Fauxbohs

 

In a magazine article about the home of interior designer Dallas Shaw, I encountered the unfamiliar term gypset.

"With this gypset-style approach, Shaw started with her favorite room," the article said.

A Google search shuttled me to the website of travel writer Julia Chaplin, where I found the definition.

"I coined the term gypset (gypsy + jet set) to describe an international group of artists, entrepreneurs, surfers, seekers, and bon vivants who lead semi-nomadic, unconventional lives." Chaplin writes. 

"They are people I’ve met in my travels who have perfected a creative approach to life that fuses the freelance and nomadic ways of the mythologic gypsy with the adventurous freedom of the jet set."

Martha Stewart-like, Chaplin has built an empire around the so-called gypset lifestyle, replete with branded clothing, books, excursions, and events.

While gypset describes the lifestyle, its practitioners are bohos, Chaplin says, free-spirited folks who are "nomadic entrepreneurs," and who plan the path to bohemianism with precision NASA would envy.

It ain't easy being laid back.

Chaplin's term inspires me to coin my own: fauxboh.

A fauxboh is a fake bohemian, someone who spends a fortune to look non-materialistic; uses a travel agent to book a spiritual journey; and works all day long to appear a carefree slouch. 

A fauxboh is the 2020s' version of the 1960s' plastic hippy, only better traveled. 

A fauxboh should not be confused with a fauxbo, a well-off poseur who dresses like he's homeless and penniless; in short, a fake hobo.

Nor should the term be confused with FOBO, the "fear of better options" that cripples most college applicants, job seekers, home buyers, and diners at Denny's.

Finally, a fauxboh should not be confused with a bobo, the term coined by journalist David Brooks to describe a bourgeois bohemian. 

A bobo is a well-heeled yuppie with a guilt complex. When he shops, he "shops organically," to offset the carbon footprint his five cars, two homes, and jet ski, snowmobile and motorboat leave; and when he buys, he "buys American," to compensate for the fact he outsources all his business to Mumbai. A bobo is a big-spending bohemian.

All these terms raise the question: who were the original bohemians?

The answer: gypsies.

Parisians were the first to call artists and dilettantes “bohemians,” in the early 1800s. But they borrowed the term from the one they'd been using for 400 years to label gypsies, the stateless Roma.

Banished from India to wander Europe and the Middle East for centuries, in 1423 the Roma were granted citizenship in the Kingdom of Bohemia. 

When they were cast out of the kingdom 274 years later, the gypsies migrated to France. 

The French called the Kingdom of Bohemia La Boheme, and the strange and nomadic newcomers from that land les Bohemiens.

Wierdo

An artist must regulate his life.

— Erik Satie

Fin-de-siècle composer Erik Satie, best known for his "Gymnopédies Suite of 1888," was, to be blunt, a wierdo. To wit:

• Satie carried a hammer with him wherever he went, a lifetime habit he acquired while living in Montmartre as a young bohemian. He also slept with one eye open.

• He wore only a grey velvet suit and kept over 100 umbrellas in his apartment.

• He detested the sun and only ventured outside on cloudy days.
  
  
• He washed only with a pumice stone, never using soap. 

• He ate only white food: eggs, sugar, salt, rice, cheese (white varieties only), fish, chicken, veal, animal fat and ground bones, turnips, pastries, and coconut.

• He regulated his daily life to the minute. Every day, Satie awoke at 7:18 am; composed from 10:23 to 11:47 am; ate lunch at 12:11 pm; rode a horse from 1:19 to 2:53 pm; composed again from 3:12 to 4:07 pm; relaxed from 4:27 to 6:47 pm; ate dinner at 7:16 pm; read aloud from 8:09 to 9:59 pm; and went to bed at 10:37 pm.
  
  
• He founded an occult religion with one follower—himself. He named it the "Metropolitan Church of Art of Jesus the Conductor."
  
  
• He composed a surreal ballet that caused riots outside the concert hall during the premiere. The ballet landed Satie in a Parisian jail cell for eight days. The charge: "cultural anarchy."

• He had only one girlfriend his entire life, Suzanne Valadon, a beautiful painter of portraits who lived in the apartment next door to his for six months. Satie's penury and compulsive nature drove her nuts and she left him and married a stockbroker. 

Satie barely graduated music school and throughout his life suffered rebuke from critics, who labelled him a "clown" and called his music "worthless." 

Satie called his compositions "furniture music"—what today we'd call "Muzak"—and would scatter his ensemble throughout the room during performances, commingled with the listening audience.

The public liked what it heard—and still does.

You can hear Satie's greatest hits here.

Random Fandom

Random fandom—the trait philosopher Bertrand Russell quaintly labels "zest"—is the sign of the happy camper.

You can be a fan of almost anything—foods, wines, games, cameras, books, birds, rocks, plants, people, countries, cultures—and it will light your fire, Russell says in The Conquest of Happiness.

The more, the merrier.

"The more things a man is interested in, the more opportunities for happiness he has and the less he is at the mercy of fate, since if he loses one thing he can fall back upon another," Russell says.

"Life is too short to be interested in everything, but it is good to be interested in as many things as are necessary to fill our days."

Newspaperman George Allen said, "Have a variety of interests. These interests relax the mind and lessen tension on the nervous system. People with many interests live, not only longest, but happiest."