I was chatting with a friend of mine in Chicago today and explaining to him that L.A. is completely dead throughout the holidays. The Faint played last week, the Acoustic Christmas (did tickets actually exist for that?) was last weekend and now there will be nothing until New Year's Eve and then there will be another lull until MLK weekend, when the scene will pick up again. In the meantime, there are a handful of local bands playing to solely local crowds, a Christmas fundraiser here and there, and that is it. I'm not sure if it's like that in any other city.
L.A. is a weird place. When we say that no one is really from L.A., it's the God's honest truth for almost everyone except for yours truly. I think I can count on my fingers the number of friends I have that are actually from L.A. Out of those, fewer of us grew up inside the city limits and, even then, most of that contingent (myself included) consists of Vals, who a lot of people don't consider to be really L.A.
When I was a little kid, the whole native thing was weird because my friends would all be out of town visiting grandparents in cities that sounded like foreign countries, like Peoria, and I was stuck here with no one to hang out at the mall with me. My dad's family moved out to L.A. shortly after getting off the boat at Ellis Island in 1910. My mom's family made a pit stop in Ohio before coming to L.A. in 1962. That said, outside of a handful of relatives in Fresno, CA and Cleveland, OH, my whole family is in Greater Los Angeles. I have no choice but to stay in L.A. for Christmas.
All this is meant to say that I'm going to be bored shitless this month. At least I will be bored with a local boyfriend and a handful of friends who also know that now is the time to enjoy a plethora of after dark street parking.