You know when you get a party later than everyone else, and you immediately know that you will never catch up to the state of inebriation that everyone else has already achieved a few hours in? I arrived at the Standard Hotel in Downtown L.A. on Sunday for the M_NUS vs. Culprit rooftop pool party, where a few friends were having a staycation, and I immediately understood that I had been left behind.

The Standard and I didn't get off to a good start. There was the girl in the elevator who couldn't move in the correct direction to let me out. That was clue number one.

Then there was the girl at the front door who didn't bother to look at the list when I asked for it, telling me it was closed, yet magically reopened when told it was a press list. Lucky for me, sucky for everyone else -- people actually resorted to buying a room to get up to this party.

Then there was the elevator ride up (definitely overcapacity) which should be offered as a horror experience in next year's carnival. All manner of leftovers from the mother countries of Europe were in our elevator, including several with big colorful sunglasses to better hide their dilated pupils, one man with suspenders holding up yet another unmentionable fashion choice, and a guy with enough gelled-up spiky bleached blond hair to make a New Jersey guido proud.

Someone mentioned Ibiza. "Oooh, Ibiza," the whole crowd murmured. "Ibiza, you went?" "Yeah," said a girl who seemed to missing half of her hair to an unfortunate asymmetrical cut. "I was there for, like, a month and a half." Another guy piped up, "You went to Ibiza and didn't call me? Fuck you!"

I thought, please, gods of the universe, do not let me get stuck in this elevator with these people. The roof would be bad enough.

The doors opened and I thought I was saved until greeted by a surly bouncer whose method of checking wristbands was to grab your wrist and tug hard. Unnecessary aggression much?

The scene was very familiar, yet not one I had experienced firsthand for several years, and only then sometime between six or seven in the morning during the fourth day of the Winter Music Conference in Miami. Let's just say there was a lot of jaw-clenching and excitable hugging.

Girls, many of them pretty and wanting to make friends, started to talk to me for no reason other than they were feeling nice and friendly. It is too bad I am not more lascivious.

Guys, wasted in that special way, were not trying to pick up ladies, but rather holding on to the poles of the umbrellas dotting the landscape. One used it as a stripper pole.

There was debris everywhere. There were still four hours to go.

Troy Pierce was on the decks spinning to a crowd of saucer-eyed worshippers who'd formed a huddled mass around the turntables. The days of people dancing with each other at dance music events have been chucked in favor of DJ worship, but then, that happened a long time ago.

I had met Pierce many times before and had interviewed him for an article in the Village Voice, but he seemed baffled to see me here in Los Angeles of all places. "How, what, why?" he inquired after his set, while his compatriot, the great Magda, spun fierce tunes through the night. (I have to admit, that nothing gets me harder than watching a female DJ tear it up on the decks, mixing and cutting, slashing across records. And I don't even have a penis.)

How was the music? Tough, punchy, melodic, blippy, and seriously surprisingly funky in parts. It's the best that minimal techno has to offer and it felt good to hear it again, instead of the same-ol' same old. I would have preferred to hear it with a different group of people under a different set of circumstances -- but we can't always have what we want. Or maybe next time, I should just take a pill and chill.

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