I’m working my way slowly and painfully through “Rent”. I don’t like it. I don’t like the people. I’m not getting their groove, although of course I have met and known many people like them. I did go to Berkeley after all, and for a long time I thought the misfits were cool.
But I’m with the “sell-out”: there is no virtue in piss on every doorstep, and the creation of a Calcutta in a prosperous city in a prosperous nation. That is more or less literally what Paris and San Francisco–two Bohemian paradises–have devolved into.
I just watched this bit. Read the lyrics and compare in sentiment to Ginsberg’s Howl. [ Here follows a train wreck of getting off topic, but venting some observations I had been intending to share]. I count at least two references in there to pedophilia (“who bit detectives in the neck and shrieked with delight in policecars for committing no crime but their own wild cooking pederasty and intoxication”; and “who retired to Mexico to cultivate a [drug] habit, or Rocky Mount to tender Buddha or Tangiers to boys. . .”), and of course many more to his homosexuality, and did not miss his reference to Neil Cassady (“NC secret hero of these poems”, plus the references to Denver), who was nearly certainly a sociopath, more certainly Ginsbergs lover for a time, and the man to whom the poem is most dedicated. Cassady was, to put it bluntly, a narcissistic asshole who left human wreckage everywhere he want. And he was central to the work of both Kerouac and Ginsberg.
I am working my way through Kaddish at the moment too. I will have more to say.
But for now, read this: http://www.metrolyrics.com/la-vie-boheme-lyrics-rent.html
Here is one selection:
To days of inspiration
Playing hookey, making
Something out of nothing
The need to express-
To communicate,
To going against the grain,
Going insane, going mad
To loving tension, no pension
To more than one dimension,
To starving for attention,
Hating convention, hating pretension
Not to mention of course,
Hating dear old Mom and Dad
To riding your bike,
Midday past the three-piece suits
To fruits – to no absolutes-
To Absolute – to choice-
To the Village Voice-
To any passing fad
To being an us for once … instead of a them!!
And: “To Uta. To Buddha, and to Pablo Neruda too”.
Why do they always have to bring the Buddha in? Because the Buddha seems foreign, weird, and vaguely subversive, even if they have understood NOTHING of the dharma, nor tried to, nor even cultivated the capacity to try to.
Here is the thing: it is well and good to oppose a given order, to want to do your own thing. But with these people, as with the psychotic narcissists running San Francisco, Paris, Sweden, Germany and elsewhere, there is no alternative.
You cannot claim to believe in a Liberal political order, for example, if you routinely tolerate illiberal behavior, such as child marriage, wife beating, gay bashing, rape, and rioting. The principle of accepting everything means, truly, in the end, tolerating NOTHING, because you have no capacity to judge. Toleration is not the right word. It is the renunciation of power, of the ability to choose your own destiny, to want one thing for yourself and your people versus another, because you cannot have all things for all people, even if stupid people want to try to.
Much of the West, as it exists today, may as well have been taken over by these Bohemians. This is a lifestyle not meant for ruling, not meant for stability, not meant for cohesion, not meant for MEANING over the long haul. I have no idea how this movie/play will end, but even if they and pretend there is a happily ever after, I call bullshit. None of these people REALLY feel deep loyalty to anything but their own feelings. None of them are reliable, with the possible and ironic exception of the cross dressing homosexual, who is perhaps the most likable of them all, even if I find the whole thing weird.
That will have to do for now. I have places to go.
You can keep a fire going if you tend it carefully. If all you care about is how bright it is, sooner or later you will fail it, and it will fail you. This is a life lesson I am giving you here kids.