Bohemian Thursday
I realized the other day how the ability to live a Bohemian lifestyle in the US just isn't possible anymore. Rent is too high, pay is too low, everything is expensive now. You can't just work a part time job and make art. Sometimes you can't even make art, if you're working your two jobs just to make rent.
Adam Horovitz, in the Beastie Boys Book, talks about a concert date in Kansas City, and looking up record shops and thrift shops so he could do some Crate Digging, and found this huge store with every record you could imagine (his example was, if you wanted Billy' Joel's first band, Atilla, they had it, such was the breadth of their inventory). He talks with the one employee there, who talks about how he poaches records when customers sell them to the store, learning about every musician's music as it came through the store, and how he lived down the street, paying $250 a month for rent. And then they went out and grabbed coffee, which like, can you even imagine?
Horovitz has this moment during this experience where he thinks, I could have this life. This could be me, just working a cool job, being surrounded by music, finding new and cool music, living in a decent place with cheap rent.
And now that life just isn't possible here. It's sad. We could be a society where it's cheap to make art, where it's cheap to live, where you could pull a part time shift and then go make something, and still live decently. Instead, we live in a hell world where the only thing that counts is how much profit we can make for a share holder.
So that's where I am this Thursday morning.
-Kosmo