As promised in "What I read last week: the fan edition," I am in the middle of reading a bunch of books about American sub- and countercultures. I'm interested in how subcultures come into being and how they affect people within and without their charmed circles. So I read Ann Powers' Weird Like Us: My Bohemian America. She's another reporter/writer who used her life as the launching point to a greater examination of some aspect of American culture. However, she has the brains to write about what she did, as opposed to doing what she wanted to write about. That is a crucial difference.
The book is about how people who don't fit into "mainstream" society manage to craft and refine their own alternate social groups. Powers uses her experiences living in group houses in 1980s San Francisco to talk about the reasons people decide they don't fit in; to highlight the work it takes to belong to any specific culture; to celebrate the deeper motives and ideals that power people's desires to create a community. (And, to my delight, she talks about the roles consumption plays in creating or maintaining a social identity.)
One complaint I have is that I couldn't shake the perception that it's a lot of goddamn work to maintain any specific subculture. Thus I couldn't stop asking, "Why would you bother?" and I didn't find an answer that satisfied me emotionally. This is my hang-up. Perhaps this goes back to third grade, when reading Blubber (a primer on how quickly children turn against their friends, if there ever was one) and watching The Wave left me slightly suspicious of anyone who enthusiastically embraced the sheltering identity of a social group. (Perhaps I'm reaching.) Whatever the root cause, I am now a person who thinks it's great that you cast your lot in with the psychobillies, the Rainbow family, or any other subculture out there, but cannot say I've ever felt the urge to do so myself. However, Powers makes it clear that for a lot of other people, it's the interplay between fellow travelers that helps each individual figure out who they are.
What she spends considerably less time on is the radical possibility that any subculture can become as restrictive or confining as the one it was reacting again. Similarly, there's not any attempt to answer the question, "What would a counterculture be if it didn't have permanent opposition?" Can these subcultures stand on their own when they're the norm, or are they powered by people's perpetual sense of outsiderdom?
Despite not really examining what debts bohemia owes to we straight-and-narrow types out there, Weird Like Us is not a bad book. It's even a great read. Powers is an elegant writer, with a distinct voice that reaches out and pulls the reader into the rhythm of her prose. But why should you take my word for it? Read "Ann Powers Remembers Tower Records" (LAT, Oct 11, 06) to get a flavor of what Weird Like Us reads like. There are the splashes of perspective grounded in objective fact; there is the transmutation of an intimate episode into a universal human experience; there is the articulation of what it means to be an outsider, delivered in the language of the world she says she doesn't belong to.
That is what ultimately makes Weird Like Us a satisfying read. She has the ability to transmit an alien experience, in terms that make sense, yet without diluting the subject's fundamental quality of otherness. I wish more writers were weird like her.
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