At Dusty's, a Montreal diner parked at the intersection of Mt.-Royal and Parc, breakfast costs $2.95. That's two eggs, toast, potatoes and coffee plus a small fresh-squeezed orange juice. Walk north from Dusty's along Avenue du Parc until Saint-Viateur and turn right. Here, hot, fresh sesame bagels can be had 24-hours-a-day for only 40 cents. Keep walking east -- perhaps pausing for a $1.50 cafe au lait at the Olympique -- until St. Laurent, where dollar pizza soon appears. By now you are thirsty, so push open the door of Casa del Popolo, the saloon that Godspeed You Black Emperor! bassist Mauro Pezzente built, where a bartender will throw a bar shot of rum into a glass of ice and charge you only $2.50 for the trouble.
The complete ten-bucks-or-less culinary tour of Montreal would require innumerable paragraphs, but already the slackwater appeal is obvious. Artists and dreamers glimpse shabby utopia in a city where time elapsing is signified by another refill of gratis coffee. Hours evaporate, days melt together, leaving behind illustrations, songs and short stories, the creative residue of a city that represents a permanent holiday from expectation. Welcome to best -- and only -- Canadian bohemia.
Many other urban centres, not to mention dozens of rural outposts, offer bargain booze and breakfast, but lack a key element of bohemia: ambiance. In the novel Lenny Bruce is Dead by Jonathan Goldstein, Montreal protagonist Josh notes, "Everyone runs around trying to find a place where they still serve breakfast because eating breakfast, even if it's five o'clock in the afternoon, is a sign that the day has just begun and good things can still happen. Having lunch is like throwing in the towel." These two sentences fail to resonate in efficient Toronto, nor accurately encapsulate casual Vancouver. Only in Montreal is there a tangible link between a late-afternoon breakfast and optimism. Here, residents imprint their schedule upon the city, not vice-versa.
Such minor rituals aren't irrelevant. McGill's Geoff Stahl spent seven years researching Montreal's English-speaking underworld and recently defended his Ph.D dissertation. His essay "Tracing Out and Anglo-Bohemia" is part of an anthology published in 2001 by The Culture of Cities project, an ongoing, five-year academic research initiative that is studying what makes the urban experience succeed (and fail) at sidewalk level. Thankfully, the requisite grad-student jargon in "Tracing Out" is mitigated by frequent quotes from musicians like Efrim of Godspeed!, Ian from Constellation Records, and Gen of Pest-5000 fame, each explaining their particular indie-rock bohemian rhapsodies.
That the independent music scene of Montreal is worthy of intense and sustained scrutiny is to be congratulated. Too often zines and 7" singles are considered evanescent cultural expressions, although Stahl is quick to make an important distinction. "A scene implies certain kinds of institutions -- college radio, community radio, bars and so on," he argues during a recent telephone interview. "Bohemia is something a little more intangible. It's a kind of attitude, a kind of atmosphere. A scene has a tendency to be much more geographically circumscribed and bohemia in the case of Montreal is much more diffuse."
How does one analyze bohemia? Usually in retrospect. Yet Stahl describes a normally transitory condition that has enjoyed miraculous longevity. Not that everything is perfect in paradise: Since 1997, vacancy rates in Montreal have dipped, from six percent -- which translated into bargains like a four-and-a-half room apartment for $250 a month -- to the current 0.6 percent. Eviction and apartment-hunting horror stories comprise the new conversational currency, as low-rent Montreal artists discover the cost of starving has suddenly doubled.
Over coffee last spring, Conundrum Press publisher Andy Brown suggested that a 1997 Utne magazine article anointing Montreal's Plateau district as the fourth hippest neighbourhood in North America eventually condemned his seven-and-a-half room apartment at the corner of Parc and Fairmount. Brown spews mostly mock anger at Utne, but his shambolic second storey space, replete with a massive bedroom, two studies, sprawling kitchen, dual balconies and a guest room is no more. The apartment cost $600 when he moved in eight years ago and by the spring of 2003, when Andy and his wife were asked to leave (so his landlord could seek new tenants and double the price) their rent had inched up to $690.
With anglo-bohemia under threat, Stahl is best qualified to assess its severity and the indigenous response. The good news is that he believes this particular bohemia "is quite resilient." Montreal anglophones have spent the past few years describing and reinforcing notions surrounding their creative community through a shared language about culture and art. The instrumental post-rock hymns of Godspeed! provide a soundtrack of urban decay while writings like Lenny Bruce is Dead or the zine Fish Piss articulate the habits and attitudes of Montreal's English outcasts. Stahl believes anglo-bohemia will gradually transform during the next few years, "but I don't think it's going to disappear. I don't think there's any threat of that happening anytime soon."
Indeed, Conundrum Press has found new headquarters a few blocks south. The Casa still stands, and now has a sister venue across the street called La Sala Rossa. Having finally been adjusted for inflation, the economic unreality is flickering; landlords no longer offer free microwaves or air conditioners to lure prospective tenants, as they once did in the early 1990s. Montreal no longer represents a risk-free, ejection-seat strategy for the culturally inclined living elsewhere in Canada.
The glory days are ending. Bohemia is dying, long live bohemia, etc.
But here is where the oft-told tale of boho in gentle decline strays from the traditional narrative. The bourgeois used to let loose a morbid cackle the moment bohemia suffered from shortness of breath. These days, business analysts bemoan any sign of illness in the ranks of the intentionally unwashed. Especially Dr. Richard Florida, the Carnegie Mellon University economist and urban geographer responsible for developing the Bohemian Index -- which measures the number of "writers, designers, musicians, actors and directors, painters and sculptors, photographers and dancers" in a given city. In his 2002 book The Rise of the Creative Class, Florida argues that the distance between culture and industry is imperceptible; a brand new hybrid has integrated the contradictions of either grouping. "Highbrow and lowbrow, alternative and mainstream, work and play, CEO and hipster are all morphing together today," believes Florida. "At the heart of the Big Morph is a new resolution of the centuries-old tension between two value systems: the Protestant work ethic and the bohemian ethic."
Florida posits that the bourgeoisie are no longer opposed to the cultural and aesthetic milieu of hedonistic bohemians. In fact, they believe, quite sincerely, that they are becoming us -- and worse -- we are becoming them. A few years ago, in his book Bobos in Paradise, author David Brooks postulated the existence of Bourgeois Bohemians (Bobos), an upper class creature who enjoys the best of both business and leisure, a unique opportunity afforded by the evolution of the information age.
Such theorizing used to be the realm of satire. In the 1922 novel Babbitt, a vicious jab at the American "Booster" ethos of the era, titular character G.F. Babbitt finds himself speaking before the Annual Get-Together Fest of the Zenith Real Estate Board. Author Sinclair Lewis uses Babbitt's ramble to explain how middling America views cultural production. "In other countries, art and literature are left to a lot of shabby bums living in attics and feeding on booze and spaghetti," claims Babbitt, half-way through his lecture, "but in America the successful writer or picture-painter is indistinguishable from any other decent business man."
No longer the realm of speculative fiction, this distasteful prophecy is nudging toward solid truth. But, as eight-year-old philosopher Lisa Simpson once said to Bart, "Everybody needs a nemesis. Sherlock Holmes had his Dr. Moriarty, Mountain Dew has its Mello Yellow, even Maggie has that baby with the one eyebrow." Geoff Stahl agrees that bohemian and bourgeois must remain incompatible: "The two are opposed to one another but they are not mutually exclusive. They need each other to define each other. They are essential."
So what happens when you and your enemy are wearing the same ironic mesh trucker hats? Neither artists nor real-estate speculators nor urban theorists want bohemia to die, but their motivations differ considerably. Yet everyone has overlooked the fact that cultural capital and economic capital move in a near perfect, inverse relationship.
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"What Ever Happened to Queen St. West?" asks Toronto art historian and independent curator Rosemary Donegan in the art magazine Fuse. In her thoughtful and thorough article, she argues that "the very success of the Queen St. scene may have already transformed Queen St. into a caricature of itself, another conventional 'lifestyle' commercial venture." Later in the piece, Donegan writes "In asking the question -- what is to become of Queen Street? -- the simplest and most cynical view would be based on recent experiences of urban gentrification." If such sentiments sound overly familiar -- even obvious and trite -- you're only half correct.
Donegan's article was published in the fall of 1986.
Almost twenty years later, Toronto's Queen West scene is still around, in the form of small clubs, vintage clothing stores, emerging art galleries and saloons selling cheap(ish) draft. But it used to be different, somehow. Chateauworks, the showcase emporium for Le Chateau was formerly a Salvation Army, and a Goth bar called Sanctuary is now a Starbucks. (Insert joke about only serving black coffee here.) Most artists and musicians have been pushed a dozen blocks past Bathurst or Spadina into Queen West West (a.k.a. Parkdale), where a nearby mental hospital provides the area with a suitably eclectic atmosphere.
The ability of Queen St. West to pause and delay commodification is encouraging, although a cynic might be forgiven for pointing out that only thing that has saved Queen West is the length of its street. The mythology of Queen West persists, but few would label the area bohemian -- it's too clean and too costly to deserve such a downmarket description.
Artists helping to gentrify neighbourhoods that they are eventually unable to afford is a timeless bedtime story that continues to enchant or enrage, depending on your perspective and salary. In the second issue of Toro, a new Canadian glossy men's magazine, Joshua Knelman describes the Exchange District of Winnipeg -- a set of discarded industrial warehouses that house the ubiquitous Royal Art Lodge, ironic igloo-artist Simon Hughes and collage demon Paul Butler. Tucked between ads for Kenneth Cole, BMW and Stella Artois, the Toro article explores the transformation from "industrial hangover" into cultural hotbed. What's strange about the article is that it isn't strange at all; it doesn't feel out of place inside a lifestyle magazine for professional men age 25-45 earning $65K+ a year.
The media attention that provides artists like Marcel Dzama a higher profile (and the ability to make a living from his art) simultaneously erodes their creative ecosystem. Only a few years ago, anonymous pundit Tartar Decaf observed in Winnipeg art and culture magazine Tart, that "One of the best things about the relatively slow pace in places like Winnipeg is that all the cracks don't get paved over in a hurry. And that leaves the chance for new and sometimes surprising things to take root." He described this phenomenon as "isolation as cultural capital." Since 2001, reports Joshua Knelman in Toro, the cost of studio space in Winnipeg's Exchange district has quadrupled.
"Boo-hoo," weeps the 9-to-5 crowd, as dehydrated tears slowly trickle, "white middle-class artists no longer being allowed to play poor isn't much of a catastrophe." Home decor and couture magazines are fond of hyping bohemian chic and Claritis, a Virginia market-research firm has sliced the United States into 62 different neighbourhoods, including Kids & Cul-de-Sac, Shotguns & Pickups and, of course, Bohemian. Once a term used to describe the rebellious cafe habitants of 1830s Paris; now it's just another demographic category. Meanwhile, the average Canadian cultural producer earns $12,000 per year.
The distinction between bohemia as cultural-incubator versus bohemia as empty-fashion-trope is now difficult to distinguish. And as the cost of creative loafing increases, the village is swelling with the idiot bohemian known as the trust-fund hipster (or trustafarian), a repellant creature so desperate to consume an authentic lifestyle the actually claim to enjoy listening to electroclash. Last fall, in an article in the New York Times about the branding of Vice magazine, Robert Lanham, author of The Hipster Handbook, was quoted on the cool backlash: "People are starting to realize that hipsters are just upper-middle-class kids in trucker hats and mesh T-shirts."
Toronto has all the money and none of the style; Montreal has no money and all the style, goes an old saying in Quebec. A rum and cola at Toronto's Bohemian Pub, a squat red brick building located across the street from a luxury car dealership, at the northern fringe of Yorkville (the once infamous hippie enclave) costs considerably more than the Casa's $2.50 bar shot. The name of the establishment its only vagabond concession. As New York writer Ann Powers points out in her 2000 memoir Weird Like Us: My Bohemian America, "The consumer-bohemian has always been the counterculture's pariah, standing at its gateway as a living illustration of who (perhaps you?) should not be allowed in." Anyone with $14.95 can purchase The Hipster Handbook and discover what music to wedge into their iPod, along with the movies and books they must pretend to have seen and read.
"I really love your hairdo, yeah / I'm glad you like mine too," sings Courtney Taylor-Taylor with a laconic lilt in the song "Bohemian Like You." The piss-take tune by the Dandy Warhols perfectly mocks a lifestyle that has devolved into a series of cliches, as does Hipster Bingo (see www.catbirdseat.org), an online parody illustrating the essential sameness of cool. Being hip has become a game of connect-the-dots: take one tin Pabst Blue-Ribbon (or a bottle of Labatt's 50) add a too-small sweater, old-school Pumas, a tattoo of a star, chunky plastic-frame glasses and an ironic mustache and B-I-N-G-O! You're a hipster.
The original Parisian bohemians certainly put plenty of time and thought into their appearance, but they attempted to look unique, not identical. A bohemian uniform makes it impossible to separate the hobohemians (the trust-fund deprived working or middle-class) from the fauxhemians (rich kids pretending to be poor). A lack of political engagement doesn't help. According to Geoff Stahl, anglo-bohemians want to live an artful lifestyle which is in many ways devoid of politics. As Stephen Duncombe, author of Notes From Underground: Zines and the Politics of Alternative Culture puts it, "The bohemian -- stripped of all criticism of capitalism -- is the model consumer citizen, and bohemia can serve the interests of capital well."
These hipstercrits (apolitical cool kids smart enough to name-check Adbusters but too dumb to realize they've become the consumers they profess to despise) diminish bohemia. But their selfish and myopic search for the next cool thing might cause them to self-destruct. Aimee Plumley, the brain behind hipstersareannoying.com, a Brooklyn-based anti-hipster forum, offers a theory of ironicannibalization in one of her many adrenalized postings: "Because somewhere between 'Caddy Day 1983' the event and 'Caddy Day 1983' the mass-produced 'ironic' t-shirt, the weather-vein of irony was violently twisted from its course and bent into an excruciating 180 degree arch, severing it from all reference and ultimately pointing the finger of pitifully corny, cheap and vomitusly bruising humor right back, smack-dab at the stupid, unthinking motherfucker wearing it: The arrow on the "I'm With Stupid" t-shirt now points straight up."
Another strategy may be found in Chunklet, a nasty, satirical indie-rock magazine from Athens, Georgia. In 1998, Chunklet created the Bank of Indie Credit to identify the poseurs. The hilarious three-page quiz was daunting in its scope, an exhaustive interrogation of hipster bona fides: When did Pavement start sucking? What is the ratio of thrift to new clothing that you own? How many ska revivals have you lived through? How thick and how black are your glass frames? Do Japanese kids ever offer to buy the clothes off your back?
The thought of having to apprentice for hipster license, like Medieval artisans learning their craft, is a tasty thought. Or perhaps a passport indicating citizen or tourist status in hipsterville. But is bohemian elitism better or worse than none at all?
It's clear a solution is required, because putting a dollar value on cultural capital is impossible. Perhaps boho needs to become more rigid to best delineate itself from Richard Florida's Bohemian Index. Geoff Stahl calls the bohemian method of evaluating achievement a "shadow cultural economy," a more serious version of Chunklet's Bank of Indie Credit. As Stahl notes, "Financial success means failure in bohemia."
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Why does the idea and appeal of bohemia continue to enchant and persist to the present day? The commune and the Kibbutz lack the sustained romance of cafes and "nostalgie de la boue" (a nostalgia or homesickness for the gutter or mud). A more worthwhile question is: who benefits from a dead bohemia and who gains (and how) from keeping it alive? The status of the patient might is unclear, but everyone is claiming the cadaver as their own. During the New Economy insanity, Andrew Ross, a New York University professor, studied Bohemian Workplaces, a contradiction few bother to challenge anymore.
The appeal of modern bohemia stems from our rigid internalization of leisure as commodity, our schedules so frantic that wordspy.com lists the term Time Porn ("television shows that portray characters as having excessive amounts of spare time"). Creative freedom is inseparable from financial freedom, hence the frustration when rent sharply increases in Montreal. Activists in Toronto and elsewhere have begun vigorous battles against commercial encroachment, trying to preserve public space as ad-free. Viewed in this manner, the battle for bohemia is about delineating an urban space in which to create. The more bohemia is consumed as lifestyle trope, the less it functions as a creative incubator. The scarcity of authenticity caused by the constant commodification of everything pushes the admission fee of boho ever higher, until all that remains are the simulacrumbs of post-bohemia.
In Notes From Underground, Stephen Duncombe analyzed the Spring 1991 issue of zine bible Factsheet Five and discovered that 749 of the 1,142 US zines listed originated from outside the major cities in each state. "Though surprising, this disparity makes sense: gentrification and the allure of the bohemian life for non-bohemians have sent rents and services in urban areas out of reach for many people, particularly those who eschew stable careers and ideals of material success," he argues. "As traditional garrets give way to gentrified lofts and smoky cafes are superseded by the Starbucks coffee chain, creative misfits scattered across the county use the culture that is zines to share, define and hold together a 'culture' of discontent: a virtual bohemia." The fauxhemian gentrifiers might try and force us into the smallest, stinkiest urban corner or evict us from physical bohemia entirely, but we shall fight them in the quirky cafes and greasy diners, and never will we surrender our $3 plate of eggs and potatoes.
Cheap breakfast symbolizes not only a lazy, lingering meal but creative and imaginative potential. It's easy to over-romanticize Montreal, but its bohemian cityspace offers a location to project our cultural desires, an asset too valuable to calculate. There is, as of yet, no tidy correlation between cheap food and a city's ability to nurture a vibrant independent cultural community. Perhaps a Breakfast Index is necessary, to show how the most important meal of the day is also the most inspiring. In the meantime, take some solace in knowing that Montreal ranked fourth on Dr. Richard Florida's Canadian Bohemian Index, behind Victoria, Toronto and Vancouver. As long as the bohemian ambiance of Montreal remains diffuse, intangible and beyond quantification, it will avoid being capture and commodification. There is, in other words, still hope.