BOHEMIAN RHAPSODY : Who Will Be the Dreamers Now That Hard Times Mean Getting a Real Job?

For a while in the ‘80s, a lot of the people I knew eked out a living crating art part time, or doing paste-up a few days a month for the kind of magazine that supported itself on Absolut ads and used words like hermeneutics a lot. When most of the people who watched “thirtysomething” were still talking about career arcs, my friends were basically hanging out, waiting for something to trickle down.

And sometimes things did trickle down--a week’s work set-decorating for a low-budget thriller, say, or a pop single that charted in Greece . . . or even a cushy part-time gig that involved eating expense-account Chinese seafood and then writing about it--though basically, there was something sort of haphazard about the whole thing. If you root around in the U.S. Constitution long enough, I believe that you will find in there somewhere the fundamental right to goof off.

I was at a Chinese restaurant not long ago with some of these friends, digging into a platter of subsidized pan-fried scallops, when I realized nobody at the table had a real job, at least not the kind you can’t blow off for a couple of days if you feel like heading out to Joshua Tree or unplugging your telephone for a while and woodshedding on your sax. It’s not like most of the people I know ever had jobs anyway, but now even those not-really jobs have gone away: the catalogue styling, the non-union movie-extra stuff, the set-painting, the two-day videocam gigs for French TV. Total freedom might well be an inalienable right, but not when it becomes incompatible with paying the rent.

We were all raised to believe that we could do anything, even if that involved composing soundtracks for evil-clown movies or making jewelry out of old chicken bones. We are in our early 30s, by and large, but most of us still haven’t decided what we want to do when we grow up.

One advantage people from out of town have over us is that they generally have some idea of what they want from Los Angeles, while a lot of the rest of us hope that the meaning of it all will appear to us as if in a dream.

This is what the hard times have done: forced us to learn to type; to purchase neckties; to be obsequious to video producers; to accept temp work at offices where it is unlikely that our deskmates will ever have a major gallery show or wind up playing bass with Guns N’ Roses. We are learning to cultivate working-class resentments for the first time, because “working class” necessarily includes the concept of work.

Obviously, boho unemployment is but a wart on the problems of the laid-off auto worker with a family to feed, but you can realize the depth of the recession we’re in when even people devoted to the romance of poverty are out of jobs.

It would be easy to indulge in the bohemian equivalent of Japan-bashing, not toward Nissan or Mitsubishi, but toward the Manchester DJs who move to Los Angeles and take high-paying nightclub jobs away from American citizens, the former BBC PAs who snap up the decent rock-video gigs, the willowy ring-nose Brixton beauties who work in Melrose boutiques, the soccer-playing Luton hooligans who land high-paying positions as roadies for many of the better heavy-metal bands.

Mildly ambitious British art students are to the factories of American pop culture what hard-working Yokohama guys are to their counterparts in Pittsburgh steel mills: not particularly innovative, but with a knack for building products that last. (The people from New York usually end up taking jobs no local would want: in banks, at law firms, running movie studios. Jobs with office hours. Ugh.)

But we don’t blame foreign competition: In our hearts, we know it’s our own fault. If you poke around in recent American culture, you’ll find that the best painters and composers and poets have goofed off plenty, because the writing of string quartets or elegant sestinas has been classified pretty much as a hobby. This leaves no excuse for the rest of us, but still, we like to dream.