1,000 Words: Steven Meiers

Toastycakes (aka Steven Meiers) is a photographer-cum-cultural anthropologist who moved to Los Angeles in the early 2000s and became immersed in the bloghouse/alternative Hollywood party scene. Since then, he’s taken an untold number of photos—from fashion to parties to music-related work—and captured how youth and club culture have morphed since the halcyon days of social media. If you want to know how it was done in L.A. in the ‘00s, ask Toastycakes.

 

Name: Steven Meiers
Hometown: Albuquerque, NM
Occupation: I like getting to know people.

On assignment at events in 2016, including:
I’m a relic; iPhones and Snapchat made me obsolete. Going out in 2016 means taking pictures of people taking pictures of themselves. Every concert is a sea of tiny glowing screens swaying like iridescent jellyfish. Instead of moshing and sweating and rocking out, crowds of people stand quietly, arms extended like zombies, experiencing the world through their 4.7-inch screen, making sure they get the snap. It’s crazy—you see these people at a concert or festival, facing the back wall so they can record themselves with a little piece of the stage in the corner of the frame, picture-in-picture style, because just being there doesn’t count if you’re not in the shot.

I sound like the grumpy old bastards in the Muppets balcony, complaining about “kids these days,” but it’s a strange time. I liked it when sloppy-drunk socialites would try to slap the camera out of my hand, and dudes would tell me to “fuck off” if I tried to take their picture. Now they’re all bloggers and YouTube influencers and won’t stop talking about their reach or activation or… you get the picture.

Taking pictures at parties has never been a job for me, so there was never an assignment. It’s funny: My friends would always ask, “Are you working tonight?” or say, “Just come hang out tonight; don’t bring a camera.” But the camera was the reason I went out, documenting the scene—that was fun for me. It’s like Bill Cunningham said: “If you don’t take money, they can’t tell you want to do, kid.”

Reminiscing on:
Parties in L.A.

Looking forward to:
Oblivion. Everyone’s so self-aware right now, no one wants to let go and have fun; they’re all thinking about their personal brand™. It makes going out a real drag. Wish we could all just be a little more clueless.

At 16, I was:
A tough kid in New Mexico. The week after my 16th birthday, all of my friends were getting high in a cave in the Sandia Mountains and got busted by a park ranger. They got arrested; most of them were kicked out of school… 100 out of 100 times, I would have been there with them, but that one day I wasn’t. I haven’t smoked weed since that day. I was pretty fucking dumb, but even I couldn’t ignore that it was a sign, and I realized I needed to get the fuck out of New Mexico.

Which led me to:
There’s a really bizarre story about how I ended up in Los Angeles, but you wouldn’t believe it anyway, so the punch line is: I got off a plane with a half-nothing backpack of clothes and took a shuttle to my dorm at USC. I had never been to California in my entire life, but I moved here three days before my first class.

And then:
I never looked back. L.A. is a lot of things to a lot of people, but that’s what I loved about it. It’s whatever you want it to be. USC was my boarding pass—it got me to the right place at the right time. There were all these freaks and dorks and weirdos who didn’t fit into the trendy/rich/pretty lifestyle—the Entourage, Paris Hilton, Les Deux vibe. A scene grew out of rejecting that, and it brought a new kind of music and fashion and a new lifestyle to L.A. Cinespace, Banana Split, Get Bent, BANG!, Beauty Bar, Pash—all these parties exploded out of a DIY/indie mentality.

But it was kind of the wild west; people got weird. Social media didn’t exist like it does now, so there was no self-awareness, nobody was “curating” (ugh) their own personal reality show like kids do now, and the scene was so bizarre and vulgar and defiant that it would be years before the corporate world could ruin it with sponsored, branded, interactive pop-up whatever. It was punk rock.

Those early French electro parties with Sebastian/Mehdi/Justice/et al. felt like a Swingin’ Utters show. You would spill out onto Hollywood Blvd at the end of the night, sticky with sweat and High Life, your shirt ripped to shreds, lipstick smeared all over your face from a girl you’d never see again—and it was great.

First experience with electronic music:
There are a lot of answers for this one. Absolute first experience: My mom was a really badass woman, and before I could stand up on my own, I remember cruising around in her 1981 Camaro Z28 with the T-tops off, blasting a cassette of “Automatic” by the Pointer Sisters. Not the typical music geek Klaus Schulz/Jean-Michel Jarre/Tangerine Dream answer, but it really set a tone—that for me, the music was always going to be about the experience, not a meditation or an intellectual reflection that exists in a vacuum, but a soundtrack, a character in my story. And that I would forever be at the mercy of strong women.

From that point, there was a lot of garbage synth ‘80s freestyle that imprinted on me. Not traditional EDM, but I think a lot of the pop electronic music crossover that’s popular now has roots in that era. I feel like I should pretend like I’ve got better taste in music, but it was fun! It was super saccharine, and I was a little kid, and it made me smile and want to dance like a goofball. We’re talking Lisa Lisa & the Cult Jam, Exposé, Nu Shooz, Stacey Q, George Lamond, L’Trimm, MC Luscious, Pretty Poison…

I’ve always been an insomniac vampire and would lie in bed with a tiny radio on my pillow. My favorite radio station would get weird in the middle of the night and sometimes would even broadcast from the gay rave scene in Santa Fe. I didn’t know what it was at the time, but I was listening to, like, Bad Boy Bill or DJ Dan, or whoever would come through the desert on the way to L.A. Movies also made me fall in love with electronic music in the cheesiest way, like the talent show in Revenge of the Nerds, or Sigue Sigue Sputnik in Ferris Bueller, “Do You Dream About Me” by Alisha in Mannequin—silly little things like that.

For several years, I exclusively listened to rap/hip-hop, which is not electronic music, but Beastie Boys, Egyptian Lover, EPMD—they were all really heavy into 808s/909s/303s… then NIN and a lot of computer-based music. But I guess the most “electronic music” answer is: In 1997, I went on a school trip to Washington, D.C. for the Close-Up program, which was more or less my first exposure to other people from around the US (I was raised very poor and had never really been out of Albuquerque). I was in a room with a really hip kid from San Francisco, and he told me to check out a CD he’d just found; it was Homework by Daft Punk. That afternoon, I walked around Chevy Chase, Maryland, until I found the CD single for “Around the World”—and I never looked back.

Favorite shot:
I’ve shot over a million photos since I came to L.A. Most are garbage, but together, maybe they all kind of add up. A lot of friends that aren’t around anymore. All the best moments in my life, I put the camera down. I want the memory more than the picture.

My job surprises me when:
Nothing surprises me. I know how incredibly douchey it sounds, but more than anything, I try to be a cultural anthropologist—documenting this world that I stumbled into. But there’s no morality in my photos; you either get them, or you don’t. Choose your own adventure. I’m just along for the ride.

Weirdest (or funniest) thing I ever saw at a party:
Maaaaannn, let me tell you…

 

Crystal Castles at Hiro Ballroom in NYC.

 

 

Everyone thought I was crazy, jumping in pools with a $5,000 camera—that’s definitely not waterproof. That was kind of my thing. Go where no one else goes, to get the shot that no one else gets.

 

 

Nobody rocked a party like Mehdi. One of those rare nights that I’ll never forget. Afterward, we all went to Chris Holmes’ house and played life-size Wii Tennis on a giant projector.

 

 

My friend Peaches at Jeremy Scott’s NYFW presentation. It was always so interesting being on the other side of the paparazzi, seeing the world from a different angle.

 

 

Calm before the storm. The best part about Coachella is seeing your friends—the ones who live 7,000 miles away but come to the desert once a year, the ones who live a few blocks away and you see every day…

 

 

There are like 150 people who, even today, will explain to you that Paul & André was the last best party in Los Angeles. And it would be pretty hard to argue with them.

 

 

A few weeks after The Fame was released in 2008, Lady Gaga came to Cinespace to promote it. She’s surfing in a crowd of like 100 people. Nobody had really heard of her at the time, but that was the magic of Dim Mak Tuesdays. So many artists got their start in that tiny little room.

 

 

Night Swim at Tropicana was a little fancy. This random night in 2009, Thom Yorke dropped in to do a surprise set. At the time, Twitter was still kind of alt, but I remember my friends tweeting the APB to get down there. Everyone thought it was wild that Thom was spinning Major Lazer. Like most nights, we ended up soaking wet in some stranger’s hotel suite.

 

 

A-Trak + Chromeo family photo at Jeremy Scott’s legendary Coachella party at Frank Sinatra’s house.

 

 

My best friends Ivey and Victoria had this Polaroid wall…

 

 

No one was allowed to take photos in Teddy’s (except a few of us)—not even Blackberry or flip-phone pics. But that meant everyone could be themselves, without worrying about what was going to be on a blog or Snapchat or whatever in the morning. Talk about a different era. This is my friend literally hanging from the rafters in the middle of a party.

 

 

Brent Bolthouse changed the game in so many ways… The last artifact of that is Neon Carnival. A lot of people consider it the best party of the year, full stop.

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