Our Bohemian Allies

I was raised in Northern Iowa not far from a small town called Protivin. It is Protivin where I learned to speak a limited amount of Czek from the 300 inhabitants. The majority of the ancestors of these wonderful people actually came from the region of Bohemia in Eastern Europe. There are few places in the world where I have eaten better food and met nicer people then in Protivin.

Needless to say, this was how I viewed what a bohemian was. Over the years on numerous occasions people have called me a bohemian and I am flattered. Here is how Wikipedia defines bohemian, and because it is on the internet it can’t be wrong =)

“The term has become associated with various artistic or academic communities and is used as a generalized adjective describing such people, environs, or situations: bohemian (boho—informal) is defined in The American College Dictionary as "a person with artistic or intellectual tendencies, who lives and acts with no regard for conventional rules of behavior."

Many prominent European and American figures of the last 150 years belonged to the bohemian subculture, and any comprehensive "list of bohemians" would be tediously long. Bohemianism has been approved of by some bourgeois writers such as Honoré de Balzac, but most conservative cultural critics do not condone bohemian lifestyles.

The New York Times columnist David Brooks contends that much of the cultural ethos of what he semi-humorously terms "upper-class" Americans (meaning well-to-do middle-class people) is Bohemian-derived, coining the paradoxical term Bourgeois Bohemians or Bobos.

The Bombshell Manual of Style author, Laren Stover, breaks down the Bohemian into five distinct mind-sets/styles in Bohemian Manifesto: a Field Guide to Living on the Edge. The Bohemian is "not easily classified like species of birds," writes Stover, noting that there are crossovers and hybrids. The five types devised by Stover are:

• Nouveau: bohemians with money who attempt to join traditional bohemianism with contemporary culture

• Gypsy: drifters, neo-hippies, and others with nostalgia for previous, romanticized eras

• Beat: also drifters, but non-materialist and art-focused

• Zen: "post-beat," focus on spirituality rather than art

• Dandy: no money, but try to appear as if they have it by buying and displaying expensive or rare items – such as brands of alcohol

In the United States, the bohemian impulse can be seen in the 1960s hippie counterculture (which was in turn informed by the Beat generation via writers such as William S. Burroughs, Allen Ginsberg, and Jack Kerouac).

Rainbow Gatherings may be seen as another contemporary worldwide expression of the bohemian impulse. An American example is Burning Man, an annual participatory arts festival held in the Nevada desert.”