It wasn't quite enough for 2013 Mayoral candidate Eric Garcetti to shut down LA's premiere music festival, Sunset Junction last summer. Proving that he can crush festival and venue alike, he has now also found a way to drive Silver Lake's venerable institution El Cid out of business.
This time Garcetti used the old fire marshal trick, skirting the employment of the Mayor's killjoy of choice, Andrea Alarcon altogether. I'm also sure that neighbors across the street at Garcetti's simulated urbanist twenty-pack must have complained too.
Soon you may not be able to party anywhere but where City Council tells you to: LA Live and all its ersatz midway, electric fun-zone, metered-pour glory. Thus the LA-Live-ing styled-midwesternization of Garcetti's Silver Lake continues apace.
Might there be something self-loathing in this frustrated cabaret pianist's lust for shutting down the sexier, gender-bending shindig scenes formerly among us?
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Speaking of LA Live, a deejay recently wrote street-hassle:
I'm insulted by the idea of Jan Perry, Arnold Schwarzenegger and the Mayor creating a place for me to be entertained (with exemptions for billboards, density, and the rest). Needless to say, I still haven't been to LA Live. I just have no desire. It looks like a glorified funhouse. I'm not into sports, spray-on tans, big plates of meat. … Am I missing something?
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Several years ago, even before it went Republican, the Weekly similarly went off on Sunset Junction. What a coincidence: two music festivals right here in LA who don't need to advertise in the Weekly, and the Weekly actually throws what it tries to pass off as investigative journalism at them.
[Meanwhile, Coachella and even SXSW take out adspace all around town that they certainly don't need to take out, and those things can safely grow, unchecked. I said it my year-end piece: "...the LA Weekly, an increasingly slimy organization that sells cultural advertising the way a mafia don sells insurance..."]
Most cosmopolitan cities would only be too grateful to have the market for a gigantic, civic rave venue, especially as clubs can't afford the insurance for anyone underage who shows up. And LA has the market to support it. But also in LA, which might as well be Des Moines by now, we bump up the density to catastrophic levels, but then turn around and don't let anybody congregate anywhere in numbers. Except, say, at the otherwise generally dead LA Live.
And always, the underlying story of all these "exposes" is cash cash cash. Alleged buckets of it, alleged barrels of it. What a surprise, that cash is involved with music events! Like teenagers do a lot of ticket buying on their Am-Exs.
Even at Mardi Gras in New Orleans, if you're paying with a credit card for anything, you're not at anything that's really part of Mardi Gras. But LA finds cash a surprise when it appears in conjunction with entertainment.
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In yet another example how weirdly at war the City has become with its own vibrant music scene--one of the few scenes that makes otherwise insufferable LA life worth living--the former national fishwrap of record the NYTimes had a piece a couple of weeks ago about our after-hours club and party scene. It was a kind of arms-length piece filled with subtext suggesting that NYC is secretly covetous of us. I was instructed by people throughout LA's music scene not to draw any further attention to this piece, but now that the City is completely at war with music anyway, I really can't resist at this point. Maybe someone will wake up about the ramifications of having a late-night culture without late-night venues to accommodate it.
Again, in this piece too, money is an evil, not a good--again, there's talk of $20K cash profit at such parties, a figure that has been described to me as "entirely bogus--besides, a cop wouldn't know."
The piece also implies dangers that certainly are not present. NYT, please go back to the New York where you came from. We're having enough trouble understanding what is going on ourselves.
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