Say Goodbye to Hollywood

As much fun as it’s been writing this blog unfortunately life has intervened and I’m going to have to step away from it. I’ve become too busy with other pursuits and will have to stop writing and scale back the promoting to mainly special events. I’m actually quite happy about it but it’s bittersweet. Thanks for all the emails and messages, I definitely appreciate it.

I started this blog because I wanted to pull back the curtain of Hollywood nightlife and show you that the emperor has no clothes. I wanted to show you that if you think Hollywood nightlife is superficial, racist, and corrupt on that side of the velvet rope, on our side it’s 10 times worse.

I’ve been going out in this town for damn near a decade. I saw Jay-Z sing “bubblin’ in Dublin’s” in the actual Dublin’s…where he was apparently “bubblin’. I danced with tweaker girls at 4am at Coconut Teaser. I got thrown out of a Playboy party at the Century Club. I rolled into Concorde with some USC sorority girls.

I remember going to the opening night of Opera. It was absolute mayhem as I walked up. As I waited for my friends to park I saw a guy I had been introduced to a week earlier. He was one of the managers of one of the other then hot clubs in town. The other manager introduced me to him and told me after he walked away that the guy was a hardcore coke addict. And 40. And sleeping on friend’s couch. I saw him walk up to the door past everyone outside Opera, give the bouncer the half handshake / half bro-hug and stroll in.
























Just then I heard the one of the girls standing next to me say “Who is that guy? He must be important”

And that, my friends, is what I want you take away from this blog.

Hollywood nightlife is all smoke and mirrors. That dude isn’t really a producer. The club with the line outside is empty inside. The girl who tells you she’s only been with 3 guys – that first time that she didn’t like, her high school boyfriend, and you – was also seen blowing the bouncer last week. The “VIP” in bottle service lives with his parents. The 9 is really a 6 with 2 hours of prep time. And most importantly, the so-called “important” person is a 40 year old cokehead.

See these places for what they are….places where pretty people go to fuck each other. That’s it.

Making it into a hot club doesn’t make you someone. It doesn’t make you “cool” or “in the know” or a “tastemaker” (someone please tell me what that fuck that word is supposed to mean). If you derive your self esteem from being able to get into Club X on a Tues. night, you are a douche who has the mentality of a high school girl. And if you are over 30 and think this way, please get into a paper cut fight with Magic Johnson.

“Parties are intended to be celebrations, and celebrations should be only for those who have something to celebrate” – Dagny Taggart in Atlas Shrugged

Growing up my hero was Michael Jordan. Late in his career he wrote about the problems with the NBA, mainly that the accolades (the $80M contracts, etc) came before the achievement. “Status symbols are meant to be just that - symbols. A flashy car should represent the underlying achievement, not replace it.”

These places, especially during the week, are often filled with the utterly useless of our city. They should not be admired. They should be ridiculed.

It’s a problem that infects our broader culture. What Bill Maher once called it, “the Guitar Hero culture. Everyone wants to be a rockstar, no one wants to learn the chords.” And Hollywood is ground zero for it.

Don’t get me wrong. I love nightlife. It can be a lot of fun and it has its place. As much as I poke fun I think it’s great to go out with your friends and have a great time, have a few drinks, and meet some attractive strangers. I’d go so far as to even defend it as a good place to meet people. Let me tell you, it’s a hell of a lot easier to go to a place filled with attractive girls and find the few interesting, smart, or substantial women there than to go to a place where supposedly more substantial or intelligent women go (let’s say, a professional mixer) and try to find the 1 attractive girl (let me clue you in….there aren’t any). I even have a friend who tried going to church to try to meet a normal girl …and he was fucking atheist!

I’ve met some great people in nightlife. I’m happy to call many of them my friends. So even though I’m stepping away from the blog and promoting, you’ll still see me out sipping on my Crown and Coke, chatting up some model / actress (aka “mattress”) and making fun of her every time she says “supposably”. And I’ll still be having a good time doing it.

But remember, if you start bragging to me about getting into some club I’m going to remind you that it’s no different than that unibrowed Persian guy telling you about his BMW (that his dad bought for him).

Talk about the achievement, not the status symbol. Tell me when you actually do something.

Otherwise please get the fuck out of our bottle service. :)

Love,
Xander

Who's that?

At the gym last night and cycling through the tired selection on my iPhone. I got so desperate I actually allowed a Creed song to infect my eardrums for a few seconds before hastily removing the plug from the topside of my phone and linking up to the audio on the TV screens in front of me.

Besides discovering that it is impossible to look manly on the elliptical machine, I stumbled on a show called Basketball Wives and watched the whole thing as I burn off the afternoon’s Pinkberry. Aside from inexplicably ignoring the 800-lb gorilla in the room – that the major requirement of being a basketball wife is looking the other way as your husband “takes it to the hole” on every cocktail waitress, bottle service girl, and club skank in 30 cities – this particular piece of journalistic drivel exposed a peculiar quality of hot chicks that I encounter regularly.

They interviewed several wives and each one said the same thing when recalling meeting their huge future husband to be.

“My friends said “Oh, Jason Kidd wants to meet you and I was all like, who is that? All the other girls were totally all over him but I didn’t even know who he was.”

Riiiiight.

Every one of the wives gave the same story. She didn’t know who this guy was, she kept ignoring him, he pursued her for 15 years before she finally relented and went out with him and it was another 15 years before they actually had sex. Because if there is one thing pro athletes are known for, it’s putting in a lot of work to get laid.

I hear this same line of B.S. all the time. I’ll be chatting up some 22-year old Santa Monica College psychology major and I’ll point out some B or C level celebrity at another table.

Me: Hey there’s Turtle from Entourage

Her: Who’s that? From what now? Oh I don’t really watch much TV.

So let me get this straight. I, heterosexual male busy with a day and a night job, whose interests include sports and finance, somehow recognize a celebrity (albeit not a very big one) but you empty-headed retard whose entire existence is spent reading US Weekly and TMZ and watching the E! Channel on a continuous loop, somehow is oblivious to the famous person in the room.

Really?

“I don’t really watch much TV”

I’m sure your days are spent pouring over the latest iteration of the Senate’s health care reform bill and furiously nitpicking at the details or thumbing through your latest copy of The Economist considering the implications of microfinance in Indonesia and you’ve just pulled yourself away from this important work to come to Voyeur on a Wed. night but I somehow don’t buy that even with all on your plate you don’t notice the millionaire in the room.

“I don’t really care about celebrities…I don’t even notice them”

So a couple of weeks ago when I saw LA Laker Luke Walton at a certain hotel lounge on Hollywood and Orange and every girl in the room started hovering around him like the proverbial golddigging moths to the 6-year, $30M dollar guaranteed contract flame, it was just a mere coincidence that they were all standing around in that huddle making eyes at him. I mean your friends probably told you who he was but you don’t didn’t care because they’re just people like everyone else. People who are now making out with you.

“He totally hit on me once at party and slipped me his number but I never called…I was like ‘whatever’”

If she somehow slips up and actually admits to recognizing a celebrity, she will undoubtedly tell me about how she is unfazed by them and that it’s not big deal that they buy her a drink / call her / give her their number / bang her in the back of their Phantom. I’m sure she’s regularly passing up opportunities to instant riches by becoming Ray J’s baby momma or at least end up on a reality show. After all she has Stitch, the unemployed actor / part-time tattoo artist waiting at home for her. She’s too good for Ray J.

In the words of Seth Myers…..Really?