I've blogged about the concept of "bohemia" before, a gathering or community of unconventional people, ususally artists, who live and support and love one another.
When the musical Rent came out in 1996, it glamorized and popularized the concept of NYC (especially the Lower East Side) as a great bohemian landscape, a place where people could congregate and let their various freak flags fly. Of course, the musical, set in the early 1990s, was about how bohemia was also being pushed out of NYC by the forces of money and gentrification, the coldly impersonal disrupting the highly personal.
But just like NYC is not just a city but a state of mind (hence this blog) bohemia exists in the imagination as much as in concrete and steel, and the flesh and bones of its denizens. Even as bohemia has been shoved out and marginalized in modern NYC, its has and will always exist in the minds and souls of those who consider themselves unconventional, artistic, different, weird, outlandish, etc. etc. etc. As this article from 1992 demonstrates, bohemia exists within anyone who considers himself or herself a bohemian.
Bohemia is everywhere and will live forever.
La vie boheme is more like la boheme vivra pour toujours (although that's obviously a bit of a mouthful for a song title or refrain).
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