Bohemian Love Quotes

There is strange comfort in knowing that no matter what happens today, the Sun will rise again tomorrow.

The struggles we endure today will be the ‘good old days’ we laugh about tomorrow.

I am a wild woman. it would take a warrior to tame my spirit.

It's in those quiet little towns, at the edge of the world, that you will find the salt of the earth people who make you feel right at home.

Life's trials will test you, and shape you, but don’t let them change who you are.” ~ Aaron Lauritsen, ‘100 Days Drive

True friends don't come with conditions.

From this point forward, you don’t even know how to quit in life.” ~ Aaron Lauritsen, ‘100 Days Drive

Love is the bee that carries the pollen from one heart to another.

Those who achieve the extraordinary are usually the most ordinary because they have nothing to prove to anybody. Be Humble.

Why does everyone think a guy who prefers love to people is missing something in his life?

The freedom of the open road is seductive, serendipitous and absolutely liberating.

I am part of everyone I ever dated on OK Cupid.

The high road of grace will get you somewhere a whole lot faster then the freeway of spite.

We love our partners for who they are, not for who they are not.

Other people look at me and think: That poor woman; she has a child with a disability. But all I see when I look at you is that girl who had memorized all the words to Queen's 'Bohemian Rhapsody' by the time she was three, the girl who crawls into bed with me whenever there's a thunderstorm - not because you're afraid but because I am, the girl whose laugh has always vibrated inside my own body like a tuning fork. I would never have wished for an able-bodied child, because that child would have been someone who wasn't you.

It’s plain to see that the romance has slightly slipped from the Bohemian lifestyle. But we’re literary Gypsies, all of us, and it’s only recently that we’re starting to realise we’re not alone. The Internet is connecting all the healers and storytellers, the wild people and mystics, the writers and painters, and the ones who are slightly cracked. I’ve always loved wild people.

My environment reflects the life I've led, the places I've visited and the people I've loved.

I now know that I was in the presence of the only angels we are ever likely to make the acquaintance of: teachers blessed with the love of small people who are trying to find their place in the world.

Be a team player, not a bandwagon jumper.

Loving music had pushed all of us off the track- away from the normal pursuit of career, mate, and family, on an endless quest for that vibrating high, the plunge beyond time that comes only when you submerge yourself beneath the waterline of amplified sound. We were addicts, in a way, but also adept, enlightened by a noise most people considered no more than a pleasant distraction. What was left for us but to practice our art of listening?

There is no such thing as loving a child too much.

People think live is, you know, this spiritual thing, "the lama said. "This 'feeling'. But that's not my thing. In my book, love is physical act. Love is not ethereal. Love is sticking by someone when they're in the nuthouse. Love is when you keep calling someone when they don't call you back. Love is dirty and solid. Love is, you know, earth and shit and blood and hair.

Tis true what Hemingway says--if we're lucky enough to live our dreams in youth, as Ernest Hemingway did in 1920's Paris and I did with the Beat poets, then youth's dreams become a moveable feast you take wherever you go--youthful love remains the repast plentiful; exquisite, substantive and good. You can live on happy memories. Eat of them forever.

Who thought up the dumb idea to arrange the memoir section in the bookstore by subject?

The highway of grace will get you somewhere a whole lot faster then the freeway of spite.

Is the thing we love always our downfall? Always our destruction?

A Bohemian life, filled with poetry, it cuts like a knife, without coquetry!

Successes are those highlights of life we look back on with a smile. But it's the day to day grind of getting them that defines the laugh lines etched until the end of time. Enjoy each moment along the way

Comfort and security are all well and good, but not at the cost of liberty, love and lustiness. The Bohemian knows that money, property and status have little to do with the content of one’s character, and that professional success and widespread celebration have little to do with talent. Of value to the Bohemian is spiritual integrity and creative freedom. The Bohemian would sooner live in poverty than submit to an undesirable job.

Eldridge misunderstood the white radical movement. He exploited their alienation and encouraged young whites to think of themselves as “bad” Blacks, thus driving them ever further away from their own community. At the same time, he seduced young Blacks into picturing themselves as bohemian expatriates from middle-class “Babylon” (as he poetically but mistakenly analogized superindustrial America). So we became temporarily alien to the Black community, while the white radicals were plunged deeper into their peculiar identity crisis. Cleaver’s genius for political and cultural schizophrenia infected us all, Black and white, and the opportunity was missed for youth of both races to express and make concrete their authentic underlying solidarity and love. This still remains to be done.

Our life was so extraordinary and passionate, so intense if you like, because we were around each other all the time. We socialised together, and we worked together, and we loved together. When we all set off for our first season on the South coast of England - what we were really searching for was our tribe. Something about those years was the bringing together of ‘our tribe.’ These are the people who shaped me. We’re the pranksters, the misfits, the bohemians, the court jesters, the comedians, the crackpots, the Carefree Scamps, the nomads and free spirits. Without people like us the world would be full of humans who are little more than robots I love chaotic human beings, people who don’t follow the rules, who can’t be categorised, but whose loyalty is stronger than blood, and whose integrity is hard as nails.

I am an intellectual, a wage-slave, a hunter and also a Bohemian. I am a politician who hates politics, an anarchist who believes in God. I am a warrior who loves peace.

Together, we will become the ideal bohemian couple—equal in love and work.” “Truly?

Love is a Bohemian child... it has never, never known a law.

There’s a demon named Kali; he loves slaughterhouses and gold. He likes to gamble and he likes to fuck things up.

People think love is, you know, this spiritual thing,” the lama said. “This feeling. But that’s not my thing. In my book, love is a physical act. Love is not ethereal. Love is sticking by someone when they’re in the nuthouse. Love is when you keep calling someone even when they don’t call you back. Love is dirty and solid. Love is, you know, earth and shit and blood and hair.

Constance helped Mick see that there are never any sides. Only things we understand and things we have chosen to pretend we don't understand. Only those we admit we love and those we pretend we don't recognize.

About my interests: I don’t know if I have any, unless the morbid desire to own a sixteen-millimeter camera and make experimental movies can be so classified. Otherwise, I love to eat and drink – it’s my melancholy conviction that I’ve scarcely ever had enough to eat (this is because it’s impossible to eat enough if you’re worried about the next meal) – and I love to argue with people who do not disagree with me too profoundly, and I love to laugh. I do not like bohemia, or bohemians, I do not like people whose principal aim is pleasure, and I do not like people who are earnest about anything. I don’t like people who like me because I’m a Negro; neither do I like people who find in the same accident grounds for contempt. I love America more than any other country in the world, and, exactly for this reason, I insist on the right to criticize her perpetually. I think all theories are suspect, that the finest principles may have to be modified, or may even be pulverized by the demands of life, and that one must find, therefore, one’s own moral center and move through the world hoping that this center will guide one aright. I consider that I have many responsibilities, but none greater than this: to last, as Hemingway says, and get my work done.

So take him down into me on the bed. Give and offer what shelter I have. At first we are only people in love, reducing all life to the measure between us. But others pass into. Lives break through, making him go elsewhere and I become.

Being young you have not yet known the fool’s triumph nor yet nor yet love being lost as soon as won. No. That’s wrong. Only won here. Not lost at all. And dread? Won’t any more. For bound to him is what’s to bind and as for crying? For the wind.

In the same way, our own Christian versions of bohemia—our self-constructed religious spaces of critique—cannot save. Mumford notes that while the bohemian position wanted to retain the “Christian impulse of love … they failed to retain the co-ordinate doctrine of sacrifice.”2

 You would have loved Jackson. He was a downtown guy, a real Bohemian. No banker’s hours for him, believe you me. Every night the drinking and the talking and the fighting and the dancing and the staying up late; like everyone’s romantic idea of what an artist ought to be: the anti-Rothko... At his worst you still loved him though; you loved him because he loved art so much... He thought it mattered. He thought painting mattered... Does not the poignancy stop your heart?... How could this story not end in tragedy?  Goya said, 'We have Art that we may not perish from Truth.'... Pollock saw some truth. Then he didn’t have art to protect him any more... Who could survive that?  I was walking up to my house last week and this couple was passing. Lady looks in the window, says: 'I wonder who owns all the Rothkos.'... Just like that I’m a noun. A Rothko.

We met at the blue lagoon on the even of a full moon. Dancing wild like those gypsy girls, with their messy hair and glittering eyes. We made magic behind the mangrove trees and ended up with bruised knees, as the sound of the win and the waves serenaded us late into the sweet bohemian night.

She [Mary Maclane] is almost always referred to as “confessional.” She has been referred to, several times, as the first blogger. Whereas her writing does not confess much - it is much more spiritual memoir than anything, or perhaps something akin to a mystic’s courtly love, directed at the self. I am wondering what distinguishes writing as confessional… I keep on feeling I prefer the latter-day MacLane, the diary she wrote while convalescing from scarlet fever back home in Butte, Montana, I, Mary MacLane, that Melville House is only publishing as an ebook. Mary MacLane melancholy, totally isolated. Feeling intense disquiet. Now in her early thirties, meditating on her whirlwind celebrity, in cities, feeling distanced from all that, but longing for it too. Obsessed with the Mary MacLane who stopped writing, or stopped publishing books, who was involved with the anarchist/bohemian crowd in Chicago, with the Dill Pickle, who died in poverty and obscurity on the South Side at the age of 48. I want to write about her, but I don’t know how or why yet.

Wasn't solving mysteries important? Didn't the truth matter? Of course, Silette had foreseen this. He knew the truth was, and always would be, the most unpopular point of view. "If there is anything that can unify us," he wrote to Constance during the Paris uprising, already old and bitter, "it is our love of deceit and lies, and our abhorrence of the truth.

মানুষের সঙ্গে কোনো বিরোধ নেই না, মানুষের সঙ্গে আমার আর বিরোধ নেই কোন– এখন পাওনাদার দুর্ঘটনায় পড়লে তাকে নিয়ে যেতে পারি হাসপাতালে প্রাক্তন প্রেমিকার স্বামীর কাছ থেকে অনায়াসে চাইতে পারি চার্মিনার দাড়ি গজানোর মতো অনায়াস এ জীবনে আমি রামকৃষ্ণের কালিপ্রেমে দেখি সার্বভৌম যৌনশান্তি বাবলিদের স্বামীপ্রেমে দেখি সার্বজনীন যৌনসুখ একটা চটি হারিয়ে গেলে আমি কিনে ফেলি এক জোড়া নতুন চপ্পল না, মানুষের সঙ্গে আমার আর বিরোধ নেই কোন বোনোর বুকের থেকে সরে যায় আমার অস্বস্তিময় চোখ আমি ভাইফোঁটার দিন হেঁটে বেড়াই বেশ্যাপাড়ায় আমি মরে গেলে দেখতে পাব জন্মান্তরের করিডোর আমি জন্মাবার আগের মুহূর্তে আমি জানতে পারিনি আমি জন্মাচ্ছি আমি এক পরিত্রাণহীন নিয়তিলিপ্ত মানুষ আমি এক নিয়তিহীন সন্ত্রাসলিপ্ত মানুষ আমি দেখেছি আমার ভিতর এক কুকুর কেঁদে চলে অবিরাম তার কুকুরীর জন্যে এক সন্ন্যাসী তার সন্ন্যাসিনীর স্বেচ্ছাকৌমার্য নষ্ট করতে হয়ে ওঠে তৎপর লম্পট আর সেই লাম্পট্যের কাছে গুঁড়ো হয়ে যায় এমনকী স্বর্গীয় প্রেম– শেষ পর্যন্ত আমি কবিতার ভেতর ছন্দের বদলে জীবনের আনন্দ খোঁজার পক্ষপাতী তাই জীবনের সঙ্গে আমার কোন বিরোধ নেই– মানুষের সঙ্গে আমার কোন বিরোধ নেই

Karma," he said once, "is not a sentence already printed. It is a series of words the author can arrange as she choses." Love. Murder. A broken heart. The professor in the drawing room with candlestick. The detective in the bar with the gun. The guitar player backstage with the pick. Maybe it was true: Life was a series of words we'd been given to arrange as we pleased, only no one seemed to know how. A word game with no right solution, a crossword puzzle where we couldn't quite remember the name of that song.

Some very eminent critics writing in the decades immediately after the novel's publication felt that Eliot failed to maintain sufficient critical distance in her depiction of Ladislaw--that she fell in love with her own creation in a way that shows a lack of artistic control and is even unseemly, like a hoary movie director whose lens lingers too long on the young flesh of a favored actress. Lord David Cecil calls Ladislaw 'a schoolgirl's dream, and a vulgar one at that,' while Leslie Stephen complained 'Ladislaw is almost obtrusively a favorite with his creator,' and depreciated him as 'an amiable Bohemian.

Yet that which is above all this, the favour and the love of Heaven, we have great argument to think in a peculiar manner propitious and propending towards us. Why else was this nation chosen before any other, that out of her, as out of Sion, should be proclaimed and sounded forth the first tidings and trumpet of Reformation to all Europe? And had it not been the obstinate perverseness of our prelates against the divine and admirable spirit of Wickliff, to suppress him as a schismatic and innovator, perhaps neither the Bohemian Huns and Jerome, no nor the name of Luther or of Calvin, had been ever known: the glory of reforming all our neighbours had been completely ours.

Yet that which is above all this, the favour and the love of Heaven, we have great argument to think in a peculiar manner propitious and propending towards us. Why else was this nation chosen before any other, that out of her, as out of Sion, should be proclaimed and sounded forth the first tidings and trumpet of Reformation to all Europe? And had it not been the obstinate perverseness of our prelates against the divine and admirable spirit of Wickliff, to suppress him as a schismatic and innovator, perhaps neither the Bohemian Huss and Jerome, no nor the name of Luther or of Calvin, had been ever known: the glory of reforming all our neighbours had been completely ours.

I'll tell you this,though, Frankie makes me happy. So does Sadie. I don't want to canoodle with either of them, but I love them to death." "Must you use those words in my presence?" "Sorry.But.Truth:You are dead as the spat." Edward sighed. "You're right.You're absolutely right. So I suppose you'd best go to sleep, darling Ella. It's late. And,as was famously said, 'tomorrow-'" "-is another day? Thank you, Scarlett O'Hara." "Actually-" -he scowled at me- "I was going to say, 'Tomorrow comes. Tomorrow brings, tomorrow brings love, in the shape of things.'" "Shakespeare?" I asked. "Queen," he shot back. "Not nearly as good as 'Bohemian Rhapsody' or 'Fat Bottomed Girls,' but certainly poetic." "Good night, Edward." "Good night, lovely girl." I turned off the light and climbed into bed. "Oh.By the way." "Yes?" "I think I figured out why you called Diana all those nicknames. 'Spring,' 'Cab,' 'Post'..." "Yes?" "They're all things you wait for. I think Diana was making you wait, and it was making you crazy. Am I right?" "Oh,Ella. You know I can't tell you that. I will,however, leave you with one more lovely old chestnut-" "'All good things are worth waiting for?'" "I really wish you would let me finish a thought tonight. I was going to say, 'Ain't nothing like the real thing, baby.'" "Marvin Gaye," I said. "The one and only.

And then, on his soul and conscience, [Gringoire] ... was not very sure that he was madly in love with the gypsy. He loved her goat almost as dearly. It was a charming animal, gentle, intelligent, clever; a learned goat. Nothing was more common in the Middle Ages than these learned animals, which amazed people greatly, and often led their instructors to the stake. But the witchcraft of the goat with the golden hoofs was a very innocent species of magic. Gringoire explained them to the archdeacon, whom these details seemed to interest deeply. In the majority of cases, it was sufficient to present the tambourine to the goat in such or such a manner, in order to obtain from him the trick desired. He had been trained to this by the gypsy, who possessed, in these delicate arts, so rare a talent that two months had sufficed to teach the goat to write, with movable letters, the word “Phœbus.” “‘Phœbus!’” said the priest; “why ‘Phœbus’?” “I know not,” replied Gringoire. “Perhaps it is a word which she believes to be endowed with some magic and secret virtue. She often repeats it in a low tone when she thinks that she is alone.” “Are you sure,” persisted Claude, with his penetrating glance, “that it is only a word and not a name?” “The name of whom?” said the poet. “How should I know?” said the priest. “This is what I imagine, messire. These Bohemians are something like Guebrs, and adore the sun. Hence, Phœbus.” “That does not seem so clear to me as to you, Master Pierre.” “After all, that does not concern me. Let her mumble her Phœbus at her pleasure. One thing is certain, that Djali loves me almost as much as he does her.” “Who is Djali?” “The goat.” The archdeacon dropped his chin into his hand, and appeared to reflect for a moment. All at once he turned abruptly to Gringoire once more. “And do you swear to me that you have not touched her?” “Whom?” said Gringoire; “the goat?” “No, that woman.” “My wife? I swear to you that I have not.” “You are often alone with her?” “A good hour every evening.” Dom Claude frowned. “Oh! oh! Solus cum sola non cogitabuntur orare Pater Noster.” “Upon my soul, I could say the Pater, and the Ave Maria, and the Credo in Deum patrem omnipotentem without her paying any more attention to me than a chicken to a church.” “Swear to me, by the body of your mother,” repeated the archdeacon violently, “that you have not touched that creature with even the tip of your finger.” “I will also swear it by the head of my father, for the two things have more affinity between them. But, my reverend master, permit me a question in my turn.” “Speak, sir.” “What concern is it of yours?” The archdeacon’s pale face became as crimson as the cheek of a young girl.

Almost immediately after jazz musicians arrived in Paris, they began to gather in two of the city’s most important creative neighborhoods: Montmartre and Montparnasse, respectively the Right and Left Bank haunts of artists, intellectuals, poets, and musicians since the late nineteenth century. Performing in these high-profile and popular entertainment districts could give an advantage to jazz musicians because Parisians and tourists already knew to go there when they wanted to spend a night out on the town. As hubs of artistic imagination and experimentation, Montmartre and Montparnasse therefore attracted the kinds of audiences that might appreciate the new and thrilling sounds of jazz. For many listeners, these locations leant the music something of their own exciting aura, and the early success of jazz in Paris probably had at least as much to do with musicians playing there as did other factors. In spite of their similarities, however, by the 1920s these neighborhoods were on two very different paths, each representing competing visions of what France could become after the war. And the reactions to jazz in each place became important markers of the difference between the two areas and visions. Montmartre was legendary as the late-nineteenth-century capital of “bohemian Paris,” where French artists had gathered and cabaret songs had filled the air. In its heyday, Montmartre was one of the centers of popular entertainment, and its artists prided themselves on flying in the face of respectable middle-class values. But by the 1920s, Montmartre represented an established artistic tradition, not the challenge to bourgeois life that it had been at the fin de siècle. Entertainment culture was rapidly changing both in substance and style in the postwar era, and a desire for new sounds, including foreign music and exotic art, was quickly replacing the love for the cabarets’ French chansons. Jazz was not entirely to blame for such changes, of course. Commercial pressures, especially the rapidly growing tourist trade, eroded the popularity of old Montmartre cabarets, which were not always able to compete with the newer music halls and dance halls. Yet jazz bore much of the criticism from those who saw the changes in Montmartre as the death of French popular entertainment. Montparnasse, on the other hand, was the face of a modern Paris. It was the international crossroads where an ever changing mixture of people celebrated, rather than lamented, cosmopolitanism and exoticism in all its forms, especially in jazz bands. These different attitudes within the entertainment districts and their institutions reflected the impact of the broader trends at work in Paris—the influx of foreign populations, for example, or the advent of cars and electricity on city streets as indicators of modern technology—and the possible consequences for French culture. Jazz was at the confluence of these trends, and it became a convenient symbol for the struggle they represented.

Gross was a habitué of the decadent bohemian café society of Munich’s Schwabing district—a kind of early-twentieth-century Haight-Ashbury—and embraced the radical social ideas prevalent in Monte Verità, the “Mountain of Truth,” an early alternative community established in Ascona, Switzerland, in 1900, where as the historian Martin Green argued, “the counterculture began.”15 Notables such as Hermann Hesse, Rudolf Steiner, Isadora Dun-can, and many more made the trek to Monte Verità to take the nature cure, practice nudity (not Steiner), meditate, grow their own vegetables, enjoy “free love,” and in general cast off the ills of an increasingly mechanized society. Gross was initially drawn to psychoanalysis because, with its emphasis on the dangers of sexual repression, it seemed a potent weapon against authoritarianism.

Even in the 1950s and very early sixties, when people still worried about conformity and the silent generation, there were different drummers to whose beat millions would one day march. The bohemians of that era (called “beatniks” or “beats”) were only a handful, but they practiced free love, took drugs, repudiated the straight world, and generally showed which way the wind was blowing. They were highly publicized, so when the bohemian impulse strengthened, dropouts knew what was expected of them.

Now as the train moved towards Calcutta, Malay felt as if his life was coming full circle. It had been a strange decision to visit the city at a time when post-Partition vomit and excreta was splattered on Calcutta streets. Marked by communal violence, anger and unemployment, the streets smelled of hunger and disillusionment. Riots were still going on. The wound of a land divided lingered, refugees from East Pakistan (now Bangladesh) continued to arrive in droves. And since they did not know where to go, they occupied the pavements, laced the streets with their questions, frustrations and a deep need to be recognised as more than an inconvenient presence on tree-lined avenues. The feeling of being uprooted was everywhere. Political leaders decided that the second phase of the five-year planning needed to see the growth of heavy industries. The land required for such industries necessitated the evacuation of farmers. Devoid of their ancestral land and in the absence of a proper rehabilitation plan, those evicted wandered aimlessly around the cities—refugees by another name. Calcutta had assumed different dimensions in Malay’s mind. The smell of the Hooghly wafted across Victoria Memorial and settled like an unwanted cow on its lawns. Unsung symphonies spilled out of St Paul’s Cathedral on lonely nights; white gulls swooped in on grey afternoons and looked startling against the backdrop of the rain-swept edifice. In a few years, Naxalbari would become a reality, but not yet. Like an infant Kali with bohemian fantasies, Calcutta and its literature sprouted a new tongue – that of the Hungry Generation. Malay, like Samir and many others, found himself at the helm of this madness, and poetry seemed to lick his body and soul in strange colours. As a reassurance of such a huge leap of faith, Shakti had written to Samir: Bondhu Samir, We had begun by speaking of an undying love for literature, when we suddenly found ourselves in a dream. A dream that is bigger than us, and one that will exist in its capacity of right and wrong and beyond that of our small worlds. Bhalobasha juriye Shakti

I didn’t understand about alcoholism yet, how booze and drugs fed the wounded animal in Walter, I just thought that’s how life was. Unpredictable and insane. I’d show up to school the day after one of his episodes feeling shell-shocked and spaced out. I don’t know how I manifested this stuff outwardly, but I never talked to anyone about it. I just wandered around in a daze, stuck in a severe hangover. I had no idea how to deal with it. I was very conscious of the things I loved about my family—the freedom of all of us walking around the house naked, Walter being a musician, the amazing jazz I heard, the well-stocked book and record shelves, the bohemian aspects of our life. But I’d lie in bed at night and wish that I had a boring, normal, dumb family. One with no creativity. I wished my dad worked in a factory, and my mom was a conservative housewife who wore ugly pantsuits. I wished they’d have petty arguments and watch TV; the way Archie Bunker and Edith behaved on the TV show All in the Family, or like the Battaglias back in Larchmont. I equated creativity with insanity.

This is something new from England, an opera called the 'Bohemian Girl.' I'll play the air through once and then you sing it. Oh, yes, you can; it's very easy." So Miranda stood beside him and sang, "I Dreamt that I Dwelt in Marble Halls." And when her first self-consciousness wore off she thrilled to the singular appropriateness of the words. Had he guessed her dreams and was that why he had picked this music? But the song was about love as well, and her voice wavered as she thought, Love there can never be for me in these marble halls- this is then not my dream, how could it be?

But whistling down from the blue night it comes: I had not grasped that the sun still rose after I love you.

At the Artists Club in 1950 he rhythmically intoned his “Lecture on Nothing” for the first time. It was a seemingly rambling, remorselessly monotone meditation on being and nothingness, stillness and action. He began, “I am here, and there is nothing to say. If among you are those who wish to get somewhere, let them leave at any moment. What we require is silence; but what silence requires is that I go on talking.” It went on that way for a long time. In his book Silence he recalls that the artist Jeanne Reynal, best known for the painstaking and repetitious art of the mosaic, “stood up part way through, screamed, and then said, while I continued speaking, ‘John, I dearly love you, but I can’t bear another minute.’ She then walked out.” When the “lecture” finally ended Cage invited questions; however, to illustrate his feelings about the pointlessness of discussion, he responded only with prewritten answers such as “That is a very good question. I should not want to

Can one ever outgrow the effects of her name, she wonders. Maybe we should have chosen a different one. Maybe things would then be easy. It is after all the earliest label that probably affects the development of you in ways you cannot even imagine. How your name rolls on another’s tongue. How it affects you every time it is said right. How it influences your persona when the a in your name is replaced by the sound of ohm, transforming a lovely day in spring into a bout of bohemian rapture, anxiety and breathlessness all rolled into one. Every pronunciation, right and wrong, like little blows shaping up the form and destiny of you.

Rodolphe Salis was a tall, red-headed bohemian with a coppery beard and boundless charisma. He had tried and failed to make a success of several different careers, including painting decorations for a building in Calcutta. But by 1881 he was listless and creatively frustrated, uncertain where his niche might lie. More pressingly, he was desperate to secure a steady income. But then he had the ingenious idea to turn the studio which he rented, a disused post office on the resolutely working-class Boulevard de Rochechouart, into a cabaret with a quirky, artistic bent. He was not the first to attempt such a venture: La Grande Pinte on the Avenue Trudaine had been uniting artists and writers to discuss and give spontaneous performances for several years. But Salis was determined that his initiative would be different – and better. A fortuitous meeting ensured that it was. Poet Émile Goudeau was the founder of the alternative literary group the Hydropathes (‘water-haters’ – meaning that they preferred wine or beer). After meeting Goudeau in the Latin Quarter and attending a few of the group’s gatherings, Salis became convinced that a more deliberate form of entertainment than had been offered at La Grande Pinte would create a venue that was truly innovative – and profitable. The Hydropathe members needed a new meeting place, and so Salis persuaded Goudeau to rally his comrades and convince them to relocate from the Latin Quarter to his new cabaret artistique. They would be able to drink, smoke, talk and showcase their talents and their wit. Targeting an established group like the Hydropathes was a stroke of genius on Salis’s part. Baptising his cabaret Le Chat Noir after the eponymous feline of Edgar Allan Poe’s story, he made certain that his ready-made clientele were not disappointed. Everything about the ambience and the decor reflected Salis’s unconventional, anti-establishment approach, an ethos which the Hydropathes shared. A seemingly elongated room with low ceilings was divided in two by a curtain. The front section was larger and housed a bar for standard customers. But the back part of the room (referred to as ‘L’Institut’) was reserved exclusively for artists. Fiercely proud of his locality, Salis was adamant that he could make Montmartre glorious. ‘What is Montmartre?’ Salis famously asked. ‘Nothing. What should it be? Everything!’ Accordingly, Salis invited artists from the area to decorate the venue. Adolphe Léon Willette painted stained-glass panels for the windows, while Théophile-Alexandre Steinlen created posters. And all around, a disorientating mishmash of antiques and bric-a-brac gave the place a higgledy-piggledy feel. There was Louis XIII furniture, tapestries and armour alongside rusty swords; there were stags’ heads and wooden statues nestled beside coats of arms. It was weird, it was wonderful and it was utterly bizarre – the customers loved it.

In the El Raval district in Barcelona, this phenomenon plays out every evening. El Raval is a prostitution-dense, bohemian quarter that is both home to many immigrants and a destination for certain types of tourists. Some people who live there like to think that they live in the midst of a crowd, a carnivalesque melting pot, but the boundary is razor-sharp. On the narrow street Carrer d'en Robador, African women with tired eyes and fanny packs stand selling themselves while a sour-faced pimp hiding in a doorway supervises everything. This goes on all day and all night, with only a short break between seven and ten in the morning. In the pubs, 'alternative' people party. They love prostitution and filth, despise authorities and censorship, speak adoringly of the quarter's charming character and pretend that some of it has rubbed off on them. The existence of prostitution is important to them. But people never exchange places: the African women never go into the pubs, and the pub patrons never go out and prostitute themselves. They pass each other every day, but the crowd is only an illusion - there is no common, shared experience. Everyone has an established role and no one speaks to anyone else.

The Impossible Banquet by Stewart Stafford Awakened by a stinging sun, Radiant wings of flame and gold, I breathe in dawn’s virgin hopes, With icy shards of doubting cold. Am I not my parents' child? Lost my way on a freedom roam, Invitation to a tempting feast, Over family, love, and home. Trapped within the world's crosshairs, Locked down with time to burn, Casting runestones, but too late, For visible escape, I yearn. An obsessive lady by my side, A judge of karma infernal, She took my life with her own hand, Bequeathing a wound eternal. Tomorrow’s hopes are now a ghost, No merciful release to illuminate, I wish to scrub away the past, A vain rebirth to change my fate. But I’m caught in the Reaper's maw, I weep for you who procrastinate, Sold my soul on Devil's Bridge, Then dragged through a fiery gate. Hope, community, society crash, Towering feats of grotesquery, You may not grieve for me who's gone, Time's cruel critic is all you see. © Stewart Stafford, 2023. All rights reserved.

She was Catholic, carefree, Bohemian. They fell in love, but never married, though she called him husband, took his name, and gave it to me . . .” And his family hated me.

Pablo Neruda: No one else, Love, will sleep in my dreams. You will go, we will go, together over the waters of time.

Story of My Life absorbs all of Casanova’s pent-up creativity from the day in 1789 he begins writing it as an act of desperation, ‘the only remedy to keep from going mad or dying with grief’. Unable to break out of his Bohemian prison in the same way he once famously broke out of Venice’s Leads, he escapes in the only way possible: by time-travelling through his past.

How is it possible that we set out for a walk in the park and have ended up embroiled in the purchase of a bohemian headdress? The only certainty I can locate in myself is that of my desire to undermine authority itself. Authority would refuse her the mask because of the randomness of her request for it. Authority would not allow itself to be led by a course of events. Yet I myself am now the authority. And so although I want to buy her the mask, though I know she would love it and value it, though it is entirely up to me, what I decide to say to her is no. But before I can, she lifts the mask from her head. Her face is revealed again, flushed, a little dishevelled. She sets it carefully back on the table. I don’t it, she says. Don’t worry. I changed my mind.

Well, we do need to find a new lair for your treasure.” She knew he didn't want to leave his homeland, but she would make him squirm for just a few minutes. “I hear the middle of nowhere Nebraska has a large population of Czech people. They even have Nebraska Czech Days, where we can eat goulash and kledniki and kolaches.” She only knew all of this because she'd had a young lady from Clarkson, Nebraska who needed to have a big fat Bohemian wedding.

I'll never forget the day I met Rudy (aka Rudolf Nureyev). He was at the St Peter's Theatre for a rehearsal with the Ballet of Nancy on the same stage I would dance with the Young Ballet of Sao Paulo some years later. I saw him leaving the place in the backdoor wearing his Black outfit boots and Bohemian hat. People surrounded him to get his autograph. My sister pulled me out so we wouldn't be massacred by the crowd. He did a very Russian move step-step and stop before a hole (such a cute role) in the sidewalk. Took the limousine and passed right in front of where my sister and I stood. He took a glance at me and had a gentle expression like saying, "yep you stood up from that crowd. I see you..." Lovely soul. I have this image in my heart ever since. What I didn't know then and could never imagine it was that just a few months later I would be dancing with the Ballet of São Paulo in the same Theatre he performed his Apollo. He did send his charisma towards me!