The Nightlife Review: Los Angeles

Jocelyn Silver on two very different kinds of dance.

As of April, I hadn’t gone out in a while, at least in Los Angeles (on a recent trip to Berlin I did spend a Sunday afternoon “going to church,” LOL, at Berghain, before a screening of Dune 2 where I drank a lukewarm Coca Light due to Europeans’ irrational hatred of ice). I wanted to go dancing, and a helpful publicist happened to invite me to a gay party in a disco ball-laden hotel basement club on the Sunset Strip, an event loosely affiliated with Charli XCX. The line went all the way down the block, a stream of skinny boys in small tank tops and Gen Z girls in their ratty Y2K finest, denim skirts shredded into belts. My dates and I got to skip it, because sometimes the lord is merciful. Inside, we paid unconscionable prices for tequila sodas while the twinks bobbed up and down to remixes of Nelly Furtado and Timbaland and the dulcet tones of Kim Petras’s “Slut Pop.” It was very loud, and I strained to hear a friend’s story about when she worked down the street at the Chateau Marmont, catering to a redheaded former child star who checked in under the name Lily Flowers and famously did not pay her enormous bill. 

For a different kind of dance, I went to a birthday party at the Grand Star Jazz Club, a bar in Chinatown with a light-up dance floor and paper lanterns hanging from the ceiling. The DJ was Gen X, and he played The Smiths, New Order, and Crystal Castles to the delight of a crowd consisting of the middle-aged, Goth teens, and the more expensively attired people who seemed to have gotten lost on their way back from the natural wine bar across the street. It was perfect. Perfect until my leather trench coat—a design from Michael Kors’s tenure at Celine, a true piece of fashion history—was stolen off a bench. I have yet to recover from this loss, but eventually I’ll return to the bar. The DJ played “I Wanna be Adored,” and it felt so good to dance to it, because who doesn’t?

All photos by Jocelyn Silver.