Knowing that my freaky LA lifestyle is going to be the one thing I’ll miss the most when I’m living in a small, bucolic southern town, I have been livin’ it up. It’s “Fashion Week” here in LA, which means that all the local designers who can’t afford to show in NYC are holding fashion shows here. Even though their Fall ’07 collections have already been in NYC showrooms for the past month, as that’s the place to be if you actually want to sell on a global scale. So it’s hard for me to take LA fashion week seriously, but the parties sure are fun. An acquaintance of mine decided to produce a bunch of shows with parties as well, and it was amazing how well he and his crew pulled it off. You’d never have guessed it was their first time, except for the nonsense of having everyone wait in line out front. Sure, we did that for Galliano, in Paris, but that’s Galliano. Jared Gold was exceptional, though. A beautiful collection which could easily have held its own in NYC, and maybe even Paris. The setup was cool, they held the shows in the basement of the Los Angeles Theater, which is gorgeous. Not a basement in the traditional sense, more like a below-ground ballroom. There was also an art gallery of BOX Eight (the organization producing the show) artists, which was cool.
The crowd was interesting, and I ran into some great friends. Annick and Susie forgot to eat before drinking, and it was my dinnertime, so after the shows we went out for chinese, where Susie and I reminisced about working in the back room at Rozae, and talked about her possibly buying my condo. Then we went to Annick’s place for the perpetual after-party. She lives in one of those slick converted loft buildings, a whopping 300 units taking up almost a whole city block. Each unit used to be someone’s office, with the original doors and frosted glass hall windows! On the roof, there’s a lovely courtyard, as the center building is shorter than the surrounding buildings of this behemoth. On this deck there’s a pool, jaccuzi packed with screeching drunk college girls, cabanas with fireplaces and even a dog run! The only thing missing is a proper delivery service. Were someone to open a 24 hour grocery/deli and deliver all night, they’d make a fortune. I scared some guy who was hitting on me when I walked over to the nearest chair, picked it up (it’s one of those giant mission-style rocking chairs, kinda heavy) and carried it over myself. He said “Whoa! I ain’t gonna mess with you!” and “I was going to offer to do that…” Jeesh, I will not miss these pathetically insecure LA men one bit. It’s a chair. I wanted to sit in it. If I spent my whole life waiting for some man to realize I needed something then offer it to me, I’d have died of starvation long ago.
Saturday night started with a trip to the roller rink with a bunch of friends, and I couldn’t resist channeling Xanadu. Photos forthcoming. I hadn’t skated on quads since 8th grade, so it was interesting. Too slippery, though, so I was pretty careful. Until a couple hours into it, when I somehow managed to body-slam myself to the ground right in front of the cute referee. He helped me up and I had him hold my hand and lead me to the exit. It only took one spill to dash my hopes of becoming a derby doll. That shit hurts! No way I could be as tough as those girls. I’ll stick to motorcycle racing, it’s much safer. The rink was lame, though. We all know that tube tops or short-shorts and rollerskating go together like air and sunshine, right? Well, not at this dive. Two very attractive young ladies were ejected for wearing tube tops! That’s just wrong. After the skating crash, I dropped Ulrich off and continued south to the Brewery for XTC’s going-away party. It was a lovely party, but I was beat from my crash and just lounged on the sofa reading an old Playboy. They had stacks of early 80′s Playboys, which were especially entertaining regarding technology. In 1983 there was some home computer system called “Adam” that had a whopping 80K memory which could hold a massive 250 pages (double spaced!) of text! And it could play video games. wow.
I love technology. Smalls and I had been arguing about it the night before at Annicks’. He’s got some crazy notion that technology is holding the entire human race from living up to its fullest potential. Some nonsense about we have 44 personality chromosomes (what the hell is a personality chromosome anyway)? and are supposed to have 46 (!there’s Rossi’s number again…always popping up, even the gate my plane landed in after my last trip..!) by now based on someone’s BS idea of where we should be and when. He said that by using technology to “think for us” we are holding ourselves back. So if that’s the case, then the 2/3rds of the world’s population who don’t even have flush toilets, much less computers, should be freakin’ avatars by now. But no, they’re too busy trying to figure out how to not starve to death, one day at a time. Jeesh. One thing I will say is that consumerism holds us back, and at one point it seemed Smalls was mixing this up with his argument. People who do not spend their lives in search of fulfillment, but rather recognize the joy and wholeness in their lives are the ones who have truly advanced.
OK, back to the parties. Even though I was dead-tired, I couldn’t resist another fashion party, especially as I was all dressed up. So I showed up and gave Peter the CD of pix I’d taken the night before, found Annick, met some of her friends, met some cool guys, drank some delicious mint water (Metro, as in metrosexual), watched a good band (Dangerous Muse), and talked to a fashion photog who has an MBA from Harvard! It was cool, because he said UNC was right up there with Harvard, and that B-school’s super easy after the first semester. We’ll see about that. It better not be too easy, I won’t have so many fun distractions, except perhaps the extremely young basketball players in the UNC stadium conveniently located right next door to the business school! ;-P
