Eve's Hollywood (New York Review Book Classics)

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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. In Nathanael West's celebrated novel of Hollywood, The Day of the Locust, Eve Babitz sees nothing but an unfair diatribe against her beloved hometown of Los Angeles. Babitz often hears of Hollywood being described as a 'wasteland', a fake town full of fake people where even the greenery is plastic. In Eve's Hollywood she refutes that myth. I love what Eve brought to this book —- her life experiences growing up in Los Angeles - BEING HERSELF!! Of course, the Vatican has always enforced its efforts by continuously playing up that it was hell not to be in heaven until finally everyone forgot the entire point, which was that they should be at their own party in the meantime, just in case… Just in case death is other people having fun without you.)

Eve’s Hollywood”…..(essays and vignettes), is the perfect antidote to depression, grief, psycho-therapy, breathwork, yoga, Pilates, Taoism, and boredom….. The first time I came across Eve Babitz was in a 2015 Vanity Fair article dedicated to a famous 1973 photograph in which she was the subject. The picture in question, snapped by Julian Wasser, showed Babitz playing chess with the French painter Marcel Duchamp. The thing about this photograph – the reason it merited its own Vanity Fair piece – is that the two competitors are a study in contrasts. On one side of the table, almost forgotten, there is Duchamp, an older man, fully clothed, carefully studying the board. On the other side is Babitz, a young woman without a stitch of clothing anywhere on her body. She’s not even wearing a watch. 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.Babitz’s parents were beautiful, talented, creative people, and like many people with symmetrical features and a desire to express themselves, they washed up on the shores of Hollywood. This is how Eve Babitz found herself going to Hollywood High, surrounded by some of the most beautiful teenagers on the planet. She was far from ugly, but she never made the top cut of those sirens who were not only breathtaking, but already gliding through life with self-assurance and poise. 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. She started out as an artist designing album covers for Ahmet Ertegun at Atlantic Records. Her most famous of these works was a collage for the 1967 album Buffalo Springfield Again. Then she began writing articles and short stories for the Rolling Stone, The Village Voice, Vogue, Cosmopolitan and Esquire.

Eve’s Hollywood has become a classic of LA life. The names in the dedication, Jim Morrison, David Geffen, Andy Warhol, Stephen Stills, and more, indicate the era and depth of this important book. Eve is easy to dismiss because she doesn’t wear her seriousness on her sleeve. Her concerns are the seating arrangements at dinner parties, love affairs on the skids. She offers up information commonly known as gossip. Girl stuff, basically. (By that standard, of course, Proust was writing girl stuff, too.) But her casualness has depth, an aesthetic resonance. She achieved that American ideal: art that stays loose, maintains its cool, is purely enjoyable enough to be mistaken for simple entertainment. It’s a tradition that includes Duke Ellington, Fred Astaire, Preston Sturges, Ed Ruscha, and, it goes without saying, Marilyn Monroe. Turning 70 this year has done a little something to me. It’s very clear there are less years ahead to live than years already lived—- A beautiful stylist whose flourishes were almost always carefully doled out, calibrated, and sure... The joy of Babitz's writing is in her ability to suggest that an experience is very nearly out of language while still articulating its force within it." --Naomi Fry, New Republic If heavenly Joan Didion is, in some sense, the moon of the West Coast-inflected prose writing world, cool and wry, dry and fashionably detached, then Babitz is the sun, hot and bright, excessive and hilarious, and they both write about California — and most things, really — incredibly well.

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Daughter of an artist (Mae Babitz) and a classical violinist on contract with 20th Century Fox (Sol Babitz), her godfather was composer Igor Stravinsky. Books are a major part of her life. She states in this book that Dombey and Sons actually saved her life when her depression was putting her on the verge of suicide. She loaths Nathaniel West because she feels he paints a bleak and harsh view of Los Angeles without giving the city credit for what makes it great. She doesn’t apologize for the culture in California, but she does share some very fond memories of why she finds the city so amazing and so undervalued. home of the famous ‘stars’, beaches, mountains, SURFING-U.S.A., large sport events, earthquakes, privileges and beauty, rich people, fancy cars, busy Freeways, great libraries, bookstores, museums, chic boutiques, educational opportunities, botanical gardens, yummy outdoor HUGE open-markets (fresh fruits, vegetables, nuts, fish, and every kind of edible that could make your mouth water, parties, drugs, sunny days, smoggy days, heat waves, *Juniors*, (The best Jewish delicatessen in Southern California), sunrises, and sunsets, etc. Her voice manages to be both serious and happy, with a run-on syntax that feels like a friend on her second glass of wine. Relentlessly unsentimental, she sees people for who they are, regardless of who she wants them to be . . . In Eve’s Hollywood, she writes with the aching immediacy of adolescence and the wide-angle perspective of a woman much older—and she’s only in her 20s. Bret Easton Ellis is a big fan of her subject matter and her style. She is writing about the mothers and fathers that spawned the generation that Ellis writes about in Less than Zero. Eve’s California generation was self-indulgent, self-absorbed, bored, too rich, too pretty, and self-destructive, but the children of the 1980s took those negative tendencies and expanded them into an art form of how to squander an infinite amount of opportunities.