It is Sunday, July 5. With a mild and coolish spring the city has started to turn sweaty late this year. But today you can get a first glimpse of what is to come soon: the blazing Southern California summer. The sun is trying its best to shine brightly through the milky haze, a concoction of leftover morning fog and smog. At noon the streets are unusually empty. Everybody had their big day yesterday and is now recovering from mad-man traffic congestion, over-crowded beaches, greasy burgers and mayonnaise laden pasta salads, one too many beers and a stiff firework-watching neck - Fools!
Not me;
I played it smart and safe this time.
I drive out west on Friday to stay over at Michael’s, we eat breakfast in - not out - on Saturday morning, catch up on the latest “Flight of the Concord”, have gelato and coffee at Ugo’s in quiet Culver City - both are of the very decent kind - before we head out to the beach at around 5pm. Leaving just before the night time fireworks start, I drive into the downtown ones on the way home, make it back to Sierra Madre by 10:30 and, snoozing away an hour later, I wake up rested for our Sunday downtown LA rooftop pool extravaganza.
We are atop the Standard hotel in downtown LA.
Drinks are averagely expensive but the food is decent and relatively decently priced: forget about the mini burgers, just go for the tasty grilled cheese sandwich + fries. The Standard as a hotel is an odd ball; semi- trendy and trashy at the same time.
One finds nicely designed metal plates next to plywood panels in the elevators, the superb chill-out waterbeds next to the pool are covered by tacky red plastic cocoons and in-between very comfy nicely colored couches one will spot the odd yellow plastic chair and a lot of fake grass.
Michael hits it when he says: “It looks like they had the right ideas and swanky intensions but did not quite follow through to the very end.” I reply: “Maybe it should be called the Half –Ass Hotel?”.
Droog are three LA based DJs who have been around a few years now, usually playing in the Honey lounge right next to and belonging to Avalon, a stereotypic Hollywood club. They recently started their own record label “Culprit”. Their monthly Sunday, 1 - 9 pm, rooftop parties have been gaining popularity and are very well attended.
The name of their game is techno, house and anything in-between. It is a unique blend of campy vocal, deep and funky house that tends to lean toward the minimal side of things at times. I have not found the perfect Britta-music-descriptor yet. Maybe it should go something like this: cheese-ball-grooving?
Very dancable it is for sure.
What I hear today is not my favorite music by far but it is indeed the perfect lazing-on-a-Sunday-afternoon-by-the-pool kind of deal. And, clearly, that is what we and about 15o other people are about to do.
Apart from the music, there is another very substantial fun factor: your fellow dancers.
This one is a little trickier to navigate especially if you are a person that is easily offended by total asses disguised as your fellow humans. Prime example is the pool party douche bag that we encountered first thing in the lobby after paying our $10 (with RSPV and before 3pm) dues. Now, douche bag clearly tore op the town last night, continued drinking throughout the morning and is now stumbling down the escalator to give his co-s a glassy look of confusion at their delay caused by the security guard. To my dismay, they are all let through to continue drinking themselves stupid. The smarmy ticket guy at the entrance gave us a full head to toe muster to see if we were worthy of passage. You’d think we were trying to enroll in the army. I guess we had passed preliminaries when he was using all his self-imagined grandios-ity to wave us into the lobby. We were just short of dropping to our knees to show our gratefulness. Thank you, oh mighty ticket master overlord …
This was not looking good: all out of all humans encountered so far were of the worst kind. If the law of averages were to hold today, this party was going to be full of tools and pompous idiots.
But once we land on the roof, the Dooms Day sky brightens: this is a nicely mixed crowd: a bunch of Normals, some Hollywood hipsters, some hipsterer Hollywoodsters, one hippie (+ me which makes two of us), a couple of Pam Andersons and a relatively small contingency of above mentioned d-bags.
You may wonder what exactly category 2 and 3 are, especially if you are an out-of-towner.
The Hollywood LA-er is a trendy one. Unlike its scruffy clothed and unshaven Silverlake equivalent, this Northwestern counterpart comes clean, creamed and gel-ed. The wardrobe leans toward color coordination rather than colorfulness. In most male cases, the main attraction is a grand hair: there are LUSes (Locks of Unusual Size) and slick, thick comb-overs;
All length of hair on one head and the occasional white man fro . One notable thing: usually the Hollywood men are the eye candy while the run-of-mill girls fade bleakly next to their fabulous boyfriends.
We settle on one of the comfy sofas close to the dj setup and away from the tool ridden pool. The dance floor is small but nice, the sound system leaves a lot to be desired but at least these guys know not to crank it up into the red like so many others of their kind. We enjoy a couple of cocktails, chat and I even get a dance leg swinging for a minute or two. We leave shortly after sunset. All in all a very enjoyable Sunday.
