The best of mates Review of Ethan Watters' Urban Tribes, which looks at the notion of 'friendship over family and ethnicity' as a current trend. Though as the reviewers says, it's perhaps tricky to generalise from the lotus life of a creative type in San Francisco
:"In certain hipster areas," he writes, "you could literally go days without seeing a child." Working and playing in their small peninsular city at the very edge of America, he and his fellow bohemians can ignore the traditional family values of the Bush era: "I lived in a social microculture to such an extent that the national zeitgeist was felt only as a small shifting of the breeze."Players for sure: soulitarians, even. But the reviewer also notes the anxiety of this lifestyle extending into the later thirty-something life: "[You] dam up certain desires, hopes, and plans. With each passing year, the pressure builds a little." Yet who votes for the simple life?Watters writes vividly about his tribe's existence: a perpetual present of parties, noisy dinners and group excursions, whole years passing in a pleasant blur in the seasonless SF weather. The group share houses, collaborate on freelance writing and art projects. They drive to a festival in the desert to build a sculpture.
