Neo-bohemian rhapsody

Wicker Park, as Lloyd tells the tale, was a relatively late neo-bohemia; no sooner was the "scene" created than it was discovered. He recounts an amusing anecdote about several neighborhood locals, some of whom had lived there as briefly as six months, deriding the crowd of "708ers" (invaders from the northern suburbs) outside a Veruca Salt show. Obviously, Lloyd's friends don't really know where the Veruca Salt fans live; given the rising rents in Wicker Park, many of them may live there. But "the performance of cultural distinction," that is, the ability to define oneself as a member of a select in-group, has always been important to bohemians, neo- or not.

Contrary to the way some of its residents feel (to the way I felt in 1995, for instance) neo-bohemia is not "over" when it has been discovered by hordes of Oxford-clad yuppies and blathering newspaper reporters. In fact, it's only coming into its own. Neighborhoods like the Mission and Wicker Park (and even older bohemias like Greenwich Village or San Francisco's North Beach) retain much of their power as bohemian signifiers even when they've become too expensive for many young artists. This is just another of the numerous contradictions they embody; to be neo-bohemian at all, they must remain superficially hospitable to anti-establishment values while becoming both a "bohemian-themed entertainment zone" and a site of postindustrial production.

Some of Lloyd's best work comes in his dissection of Wicker Park's economy, which depends largely on its hip, young residents either working long hours as bartenders and wait staff or working long hours in various digital-design occupations. This is fascinating, original and deeply humane sociology at its finest; he demonstrates that in the name of freedom, young people working in allegedly relaxed service-sector jobs waste years of their lives in a whirl of drugs, alcohol and deceptively low wages. It's a classic example of a circular economy: While a bartender at an upscale Wicker Park club may earn $250 or more in tips from a shift, he or she is likely to go right out to an after-hours club with friends and spend it all on lavish tips to another bartender on the circuit. To anyone who's ever worked in the nightlife business, all this will ring sad but true.

Lloyd also explores how Wicker Park's digital-design sector came into existence, as a sort of hipster offshoot of Chicago's downtown advertising firms. (San Francisco's neo-bohemian fringe also helped fuel many "new-economy" businesses, most of them infamously short-lived. The publication you are now reading could be viewed as a survivor of the early neo-bohemian era.) Companies that began by designing Web sites for artists, or fliers for neighborhood hip-hop shows, became avatars of the street-level authenticity now so desirable to multinational marketers.

One of Wicker Park's hippest graphic-design shops designed a recruitment campaign for Nike at just about the time the company's brutal East Asian sweatshop practices were being revealed, which occasions one of Lloyd's most important sections. Torn between a commitment to bohemian values and a contemporary ethic of success, the designer Lloyd interviews can only mouth generalities: "OK, there's more to these companies than what they're going to tell you. I think there was a certain level of naiveti that was going on for us." As another one says, Nike may be controversial, but it also allows "artists to do cool stuff and pay them lots of money to do it."

Of course these designers in a funky loft in a onetime barrio in Chicago's urban core are not responsible for "the new spatial links and displacements of contemporary capitalism," as Lloyd puts it. It's undoubtedly cheaper for Nike to subcontract to a firm like theirs than to a major ad agency, and more to the point, their neo-bohemian heritage and artsy, "edgy" design aesthetic lends Nike something it can't easily buy elsewhere. Neighborhoods like Wicker Park must remain linked to the bohemian past even as they become image factories producing goods (including the manufactured entity that is the neighborhood itself) for "the global swirl of commodified signifiers."

"The traditions of dead generations," Lloyd writes, in the closest he ever comes to a moment of judgment, "are what make it possible to understand oneself as resisting the stultification and injustice of corporate capitalism while working 12-hour days making recruitment ads for Nike."

Neo-bohemia is always contaminated by nostalgia, by the belief that the scene is over, and has been over since the yuppies moved in, the old bookstore closed, the Starbucks opened and so on. Lloyd writes that bohemia dies a thousand deaths and is always reborn, and that "bohemia is always already over because it always already falls short of its adherents' fantasies of social autonomy." Social autonomy would mean both artistic freedom and cultural power. In the Mission District of the 1980s, we enjoyed a species of freedom, but with it came powerlessness, even meaninglessness. The Wicker Park bohemians of the '90s, in Lloyd's account, gained cultural significance and a kind of power, but lost much of their freedom. In a capitalist economy -- or any other kind one can imagine -- bohemians don't get to have both.

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