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 spiritual survival in the nineties. In doing so, she has written a vibrant, engrossing take on a culture and its people.

The acclaimed pop critic for "The New York Times" chronicles the vitality and influence of alternative culture in America and discovers that Bohemia is more than alive and well--it is a powerful force in our shifting national identity.

Ann Powers, coeditor with Evelyn McDonnell of Rock She Wrote: Women Write About Rock, Pop, and Rap, has been writing about music for The New York Times since 1992. She was a senior editor for The Village Voice and an editor and writer for the SF Weekly, and her work has appeared in almost every major music publication, including Spin, Rolling Stone, and Vibe. Powers lives with her partner, Eric Weisbard, in Brooklyn, New York.

Contents

Introduction: New Day Rising
1
Home Free

2
The Long (Sexual) Revolution

3
Good Drugs and Bad Drugs

4
The Cultured Proletariat

5
Soul Trash

6
Bastards of Young

7
Selling Out