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"YOU'RE KILLING BOHEMIA!"
. . . says David Hockey, in reference to programs for social hygiene like the smoking ban in New York, which he says he won't
be visiting anymore.
"New Yorkers may be smoking less," says Hockney, "but they're taking more Prozac . . . I couldn't go to
another New York party where they're all drinking water and on Prozac and telling you off for smoking."
New Yorkers, he believes, are too concerned with what's fashionable. "People are like sheep," he says. "There
are a lot of conformists in New York. They follow fashion. I can remember New York when it had leather bars. Now you can't
smoke a cigarette.
"The peasants have taken over, unsophisticated people who can't see the consequences."
Bohemia, as Hockney is using the word, is a collection of bars and clubs and restaurants and coffee houses and neighborhoods
where young, mostly poor artists in many fields gather to exchange ideas and skills and contacts and inspiration and provocation.
Because its enclaves are urban and public, it also allows for a mixing of other economic classes and other professions beyond
the arts, which enriches the conversation of culture.
Such enclaves -- from the coffee houses of 18th-Century London to the cafes of 19th-Century Paris to the saloons of 20th-Century
Greenwich Village -- have played an incalculable role in the evolution and stimulation and renewal of culture.
We needn't worry too much about the total disappearance of bohemia -- bohemian communities will always arise because of
the nature of creative people, and youth, and poverty. When Big Nanny invades their enclaves they just reconstitute themselves
elsewhere. Always have, always will.
It's only the New York duppies who will suffer in the long run -- with their idea of turning "bohemia" into
a tidy, quiet, responsible place where they can feel at home. I'm not exaggerating when I say that they are destroying the
culture of their city in the process.
7 March 2006
Addendum
23 March 2006
A newsgroup pal sends this quote from Ludwig von Mises on the dynamics of bohemia:
The emergence of a numerous class of such frivolous intellectuals is one of the least welcome phenomena of the age of modern
capitalism. Their obtrusive stir repels discriminating people. They are a nuisance. It would not directly harm anybody if
something would be done to curb their bustle or, even better, to wipe out entirely their cliques and coteries.
However, freedom is indivisible. Every attempt to restrict the freedom of the decadent troublesome literati and pseudo-artists
would vest in the authorities the power to determine what is good and what is bad. It would socialize intellectual and artistic
effort. It is questionable whether it would weed out the useless and objectionable persons; but it is certain that it would
put insurmountable obstacles in the way of the creative genius. The powers that be do not like new ideas, new ways of thought
and new styles of art. They are opposed to any kind of innovation. Their supremacy would result in strict regimentation; it
would bring about stagnation and decay.
The moral corruption, the licentiousness and the intellectual sterility of a class of lewd would-be authors and artists
is the ransom mankind must pay lest the creative pioneers be prevented from accomplishing their work. Freedom must be granted
to all, even to base people, lest the few who can use it for the benefit of mankind be hindered. The license which the shabby
characters of the Quartier Latin enjoyed was one of the conditions that made possible the ascendance of a few great writers,
painters and sculptors. The first thing a genius needs is to breathe free air.
MERRY-GO-ROUND
1 March 2006
One of the cultural pleasures -- yes, cultural pleasures, I say -- of living in Las Vegas is that it allows one to get
in touch, imaginatively and sensually, with other delirious places in other delirious times . . .
. . . such as, for example, the Paris of the Second Empire, when that great city tried to distract itself, and the world,
from the coming rule of finance and industry with a mad whirl of elegant frivolity, all set to the ironically careless music
of Offenbach.
Among the great features of the Second Empire (1852-1870) were the spectacular international expositions that drew the world
to Paris and beguiled it with magical visions of exotic places and an even more exotic future in which technology would harmonize
and elevate all the peoples of the planet.
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| © 2006 Paul Kolnik |
One cannot fail to see echoes of the legendary pavilions of these expositions in the phantasmagorical resorts that now gleam
preposterously on the Las Vegas Strip. We even have here a replica of the Eiffel Tower, a surviving relic from one of those
expositions in the 19th Century's City Of Light. (The Tower dates from a later time than the Second Empire but epitomizes
the wonders of cast-iron construction that so dazzled the Second Empire with its fantastical possibilities.)
Here, too, we can feel precisely the mood of visitors to the Prater, the fabulous playground of pre-WWI Vienna -- a place
where shopgirls and hussars gathered for elegant gaiety on the eve of apocalypse . . . the weight of the old world's doom
only adding to the lyrical charm and dazzling enchantment of the old world's last sweet celebration of pure, careless joy.
Echoes of this poignant moment in time can be found in art, of course -- in Viennese operetta and most explicitly in the
visions of Old Vienna conjured up in the films of Erich Von Stroheim. But in Las Vegas today you can experience it for yourself.
Writers always look for darkness in Las Vegas -- an example of literary and intellectual irony, I suppose, since Las Vegas
is an empire of light. But it is also an empire of lightness, of silliness, of carefree release.
The emptiness of the surrounding desert is keenly felt here -- a perfect image of the disintegration of humane life and
vital culture in the world at large. The dark revelations of Las Vegas's conventional literary observers are entirely redundant,
banal and obvious. The Luxor resort is a pleasure palace built in the form of an ancient tomb. Grant's final resting place
is faithfully reproduced at the New York New York casino. Las Vegas knows what it is about and needs no reminders from emissaries
dispatched by the old, dying culture to "expose" it.
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| © 2006 Paul Kolnik |
Here, as on the Boulevard des Italiens in Offenbach' time, as at the Prater in the time of Von Stroheim's youth, people congregate
heroically to remind themselves that the sweet, silly, ephemeral pleasures of life will survive the collapse of civilizations
and the ossification of culture.
Here, as on Offenbach's stages, as on the Prater's carousels, "everything turns, everything dances . . ."
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