) is now the default, the target of every single lender and everyone else with a computer who wants to take advantage of your basically self-oriented behavior. In a world where one honest confusion with the electric company becomes 29% interest on your Visa, is there such a thing as a person who's smart enough to use the system without falling prey to it ? What does a bohemian look like now?
There seem to be two potential models: the hacker and the corporate activist. The hacker is a liberal, modernist figure, preserving his own individual superiority over the system by knowing how to literally beat it. There is probably a hacker out there, or even a large handful, who truly knows how to fix their FICO score. And they are working on the downlow and anonymously, with good reason. Not only is what they're doing illegal...
...it would stop working if everybody did it.
The corporate activist--folks like the Reverend Billy or The Yes Men who are generally using political theater to illuminate the power the system has over people--are also engaged in illegal activity, but it's social, and more important, it's basically conservative. I find this reversal in ideological polarity (mentioned often by Pretty Lady) interesting. The Reverend Billy and his Stop Shopping Chorus are definitely working in opposition to the existing system. They are illuminating the totalitarian nature of a Starbucks by preaching in a Starbucks and getting arrested. But their message has nothing to do with their own personal indulgence. Instead, their bohemian model is based on a David Brooksian sense of personal choice and personal responsibility. They're not just saying that Starbucks is bland and oppressive. They're saying that you sheeple are choosing to spend $4.50 on a coffee.
The Reverend Billy is not saying that you don't need things in the self-interested, faux-enlightened way Dean Moriarty didn't need things. He's saying that we all should look at the label at the back of each of our necks and repent for the pain we individually caused a thirteen-year-old girl in Bangladesh, and then stop what we are doing for the sake of that girl as well as our own pocketbooks and our own happiness. Save your money. Don't indulge in credit. Buy fewer articles of clothing. Buy the things you actually need from people in small stores. Buy things that were made in less hurtful ways. Yeah, there's a familiar hippy-dippy lesson in there that you should find happiness somewhere else. But there's none of that Slouching Toward Bethlehem disconnect between the immediate good feeling of "turning on" and the actual pain of being homeless and sick on someone else's floor, surrounded by people who are too high to take care of you.
What he's saying is that happiness can not be found in consumption, but it can be found in not causing pain to others or yourself in the first place.
This is a radical shift in bohemian consciousness. It's not just that your personal choices are incredibly important. They are important because they affect other people. This differs from the lessons in radical selfishness I learned from Jack Kerouac and Allen Ginsberg, who informed everyone else I think I ever listened to, including but definitely not limited to, in no particular order: Chris Burden, Marina Abramovic, Kim Deal, Patti Smith, Louise Bourgeois and Hunter S. Thompson.
Radical pragmatism. Radical responsibility. Radical consideration of others. This is a list of phrases that we have been trained to think of as smug, boring and intellectually weak. But it's interesting that these phrases happen to be relevant to the actual problems of now: climate change; middle east on fire; corporate feudalism. Will the words "conservative" and "liberal" actually change meaning? Will Bush Jr. be castigated as the liberal he actually is, or as the conservative he claims to be?
I don't know, but if we don't choke on the earnestness or die of an irony deficiency, this could be a radicalism that actually addresses what needs addressing right now.
I have written about the problem of individualism at length, and have never been a fan of the way irony is overused in the production of culture, and have never been afraid of my own potential for earnestness... until I wrote this post. Jeeezus save us. It looks as if--if we are all very good--we could wind up overcoming modernism not by overcoming the systems that restrain the individual, but by overcoming the individual itself.
