10,9,8,7...Zzzzzz. It’s New Year’s in L.A.
By the time the clocks of Southern California finally reach midnight on New Year’s Eve 2001, the following things will already have happened: Two giant corrugated-iron dragons, pulled behind barges in the Sydney, Australia, harbor, will be destroyed by fireworks. More than 100,000 humans will pile into the streets of Edinburgh and Glasgow, Scotland, for festivals called Hogmany. A half-million people in New York City will gather in or near Times Square to count backward from 10. A band called the Renegades will show the town of Batesville “the biggest New Year’s bash in all of southeastern Indiana.” Footage of a half-million people counting backward from 10 in New York City will be rerun in Arkansas, Missouri and Colorado.
The sun will have risen on Afghanistan.
By the time New Year’s Day reaches Los Angeles, the last night of the year is already over--officially, obviously painfully over. It’s not only yesterday’s news, but it’s yesterday. It’s on record, broadcast to the world hours ago, used.
Yes, sure, 10,000 or so people are expected to hit downtown and Hollywood dance parties; bars will be crammed with grinning maniacs in funny hats; and your neighbors will be tooting little plastic horns. All of this merriment will be, however noble, in vain: No matter how hard you try, how late you stay out, how passionate your midnight kiss, there is still, always, this year and every year, something missing from a New Year’s Eve in Los Angeles. Indeed, so many factors conspire against the night as it’s celebrated here that some wonder why we even bother: It’s a bust. It’s been done. Forget it.
To understand why, ignore for a moment the troubles inherent to Southern California--the traffic, the lack of central gathering places, the, uh, traffic--and accept that New Year’s Eve anywhere is a tough night. The stroke of midnight, Dec. 31, brings with it such a forced sense of importance that it’s nearly impossible to get right. During the last moments of each year, we are expected to: (a) understand, digest and accept the events of the last 360 or so days with a rushed sense of nostalgia, binding a chapter of our lives between artificial numerical bookends, (b) outline a solid plan for the future and develop a can-do attitude about it, (c) feel warmly connected, in some way, to the entirety of the human race, each member of which is, at this moment, experiencing the same thing, and then, worst of all, (d) kiss somebody. The night, with or without the roadblocks set up by life in Southern California, is loaded.
“It’s such a high-pressure evening. There’s this idea that if you have a bad New Year’s Eve, the rest of your year is shot,” says Todd Lyons. She’s researched the heck out of the traditions, celebrations, hang-ups and nonsense surrounding the so-called holiday for a book called “The New Year’s Eve Compendium” (Clarkson Potter, 1998). “There’s this shiny, elusive bauble out there that you’re chasing, thinking that everybody’s doing something special.”
So we chase and chase. We try to create atmospheres worthy of the expectations, search for crowds, stay out late holding martini glasses or plastic cups filled with cheap fluids, even if that’s entirely against our nature. And this willingness to give in to the pressure, too, is part of the problem, insists Kevin Wilkerson, a man who lives in Manhattan Beach and fashions himself a real fun-master, asking that I refer to him as “roving party animal, the Bartender.” He runs a Web site for bar-crawling tourists called PubClub.com and has a certain disdain for you and me and our lampshade-wearing friends on New Year’s Eve.
“I always call it amateur night. It’s the one night when people who don’t go out decide to go out,” he says. “For professional partyers, it’s not really that big of a deal. We’ll be like, OK, let them have their night.”
Oh, and believe me, we try.
The most impressive New Year’s Eve celebration in Los Angeles history took place in October 1995, at the end of a movie called “Strange Days.” This wildly inaccurate film, written by James Cameron, imagined the 48 hours leading up to the millennium in Southern California as tense and thrilling, crackling with an electric sense of significance. As cyberpunk-y underworlders dealt in death and justice, the LAPD tried to keep peace amid racial tensions, public hysteria and some very focused reveling. The celebration, held in front of the Bonaventure Hotel, ran through the streets as giant TV screens depicted even more raging parties (actually filmed at New Year’s Eves in other cities), and the whole night was futuristic, fun and just simply cool. Everything that New Year’s Eve here is not, and was not, during its defining moment in 1999.
What actually happened that night, however painful, is worth recounting: After every major city in the world displayed, on television, festive united hordes, screaming before their Eiffel Towers and their pyramids, Los Angeles broadcast a paltry handful of optimistic dupes standing in the rain, waiting for the mayor to light up the Hollywood sign. Or something. It was like a sucker-punch ending to a lame summer blockbuster, another injustice we’ve come to expect and accept. The city also organized a series of “neighborhood” celebrations (roundly criticized as segregated, shortsighted and, worst of all, dull) and has since not organized a thing. “The millennium really scared a lot of people off,” says roving party animal Wilkerson. “People just said to heck with this, and that cost New Year’s Eve momentum.”
The millennium was such a spectacular, humiliating bust that it overshadowed the years before and since, the soul-smashing year-in, year-out letdown of a Los Angeles New Year’s. They’re all just as bad. There usually isn’t even an attempt at civic celebration, and private parties, no matter how large or late, always lack something. Searching for what’s missing, and why, I quizzed the people who have nothing better to do but come to my New Year’s party every year. Their answers were obvious, complaints about the drizzle that dampens life in L.A. every day: There’s no tangible sense of community, no connection to the millions of others who inhabit the same grid of asphalt and sand. We’re afraid of traffic. We all live an hour’s drive from each other. And New Year’s Eve (and everything) happens in New Jersey and Illinois and even Texas long before it happens here.
There are, however, more scientifically sound reasons for this chronically limp night. In fact, the last seven days in December just happen to be--officially, I checked--the deadest, dullest, least-fun week of the entire year. The noisy royalty who, almost every week, throw loud televised bashes to celebrate mediocre $100-million expenditures, go missing. The celebrities go home, Hollywood shuts down, executives and D-girls head to Aspen or Hawaii or New York. The perpetual party motor of Los Angeles, for this one key week, sputters and stops. “I’d say that 99% of my clients are out of town,” says Mary Micucci, owner and founder of Along Came Mary, which caters and organizes Hollywood premiere parties--recently, for “Ali” and “Vanilla Sky”--some of the swankiest weeknight affairs on the planet. “With the people who are still in town, there’s this sort of nesting, doing private parties on a much smaller level, using their chefs or their in-house cooks, or doing it themselves. It doesn’t seem like there are a lot of things happening on New Year’s and this town turns very sleepy.”
Where one kind of party fails, however, another may be starting to take up the slack. The New Year’s scene may even be picking up, some say, but only for those who dig on $75 or $80 rave-like gatherings and Eurodance music. The biggest gatherings in Los Angeles County may be competing electronica shows, Giant Village in the Coliseum Gardens and Spundae @ Circus on seven blocks of Hollywood Boulevard, which can expect 10,000 or so. But the dance scene in the U.S., and especially California, is “in its infancy” compared to, say, London and Berlin, explains Henry Self, a disc jockey and promoter who’ll be spinning on New Year’s at a 500-head party in Hollywood called Broken.
“Maybe there’s some significance right there, that the biggest events are the kind of events we think of as non-mainstream,” Self says of the shows featuring A-list deejays such as Sasha and Paul Oakenfold. “But if you don’t like this music, if you don’t want to stay out until 4 or 5 in the morning, what does that leave you with? Going down to Applebee’s at the strip mall and putting on a stupid hat at midnight.”
So many who want to celebrate are left with either, yes, a stupid hat or the road out of town, promises of a party elsewhere. Oakenfold is actually heading to Las Vegas after his Hollywood Boulevard gig for a 3 a.m. set at the House of Blues, and half of the people I invite to my party every year don’t RSVP until they’ve exhausted every possible escape route to San Francisco or Nevada. “I may be out of town,” they say, postponing their commitment to another L.A. New Year’s. I’ve had friends ditch my party to simply drive into the desert, calling me at midnight, screaming and hollering, nowhere near Vegas but on their way, approaching an event.
Indeed, on Dec. 31, about 123,000 people from Southern California--roughly the combined population of Encino, Sherman Oaks and Studio City--will make the pilgrimage to massive street parties in downtown Las Vegas and on the Strip, where, quite obviously, something is happening.
“On the day before New Year’s, their mood is just that they need to get there as fast as possible,” says Victor Padros, owner of East Barstow Shell, a gas station and mini-mart halfway between L.A. and Las Vegas. He describes the scene on I-15 as a flood of refugees and says that if he didn’t have to work that night, of course, he’d drive east as well. I ask if he’d consider maybe heading to Los Angeles for New Year’s Eve, instead, coming to the second-largest urban expanse in the United States, the capital of the 21st century, the greatest city in the world.
“No,” he says, after a moment of thought. “Why would I do that?” No amount of self-flagellation truly addresses the evening’s problems, however, nor gets to the core of what’s really wrong. It’s important to realize that New Year’s Eve is fundamentally a New York holiday, an East Coast event, and we cannot claim it for our own without some serious sweat. The American mythology of the night revolves entirely around Manhattan, and it’s steeped in snow and romance and an old man and his ball.
Having watched the fabled ball drop in Times Square only on television, I find a Manhattan transplant and grill him about his land’s many secrets. Jay Schinderman, who moved here from New York four years ago and now works in the very-L.A. job of film development for Cosmic Entertainment, says that, yes, New Year’s is lousy in Southern California, and there’s a simple reason why. To understand, first consider the mechanics of the evening: New Year’s is simply the ticking of an odometer, the turnover of the arbitrary numeric system devised centuries ago to keep track of how often a ball of mud orbits a ball of gas. There’s no fire in the sky, no shaking of the earth. So the event itself must be manufactured, conjured into existence: Human beings engaged in a festival, a ritual of some kind.
This, says Schinderman, is what happens in Manhattan. All around you, no matter where you are, something’s happening. “I’ve spent New Year’s Eve in New York, never in Times Square, but in all kinds of places,” he says. “I spent it on a train, and everyone on the train was going crazy, and then you’d get up on the street everybody was going crazy, and then you’d get to your party and everybody’s going crazy there.”
The overall sense in New York City that there’s something happening is so powerful, so complete, that it’s put on tape and broadcast around the world. (The scene in Las Vegas may be catching up, but only once, in 1996, when Sinbad hosted a Fox special during which the Hacienda Hotel was demolished at midnight, did the spectacle truly compete.) But by the time you and I pop the cork here on the edge of the Pacific, it’s just us and a rerun. The New Year’s Eve that has been drilled into our popular consciousness is long over--and we know it. In this problem, however, may lie our salvation. The concocted traditional trappings of an East Coast New Year’s may keep us in shadow, but we don’t have to stay there, right?
“What you guys need are more traditions,” scolds Eve guru Lyons, from her home in Connecticut. “Unless you really have something that you do and love doing every year, you’re out there twisting in the wind.” Tradition and expectations are stacked against us, she says, so we must create our own. Come up with something and stick to it. Close the streets and flood them with people and cameras and optimism. Drop something. Or launch it into space. Make such a big deal that everybody else has to watch us on television.
Oh, but wait, what time is it? That’s already been done.
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Glenn Gaslin is a Los Angeles-based freelance writer.