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Bohemian rhapsodies | page 1, 2
I can't claim to have always followed the thread of this book -- an inspired
chapter on drugs is followed by a strange one that touts shoplifting from the very shop you work in as a way to mitigate drudgery and low pay. Powers has accommodated herself to the system sufficiently to be pop music critic for the New York Times. (She seems to like the job, but in light of her book, who can blame the security guards if they start checking her bag for pilfered office supplies whenever she leaves the building?) The 60s Communes: Hippies and Beyond By Timothy Miller
Weird Like Us: My Bohemian America By Ann Powers Powers is a terrific storyteller and a cheerleader for the lifestyle she advocates: a kind of enlightened hippiedom, in which people pick and choose among domestic and sexual arrangements, job possibilities and available stimulants while eluding some of the most oppressive influences of the establishment, including the tyranny of fashion and the reluctance to examine sex closely. "As conventions continue to self-destruct," she writes, "the bohemian choice to live differently suddenly becomes essential for everyone ... If we who are working on those reconfigurations begin to reflect openly upon our choices, we can provide a moral vision that challenges the antiquated ones that conservatives cling to and that most Americans seem eager to reject." For Powers, the cardinal virtue is rationality, even when you're doing something stupefying, like taking drugs. "Finding the balance between the drug's will and your own," she writes, "is the crucial step in negotiating that reality instead of letting it just crash over you." Drug-taking, she seems to be arguing, is a skill like many others. You're bound to make some mistakes while driving with your learner's permit, which argues for doing drugs in the company of loyal friends who can come to your aid if you need them. This is an odd, almost startlingly sane approach to a superheated topic. So many Americans take an absolutist stance toward drugs -- Just Say No or libertarian indifference to what anyone else does -- that Powers' determination to slow down and scrutinize the subject is refreshing and useful. About 10 years ago, novelist Mary Gordon argued that of all the revolutionary impulses of the '60s, only one had enjoyed lasting influence: the sexual. In Powers' view, that may have been enough. Sexual liberation has not only freed up people to choose the partners and practices that suit them but also has led to a rethinking of what a family is. With gay men and lesbians in the vanguard, sexual freedom and open unorthodoxy have led to planned single-parent families, two-mommy and two-daddy families, sperm-donating fathers, womb-donating surrogate mothers -- and a huge increase in the percentage of households not centered on a married couple. Here again Powers insists on probing a topic -- sex -- that many people would prefer not to focus on, if not because of Puritanism then because they're afraid that too much scrutiny will rob eros of its mystery. I myself have always thought sex can take care of itself, no matter how much light is shed on it. I grew up in an era when the navel was considered too racy to be shown on movie or TV screens, and no amount of attentiveness to sex can be more joy-killing than that. As if to establish her credentials as a non-flinching examiner, Powers dwells on the S/M scene -- or, rather, scenes, since there appears to be a marked difference between, say, the safety-conscious San Francisco brand and more reckless international kinds. In an electrifying passage, Powers quotes an aficionado of stun-guns explaining how she talked a reluctant partner into going with the current. "We were able to negotiate through it," the informant reports. "It was awesome." More power to them. Toward the end of "The 60s Communes," in summing-up mode, Timothy Miller quotes several grizzled hippies who take issue with the term "failed commune." The mere fact that their communes ended, these onetime members argue, doesn't mean that the experience wasn't worth having. Looking back, a nostalgic woman remembered "the way we all worked and lived together without any power or authority structure, simply following our own consciousness of what should be done each day ... The way that children [were] cared for communally, with the men also caring for them, without any stigma about child-rearing being effeminate ... And nudity, bodies of all shapes, so readily accepted just as part of nature. And no power! Only a natural hierarchy of skill, experience, and knowledge." If the naive idealism of the '60s communes has served as a cautionary tale to
the steely-eyed inhabitants of the bohemian enclaves investigated and experienced firsthand by Ann Powers, well, my generation could have left worse legacies than a primer on How Not to Rebel.
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