Had C, M and B over at my place. We watched a little bit of the original Texas Chainsaw Massacre and then went to The Friend in Silver Lake, a newish bar owned by Andre Saraiva. Wade Crescent, and Dom Prietto, who I went to see there, are some of the same people that used to be a part of an earlier club called Paul & Andre's, and later Smoke & Mirrors, which was what I would consider the closest thing LA has ever had to Studio 54, at least in my time here. This was about seven years ago, and it was a lot of fun. Especially the Smoke & Mirrors days at the Hollywood Standard Hotel. It was a completely dark and undecorated loungey room, with a couple of private areas, that was untouched by any kind of restrictions which LA is so bound to. So that drew many of the nightlife devotees to just unleash their debaucheries until the wee hours, way past the standard 2am party cutoff time. The music was good, I guess I could call it fashion music, or fashion disco, or maybe fashion boogie - it was just what should be played everywhere you want people to have fun. It was the Lindsay Lohans and Mickey Rourkes type of celebrities that came there and got their kind of models-and-cocaine party style they had always longed for. But these sceney golden days are all very far behind. I guess The Friend is now in the process of bringing it back - or so it claims. When we got there I noticed the music was the same as it used to be back then, which was a good first step, but nothing else made it seem like there's any potential for the same kind of experience of Smoke & Mirror to get revived. I mean, first you have to have some kind of a weird way to enter to make it a cool place - like a kitchen in most cases, and at The Friend, the entrance is just there on the street, and the inside is pretty visible from the outside. Then you need a much tighter door, and they just let almost anyone in. And lastly, there are no private areas. There are many other factors to why things that happened in 2009 don't happen in 2017. We then proceeded to Tenants of the Trees, where I took more pictures of some of the people we bumped into that night like Russian model Alina Timo.
