BOHEMIAN MANIFESTO

No one can truly define a Bohemian, although Bohemians themselves, from Charles Baudelaire to Jack Kerouac, have tried to name and justify their particular brand. That said, there are, if you use a little imagination, five distinct Bohemian mind-set/styles. There are also many crossovers and hybrids. Beats, for example, may have Zen leanings or the foppish trappings of a Dandy. The Bohemian by nature is not easily classified like species of birds.

Larger-than-life icons like Johnny Depp, Keith Richards, Sienna Miller and Kate Moss, who celebrate the unconventional and the road-less-traveled, are all over the media, while people everywhere long for individuality and authentic creativity but often on a shoe-string budget unlike the stars. With humor and charm, BOHEMIAN MANIFESTO inspires us all to imagine and live a life beyond convention and mass-market consumer culture. It examines the strange contents of the Bohemian bathroom, bizarre titles on their bookshelves and the exotic spices you'll find in their kitchen, as well as music, movies, muses, affairs of the heart, elixirs (coffee to absinthe), fashion looks and décor, visiting France, Germany, Italy, Austria, England, Holland, Czech Republic, India, the music of Brazil, Cuba, Spain, Mali and more along the way. Laren Stover is the author of The Bombshell Manual of Style and Pluto, Animal Lover, dramatically adapted for Naked Angels works-in-progress. She lives in a fourth-floor walk-up in Greenwich Village and is a member of The Writers Room.