Weird Like Us: My Bohemian America [Hardcover]

Ann Powers (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: February 23, 2000

There is a feeling of nostalgia that surrounds the idea of bohemia, that place where art and ideas and alternative thinking become the focal point of life. To most, bohemia is gone -- erased by the lifestyle of the 1990s and the too many, too fast influences of modern living.

Ann Powers, an acclaimed pop critic for "The New York Times" and one of today's most notable authorities on alternative culture, claims in this powerful and personal chronicle that bohemia is alive and well in America -- nurturing new lifestyles and defining our tastes in art, politics, sexual mores, and all matters cultural. "Weird Like Us" sets the record straight on alternative America -- a new bohemia whose dynamic citizens are re-creating traditional modes of building families, falling in love, having sex, and making careers, reinventing our shared values from the ground up.

So how different are these bohemians? Through stories from her own life and those of her fellow alternative Americans -- artists, writers, entrepreneurs, feminists, cyberoutlaws, punk rockers, politicos, and queers -- Powers traces the evolution of this world and where it has gone. The observations and attitudes that fill these pages will touch many who long for this lifestyle, and will shock others. No longer confined to coffee shops in North Beach or Greenwich Village, bohemia is thriving from coast to coast.

In this wonderfully written memoir, Ann Powers writes of an alternative culture that has never before been fully presented -- one that takes into account the real politics, real feelings, and genuine creativity of those who transformed the dying counterculture of the sixties into a mode of artistic and spiritualsurvival in the nineties. In doing so, she has written a vibrant, engrossing take on a culture and its people.

Editorial Reviews

Amazon.com Review

In a thoughtful mixture of autobiography, journalism, and cultural criticism, Ann Powers examines how "bohemian" culture--which many consider dead and buried--has seeped into the American mainstream. While writing extensively about her own trajectory from communal living and a dead-end record-store job in San Francisco to cohabital bliss and a staff position as a rock critic for The New York Times, Powers also takes great care to include the perspectives of her peers, even when their impressions clash violently with her own. In doing so, she turns Weird Like Us into a frontline analysis of how the members of (dare we say it?) Generation X try to find significance and purpose in their lives.

"It's hard to shock most Americans," Powers notes in a chapter on the shifts in sexual politics and culture. "But it's hard to engage them, too." Weird Like Us shows how this applies to many other aspects of social life besides sex: experimentation and variance have become increasingly normal in everything from drug use to pop-music styles, but with little or no conscious reflection on their consequences. Without that self-awareness, "alternative culture" risks becoming nothing more than an empty pose. "For too long we have united only within a culture of rebellion. What we need to refuse is the negativity that comes from always defining ourselves against a society we can't help but live within." For Powers, acknowledging and accepting one's position within mainstream culture isn't an act of "selling out," but an opportunity to act, in an individual capacity, as an agent for social change, an example of a good life worth living. Weird Like Us demonstrates that you don't have to be a cultural conservative to believe in "values," and Powers's emphasis on integrity, respect, and self-consciousness adds a new and inspiring voice to progressive cultural criticism. --Ron Hogan

From Publishers Weekly

Coined to characterize Parisian cafe denizens in the 1830s, the term "bohemian" now refers somewhat vaguely to a lifestyle or attitude that lies outside the mainstream. An acclaimed pop critic for the New York Times, Powers (co-editor, Rock She Wrote) attempts to get inside the soul of modern-day bohemia but ends up muddling its definition even more. Approaching her subject with a mix of techniques, she interviews sex workers, porn purveyors and others among her former roommates; reminisces nostalgically about San Francisco group houses in the 1980s; and, least compellingly, attempts to reveal the glory of today's bohemians in a cultural exploration limited mostly to her own experiences and those of her friends. In the journalistic passages, Powers displays her fine skills and allows her interviewees to shine. When she switches to memoir, the result is mildly engaging, although it flounders when she starts offering such details as who in the household did dishes most often. Yet even a digression about a great chair she once pulled from the trash is better honed than her messy forays into cultural theory, which are full of contradictions and unsubstantiated, sweeping statements. Bohemia is "disgustingly dead," she declares at the outset, then opines at the book's conclusion that it may be within all of us. Powers's "bohemian America" is more a clubhouse for an elite fringe than a country-within-a-country. Those hoping to find true insight into alternative culture should look elsewhere. Agent, Sarah Lazin. (Feb.)
Copyright 1999 Reed Business Information, Inc.

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Product Details

• Hardcover: 288 pages
• Publisher: Simon & Schuster; 1ST edition (February 23, 2000)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0684838087
• ISBN-13: 978-0684838083
• Product Dimensions: 9.8 x 6.8 x 0.9 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.1 pounds
• Average Customer Review: 3.1 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (27 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #868,838 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

24 of 27 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Growing up boho, by a thirty-something. Rating: "B+", December 23, 2000

By 

Peter D. Tillman (Taos, NM USA) - See all my reviews
(VINE VOICE)    (REAL NAME)   

This review is from: Weird Like Us: My Bohemian America (Hardcover)

______________________________________________
Ann Powers, age 36, has led an interesting life so far. She's a nice whitebread Catholic girl from Seattle who took her first acid trip at 16; became a record-store clerk, sexual adventuress & conscientious drug-user in the Bay Area in the 80's; and is now a pop-music journalist and bohemian sellout in New York.

For one who played at the edge of Bohemia in the late 60's, it's fun to read about a more-serious boho of the following generation. Starting with high-school alienation (is there anyone who's gone through adolescence in America in the last 50 years who *didn't * feel alienated?), Powers falls into Bad Company -- indie rock, soft drugs and (mostly) safe sex.

She drops out of college and moves to San Francisco, America's western Capitol of Cool since (at least) the Gilded Age. She makes friends, shares cheap apartments with wildly-assorted roomates, takes lovers, menial jobs and quite a lot of dope. In short, she was growing up and having fun, albeit in a more, umm, colorful milieu than most of us manage. It's good stuff, guaranteed to bring nostalgia for your own misspent youth. I'm thankful to have had a much quieter coming-of-age, but it's fun to read about someone who had a harder go of it.

Finally she gets the Big Break -- a call from the New York Times, asking her to work for them as a pop-music critic! After much agonizing -- not the least about leaving California for New York -- and a push from her boyfriend (now husband), she makes the leap to Upper Bohemia, gets married, buys a house in Brooklyn, and moans & groans about Selling Out. I'd skip over the last pretty lightly, if I were you -- "did I really think I could resist the temptation of moral emptiness, like some Boho Joan of Arc?" etc. I liked it better when Powers muses that she'd have sold out before, but no one was buying....

Powers is most engaging when she's retelling True Stories about herself and her friends. When she drifts off into boho philosophy, I skimmed, and you may want to, too. She does try to put her and her friends'experiences into perspective with the beats, hippies, slackers, etc. Powers takes pop music seriously (it's her livelihood), and the rock-indie-grunge stuff will be more interesting to readers who follow it (not me). "Weird Like Us" is a nice companion piece to David Brooks' "Bobos in Paradise" (or how Bourgeois Bohemians conquered America). Prof. Brooks is more polished, and much funnier, but Ann Powers has walked the walk. Both books are essential reading for those interested in late-20th century American pop-culture.

Happy reading--
Pete Tillman

19 of 22 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars A fascinating read, April 6, 2000

By 

Maurice H. (Pennington, NJ) - See all my reviews

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This review is from: Weird Like Us: My Bohemian America (Hardcover)

I found this book a fascinating read. I can somewhat identify with Powers' experience as I am about the same age (on the older side of Gen X) and lived through some of the same things. It was intriguing to hear recent events from our culture given such a respectful and thoughtful treatment.

Powers is at her best when writing about people she knows well and the complexities of their ongoing relationships. I was particularly drawn into the experiences of long term roommates, many of whom made a somewhat rash decision that they would be able to act as substitute family for each other and then had to deal with the increasingly complex challenges offered by the need to make up rules for a life with no rules.

In fact, a general theme of the book is the intensity of youthful passions, and how those passions interact with the unanticipated burdens of growing up a bit. Powers has a rare ability to both understand and value such passions, and at the same time look unflinchingly at what happens to them over time. And her candor about her own experiences and decisions -- good and bad -- give her writing a remarkable depth of authority and feeling.

It may not stand up as a definitive work on what bohemianism really does or doesn't mean, but I don't think I'd be interested in the kind of book that would. As the subtitle implies, this book is a insightful personal look at life just slightly outside the mainstream of American life. I highly recommend it.

9 of 9 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars really thoughtful book, January 25, 2002

By A Customer

This review is from: Weird Like Us: My Bohemian America (Paperback)

The people who dismiss this as a personal memoir about the author's life seem not to have really read the book. I was really impressed at how Powers turns a very thoughtful, perceptive spotlight on aspects of our culture that usually go un-analyzed. The chapter on thrift shopping, for example, was a great exploration of this phenomenon--why do people do this? Why does it have meaning? What does it say about them? And the same for drugs, group houses, sex, etc. This isn't just reminiscence by any means, but is an incredibly interesting hard look at WHY these bohemian practices exist, and WHAT they mean to bohemians and (I think this is the real point) to everyone who seeks to fashion a true self in today's culture.