My La-La experience

On Tuesday and Wednesday, your trusty blogger was in LA to give a talk at USC’s Center for International Studies. It was quite the experience. Have any readers experienced a moment during which they realized they were in a place that was way too hip/cool/edgy for them? That’s how I felt when I checked into ...

By Daniel W. Drezner, a professor of international politics at the Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy at Tufts University and co-host of the Space the Nation podcast.

April 1, 2004, 4:01 PM

On Tuesday and Wednesday, your trusty blogger was in LA to give a talk at USC's Center for International Studies. It was quite the experience. Have any readers experienced a moment during which they realized they were in a place that was way too hip/cool/edgy for them? That's how I felt when I checked into the Standard Hotel in the downtown. The place looked really fab -- clearly they had checked out Virginia Postrel's The Substance of Style. As the Guardian put it last year:

On Tuesday and Wednesday, your trusty blogger was in LA to give a talk at USC’s Center for International Studies. It was quite the experience. Have any readers experienced a moment during which they realized they were in a place that was way too hip/cool/edgy for them? That’s how I felt when I checked into the Standard Hotel in the downtown. The place looked really fab — clearly they had checked out Virginia Postrel’s The Substance of Style. As the Guardian put it last year:

Bright red vibrating circular water beds in Star Trek-esque space pods, orange banquettes, white 1950s plastic furniture, red Astroturf and a rooftop swimming pool (complete with nightly skinny-dippers) – this isn’t the kind of thing you expect to come across in the downtown business district of Los Angeles.

Alas, I witnessed no nighttime skinnydipping — I had evening plans (I found out later that there was a private runway show and they booted the hotel’s regular patrons from the rooftop bar anyway). Plus, I had dinner plans anyway. I can confirm the Star Trek-style waterbeds that would have made William Shatner proud. However, the highlight of the trip was eating a fabulous lunch on the rooftop, and then noticing that the guy sitting at the next table bore more than a passing resemblance to Nicholas Brendon, who played Xander on Buffy the Vampire Slayer!! Regular readers know that I’m a big Buffy fan, and I always identified with Xander — the smart aleck who never had any superpowers. [That, plus his character got to make out with Charisma Carpenter, Alyson Hannigan, and Emma Caulfield‘s characters on camera!–ed. Er, yeah, that too.] I’ve been told repeatedly that the residents of LA never ask for authographs — it’s considered gauche. Well, I’m not from LA, baby!! So I asked Mr. Brendon, and he gladly obliged with an autograph on the only blank piece of paper I had — the back cover to Steven Pinker’s The Blank Slate. Not entirely coincidentally, star blogger Megan McArdle is reading the very same book. So I now own the ultimate academic geek artifact — a copy of The Blank Slate autographed by a Buffy the Vampire Slayer cast member. Oh, and the talk went well, too. [Why are you posting about all this?–ed. I’m trying to provide this guy some genuine blogosphere gossip.]

Daniel W. Drezner is a professor of international politics at the Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy at Tufts University and co-host of the Space the Nation podcast. Twitter: @dandrezner