I love living in the Cleveland area - I really do. We have a great house in a safe area, my kids love their schools, we have room, great friends, the city is only about 40 minutes away. I like the woods and streams and farms (not many of those left), and I even like the weather about eight months out of the year (December-March pretty much suck), BUT there are some things I miss about LA.
I miss the ocean of course, the weather, the lively culture, and I miss all the action. When I DJd in LA in the '80s I worked at every manner of party all over the city in every kind of venue from homes to warehouses to formal dining halls and restaurants to the open desert. I miss working a balls out funk party one night and a new wave party the next, with maybe a hard rock/metal gig two nights later.
Truth be told, the nightlife of Cleveland has been dead for ten years now: stale, unexciting, nothing new, nothing to draw people together. Though LA is fragmented, it's so big there's always SOMETHING happening, and this story from the LA Times makes me nostalgic. I even know some of the people involved:
- Depending on who you talk to, you'll get different answers about where L.A.'s current underground art-party scene, as far as you can put your finger on it, originated.
The Coffee House Anthropologists, as usual, will trace it back to the 1950s and '60s, to Beat happenings and the Radical Chic parties where society matrons entertained the Hell's Angels and the whole free-jazz-with-magic-markers thing that Ornette Coleman's circle used to do.
The Desert People, however, will tell you that it all started with the legendary Moontribe parties in the Mojave (the annual Burning Man festival in Black Rock City, Nev., is now an institution), and even before that in the deserts of India. The Punks will scream that any original form of nightlife in L.A. crawled out of a dank bar from the 1980s like Third Eye or the Masque. The Beat Junkies and Hip-Hop Kids will insist the whole thing was imported directly from the turntables of Manchester or Detroit or the freestyle battles of Oakland to the decrepit warehouses of downtown L.A.
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