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[Steven Champeon <schampeo AT hesketh.com>]

on Fri, Sep 08, 2000 at 10:08:13AM -0400, Dave Parker wrote:
> "Valli.Heather" wrote:
> > 
> > Depending on where you move to, NC may or may not be an improvement.
> 
> The line at the bottom of my sig prompted someone from another list I'm
> on to send me a lengthy passage from Brooks's book, with the question,
> "You aspire to be a Bobo?"
> 
> Well, after I read the passage, I certainly do not aspire to such a
> thing. I do enjoy strolling through Restoration Hardware and Williams
> Sonoma, but no self-respecting Bohemian is going to spend $350 for a
> toaster!

I'm reading the book now (a friend gave it to me, laughingly saying "you!
they're talking about you!" so I had to find out what the hell he was
talking about so I could know whether or not to clap him one.) So far,
the first couple of chapters seem to point the way towards more interesting
reading, but the rest is pretty funny in a "Yuppie Handbook" sort of way.
I see echoes of myself and my friends in some of the descriptions, but 
only because the business I'm in seems to provide a lot of opportunity
for social and career ladder climbing without the craven desparation of
say, light industrial work or clerical forms-pushing.

To get back to that first couple of chapters, though; the idea of Ivy
League leaders teaming up with scientists to produce a meritocracy hit
home with me as about the first useful observation I've ever heard of
how the Sixties came about. See, when I was in seventh grade, I was
part of a program at Johns Hopkins (the Center for Talented Youth)
that gave the SATs to junior high school kids. I scored respectably,
higher than the average high school grad, but not spectactularly. Some
might say that had I applied myself I could have done better in high
school, when I finally took the things for real. The thing was, in the
case of the 1950s Ivies, it sounded like they took the best and
brightest (not just the best connected) and gave them a chance to
shine. By the time this watershed lapped at my door, I had already been
in what you guys call "gifted and talented" programs since kindegarten
(I read the Great Books in fourth and fifth grade, had entered a high
school science fair in second grade - with a papier-mache' tryannosaurus
rex - and so forth) so when the JH-CTY thing rolled around, I was pretty
bored with it. It had dwindled down to special math classes by that
point and even that stopped in high school. They had decided that to
keep the G&T kids separate so youngwas stunting their social growth. Or
something. I never heard these conversations except in snatches overheard
on telephone calls and behind closed parent-teacher doors.

The perhaps natural progression was that I became an aspiring artist
(pen/ink, graphite, acrylics) and subsequently went to art school after
underachieving my way through all of my AP classes; in college I went
into religious studies (to get the broadest education I could, as there
were hundreds of cross-listed liberal arts classes in the REL curriculum),
so ended up taking lots of philosophy, linguistics, and so forth, and
eventually wound up in Web design, programming, and the like. All in all,
I've managed to stay pretty well-rounded. I can draw, I can write, I can
hack, and I do all of them (except the drawing, which has transmuted into
"playing with the Websafe palette" ;) regularly. And I'm doing all right.

So, the BoBo book was interesting to me at first, as it seemed to be
a direct suggestion that those early efforts at creating a meritocracy
had ignored many important aspects of social interaction, upbringing,
"grooming" or "breeding", you might say, which are just as crucial to
long term success as is your grasp of math fundamentals. So, the sin 
of the BoBo (like the Yuppie before) is a lack of breeding? Hm. But
they are of a different social order, aren't they? Aren't we? Or not.

> Perhaps the complaint Saundra and Heather have is that a certain group
> of the Bourgeois co-opted the Bohemian esthetic, adapting it to their
> own desires, and that the current Bobo lifestyle is just as empty as the
> Bourgeois lifestyle that came before it.

Perhaps. Or that the people who /live/ the Bobo lifestyle are as
empty.  I personally see nothing wrong with driving a cheap toyota
pickup but spending the money to get a nice bed. Or buying a good,
solid corkscrew.  My first reaction on reading the BoBo book was "ok,
so it's about spending the money on things you enjoy, for their own
sake, instead of spending money on things to prove your social status,
or so you can show off in order to prove how advanced your tastes are"
Am I the only one who got this out of the description of the Bobo
esthetic? Seems to me that the mix of people who really know what they
are talking about viz-a-viz wine or electronics or whatever are no
longer impressed by ostentatious displays of wealth or the proper
brand name, and the people who don't know don't care as much as they
might have in the eighties.

Of course, it may have been the flyin'-the-flannel, DIY, punk-rock
revival that did it (if you don't count the Seattle scene post-Pearl
Jam, that is... :) I know fugazi had a lot to do with shaping my
sense of justice and channelling a well-abused notion of a puritan
work ethic into a better way of life.

Shrug,
Steve



-- 
http://a.jaundicedeye.com/weblog/
because it just annoys people when I talk to myself...