Weird Like Us by Ann Powers

From the Publisher

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 alternatie culture that has never before been fully presented—one that takes into account the real politics, real feelings, and genuine creativity of those who transofrmed the dying counterculture of the sixties into a mode of artistic and spiritual survival in the nineties. In doing so, she has written a vibrant, engrossing take on a culture and its people.

Book Magazine March/April 2000 - James Sullivan

...Weird Like Us is a call to arms, one that finds the author defending her decision to use her bohemian expertise to earn herself a respected "straight" living. Her defense is artful.

BUST Magazine

Powers' writing is truly enjoyable; you'll want to savor each chapter just to have more time to enjoy the humor, the honesty and the realization that our lives are significant to America's history.

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 Cahners Business Information.

Library Journal

Does bohemia still exist? Powers, rock critic for the New York Times, says "Yes." "It's everywhere somebody opens a used-record shop, a laundromat-caf , and a punk rock bar...a homeland hidden right in the middle of today's America." In this, her first book, Powers attempts to chart the outlines of this new bohemia by recounting the adventures of her circle of friends in the 1980s and 1990s as they navigated relationships, sexuality, jobs, consumerism, and drugs. Concerning the latter, she writes: "I am not willing to say that conscientious drug use must be part of everyone's healthy self-development...But I do think that the judgments society passes can be as habitual and careless as the habits of smokers, sniffers, and shooters." The book closes with an effusive description of the "audacious" party Powers and her boyfriend, Village Voice rock critic Eric Weisbard, held to commemorate their ten-year anniversary as a couple. Although Weird Like Us offers some genuine insights into contemporary mores, it suffers from an excessive level of authorial self-preoccupation. This is one of those books that may quickly seem dated.--Kent Worcester, Marymount Manhattan Coll., New York Copyright 1999 Cahners Business Information.

The New York Times Book Review - James Poniewozik

Weird Like Us is, thank God, no navel-gazing memoir. Powers instead turns her journalist's skills -- the very work that gave her access to the straight world and a mortgage -- to go back and report on her own life, asking old friends to explain their life choices and determine how their memories of la vie de Bohème differ from hers. The result is an elegantly argued piece of cultural criticism, a thorough if sometimes dry work of social reportage that salvages the mundane, little-examined details of slacker life. It's a heartfelt but cleareyed bohemian rhapsody.

Esquire

Ann Powers is one of the truly great music critics around.

What People Are Saying

Jonathan Lethem
Weird Like Us is a treat both intoxicating and nutritious, like a granola bar with an absinthe creme center. It is itself full of the values Ann Powers finds everywhere in plain sight—non-conformist honesty, irreverent humor, and perverse rigor in pursuit of meaningful freedon and aesthetic bliss—true American values to be sure. Reading it is like gaining a bunch of wonderfully flawed and essential new friends, no the least of them being Powers herself.

Lynne Tillman
Ann Powers puts the Y to Gen X, and, using lived experience boldly, explodes complacencies and explores quiter rebellions, America's new frontiers. Weird Like Us is heartfelt, engaged, fun, smart, brave, and honest. It's risky Ann Powers's audacious gift to us.

Katha Pollitt
Ann Powers takes us on an intimate, thought-provoking, and surprising joyride through her own private bohemia—and America's. I loved it!

Product Details

• Table of Contents
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Table of Contents

Read a Sample Chapter

Chapter One: Home Free

In 1984, a twenty-year-old punkette with two-toned hair and a plastic raincoat boarded an American Airlines jet and left home, in search of a fantasy that she wanted to make into a life. That nice Catholic kid gone haywire was me, fleeing toward a future as a poet, a rock star, a groupie, anything but the accounted-for accounting major my dad said I should be. My fantasy was the floating world where artists and other weirdos made their own rules, turning their lives in the city's twilight into one long experiment.

San Francisco was the logical place to touch ground, and I held a naive hope that its history would rub off on me. As soon as I checked in to the Geary Street YWCA, I hiked up to the faded cafés of North Beach. Nothing happened as I sat there with my lonely notebook. I tried my luck on Haight Street, past the head shops and the spaced-out huddling Deadheads, but I never met anyone there who offered me a useful revelation. Those neighborhoods' dreams were done, their shells transformed into theme parks. I soon tired of hucksters selling memories of Ginsberg or Garcia along with their bad manifestos and patchouli oil. I didn't want to be a Beat, or a hippie, or even a mohawked English-style punk like the ones who hung out in front of the Mabuhay Gardens. The costumes those characters wore seemed about as daring as Mickey Mouse.

I had to find the bohemia that was still forming, as I was. In the 1980s, that meant moving to the Mission District, a bilingual neighborhood where kids with fresh tattoos lived across the hall from Latin American political refugees. The Mission had the resources wage slaves and studentsneed to survive: cheap rents, easy subway access, and taquerías that served giant two-dollar burritos. I found a room in a creaky fifth-floor walk-up on South Van Ness, next to Paco's Tacos, the cheapest stand in the neighborhood. It was only two blocks from the neighborhood's oldest café, predictably called La Bohème. But I soon realized that I could make more interesting connections by staying in.

The flat I'd moved into was an ordinary San Francisco group house, occupied by a rotating cast selected by its leaseholder, a girl my age named Sally Frederick. At first, it didn't seem that different from the dorm rooms and off-campus shacks I'd passed through in my year and a half of college in Seattle. But unlike the postadolescent drifters I'd known, Sally had made a commitment to the spot where she'd happened to land. She expected her roommates and the small circle of friends who spent most evenings in her living room to go beyond the coincidence of our meeting and become one another's lifelines. Our efforts at the domestic arts didn't amount to much beyond hanging up a few movie posters and occasionally throwing together a curry from a mix. But emotionally, Sally pushed us further. She encouraged us to invest in each other, to open up, and to answer each other's trust with a willingness to provide support. Her intensity turned off some people, and they fled, but those willing to match it entered a network of steadfast companions that survived individual conflicts and disenchantments.

Sally had some kind of magic with people; I attributed it to a natural grace that made everyone in her presence feel a bit more beautiful. Now I recognize that her charisma was intensified by her self-imposed mission. She was trying to make us into a family. Hard times had struck the one she'd been born into: her parents were divorced, and a brother had drowned in a boating accident when she was a teenager. Her impulse to reach out beyond her bloodline was personal. Yet it suited all of us. As I moved from her little clan into others I helped form over the next decade, I realized that this is one of the first tasks any would-be bohemian faces: to create a sense of home that lasts while your life changes, to cultivate a family spirit beyond the boundaries of the white picket fence.

Making "family" where you find it is also one of the hardest ambitions to fulfill. No matter how strong the impulse may be to reinvigorate tired customs with the juice of inspiration and personal experience, applying your bright new ways to the life you actually lead can be difficult and even painful. You can declare the nuclear family as antiquated as the corset, but that doesn't make it easier to explain to your mother why you've decided to celebrate the holidays with your housemates instead of flying home. She will be hurt, and those beloved roomies may succumb to their own pressures and abandon you anyway. You could invite them all home with you, except that Uncle Gene might go off on one of his tirades about the gays getting all the good real estate, or your activist pal Amber might try to coax your grandmother to explain why she's prolife.

Those fortunate enough to share beliefs as well as blood with relatives usually have more luck integrating their clans, but in the hardest and best of times -- when you need money, when you have a baby, when someone dies -- old-fashioned family usually takes precedence. Some of the reasons for this are legal, since the state dictates who can enter a hospital room or choose a funeral plot. Others are a matter of habit. Not to discount the genuine trust and love that flourishes in blood families; expanding the definition of family doesn't have to mean rejecting the people biologically joined to your existence, especially since they most likely rose to the occasion and nurtured you. The ultimate goal is to take no one for granted. Today, though, many people end up doing just the opposite. They push away siblings and parents in a fury over their inadequacies, yet they expect even less sustenance from their friends. As long as orthodox family structures continue to represent the "best way" for people to dole out emotional support, more and more people will fail to find ways to gain such nourishment at all.

The old edifice of the family unit is obviously decaying. The journal American Demographics reports that as the new century begins, over five million adults will live with other adults unrelated to them by blood or marriage. As the human life span increases, more elders are finding it necessary to share housing, with more than four hundred placement organizations matching up senior tenants with homeowners who have an extra room. Policymakers see this trend as an ideal option for the burgeoning population over age sixty-five, but as the rising cost of housing does battle with the average person's enduring desire to settle into a home, members of all age groups find life with roommates becoming permanent. Friends are raising children together, buying property together, nursing each other, and forming lasting ties.

Although two-thirds of the housing in this country was built for Mom-Dad-and-kids, with healthy-sized kitchens for home-cooked meals and a big living room for lounging, less than one-quarter of the population still lives out that particular family romance. "Family" is an idea in transition. It is being recast in every town and city by homesteaders like Vivian Segal, who has lived in the same group house on Steiner Street in San Francisco for over a decade. "In the eighties, there was the Reagan-Bush-Quayle return to family values, espousing family values that I don't necessarily agree with," said Vivian. "Here we were, living amongst all of our friends, whose family values were a lot stronger and more valuable to each other than the ones that were supposed to bring us back to some moral, beautiful, peaceful time in the fifties. We were nicer and kinder to each other than that model suggested. We weren't going back."

I know why Vivian puts so much stock in the family she helped invent; for several years in the mid-1980s, I lived within its sanctuary. After my first taste of reconstructed family life, I left South Van Nes