Los Angeles-born glamour girl, bohemian, artist, muse, sensualist, wit and pioneering foodie Eve Babitz . . . reads like Nora Ephron by way of Joan Didion, albeit with more lust and drugs and tequila . . . Reading Babitz is like being out on the warm open road at sundown, with what she called, in another book, ‘4/60 air conditioning’—that is, going 60 miles per hour with all four windows down. You can feel the wind in your hair.”—Dwight Garner, The New York Times

Claiming that going to Olvera Street requires a leisurely drive down Sunset Blvd. -- “taking the freeway when you’re on your way to get a taquito for 45 cents is like taking a jet to go visit your cat, the texture’s all wrong” --she paints a picture of the working class east end of Sunset, ambling through the “hills and flowers and the car part places.” Yeah, Janis should have done that. The Sheik” is wonderful for its descriptions of the extraordinarily beautiful but dumb girls at Hollywood High who wielded enough power over students and teachers alike to throw things into chaos on a regular basis. “There were 20 of them who were unquestionably staggering and another 50 or so who were cause for alarm, or would have been in a more diluted atmosphere.” The beauty-as-power theme is a lesson learned, but not resented. It made life more interesting, and Eve is nothing if not an appreciator of beauty for its own sake. There are lovely moments too relating a teenager’s awareness of being in a special time and space during a SoCal summer: “. . . the sea was one long wave to be ridden in, our skins were dark, and time even stopped now and then and let things shimmer since time, too, is affected by beauty and will stop sometimes for a moment.” I love the rhythms of the last paragraph, a great example of Eve’s style that I enjoy so much. And now for what Eve would call her “groupie-adventuress” phase. It could be argued that, by the time of the photograph with Duchamp, she was well into it. After all, she’d already cut quite a swath through the cute young hunk L.A. artists: Kenny Price, Ed Ruscha, Ron Cooper. But post-photograph, she went on a tear that lasted nearly half a decade. Said Earl McGrath, former president of Rolling Stones Records, “In every young man’s life there is an Eve Babitz. It’s usually Eve Babitz.” As the cynosure of the counterculture, Eve Babitz knew everybody worth knowing; slept with everybody worth sleeping with and better still, made herself felt in every encounter.”—Daniel Bernardi, PopMatters And the 90s, thanks to that cigar, were an even bigger nightmare. Eve was predictably without health insurance. Her medical bills ran into the hundreds of thousands. To raise cash, Mirandi, Laurie, and Paul, along with screenwriters Michael Elias and Caroline Thompson and artist Laddie John Dill, arranged a benefit at the Chateau Marmont. An auction was staged with works donated by, among others, Ed Ruscha, Larry Bell, Billy Al Bengston, and Dennis Hopper. The ghost-of-amours-past invitees included Harrison Ford, Steve Martin, and Ahmet Ertegun.However, whilst all of the vignettes that make up this collection are fascinating insights into Babitz' life, there doesn't seem to be any common connecting factor threading them all together. Reading this book is like hopping along the stepping stones of Babitz' memories and not stopping until you reach dry land. Everything seems to crash together and there is no semblance of a structure or timeline. Thus reading this book can be quite a disorientating experience. Much like listening to Stravinsky actually.

She did? Why? What had happened? What had caused this most profoundly and abidingly social of creatures to go J. D. Salinger? Howard Hughes? Norma Desmond? An accident, as freakish as it was horrific. I don’t remember how old I was when I first heard Los Angeles described as a ‘wasteland’ or ‘seven suburbs in search of a city’ or any of the other curious remarks uttered by people. It was never like that for us growing up here… ‘Wasteland’ is a word I don’t understand anyway because physically, surely, they couldn’t have thought it was a wasteland – it has all these citrus trees and flowers growing everywhere. I know they meant ‘culturally.’ But it wasn’t. Culturally, L.A. has always been a humid jungle alive with seething L.A. projects that I guess people from other places just can’t see. It takes a certain kind of innocence to like L.A., anyway. It requires a certain plain happiness inside to be happy in L.A., to choose it and be happy here. When people are not happy, they fight against L.A. and say it’s a ‘wasteland’ and other helpful descriptions…” Since enjoying Eve and her book — I’ve already started listening to another: “Slow Days, Fast Company”….. Turns out this chapter is about Gram Parsons and Keith Richards. I had to do an internet search for an hour to fill in the blanks. I’m a Gram Parsons fan. I’m a Keith Richards fan. Why didn’t she just use their proper names?

Success!

her mind is sharp, witty, brilliant….(with honesty and candor)….she’s an L.A. Hollywood icon……’all-around’ desirable! This is one of her earlier books, I believe the first full-length one, and the voice of her first-person stories, which I have always found delightful, is not as refined and controlled as in her later books. Here the very casual conversational style can sometimes veer into rambling which seems to prefer flourishes to coherence. She is, always, a girl very much concerned with style – in language, in clothes, in dance. In this debut, she had not yet achieved the point where style becomes substance. But this is apparent in only a few of the stories.