Slow Days, Fast Company (New York Review Books Classics): The World, the Flesh, and L.A.

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Babitz’ collection of essays, Slow Days, Fast Company, the best non-fiction written about the Joys of Sensuous LA, I have always thought right up there with Joan Didion’s Slouching Towards Bethlehem.

Eve Babitz began her independent career as an artist, working in the music industry for Ahmet Ertegun at Atlantic Records, making album covers. In the late 1960s, she designed album covers for Linda Ronstadt, The Byrds, and Buffalo Springfield. Her most famous cover was a collage for the 1967 album Buffalo Springfield Again.Definitely my favorite aspect of the book was Babitz's writing style. Not only was she hilarious with her witty remarks, which were often found in parentheses, but it was also atmospheric and inviting in the way it described the glamor of LA and all its inhabitants. I particularly liked how she characterizes LA through little vignettes of places like the Emerald Bay or Bakersfield and zooms in to show how life manifests itself differently in those settings. Also, I must mention how almost each essay is dedicated to a certain person and I just love seeing this little personal insight and wondering what she might mean. It adds to her mystique in my opinion and the fact that she chose each essay specifically for one person to experience makes me ponder why those exact essays. Babitz] 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. Two by Two: Tango, Two-step, and the L.A. Night (1999). New York, NY: Simon & Schuster. ISBN 0684833921 OCLC 41641459

Ruscha, himself kind of a faux naïf, seems captivated by Babitz’s ease, her unaffected self. “She was really intelligent and up-to-date, into out-of-the-way things, unpopular things, avant-garde,” he told me. “Our little Kiki de Montparnasse pulled it off.” This is powerful. Eileen Myles immediately pins genre on her own work in a similar way, and so do third- and fourth-wave intersectional feminist zines, all narratives I hold in the highest regard. Of course, and just like Los Angeles, Slow Days, Fast Company is more than one thing. (I would never say “more than just a love story.”) It is also a map of Los Angeles, arranged in neighborhoods, monuments, and weather (Bakersfield, Dodger Stadium, Rain), and, like much of Eve’s work, an intimacy. Reading it is like sitting next to her at a dark bar or windy place, meaning the story is the thing and it’s probably mostly true but if it’s not, who cares. Because really, writing about, writing in Los Angeles any other way would be fake. “Los Angeles isn’t a city. No one burned hotter than Eve Babitz. Possessing skin that radiated “its own kind of moral laws,” spectacular teeth, and a figure that was the stuff of legend, she seduced seemingly everyone who was anyone in Los Angeles for a long stretch of the 1960s and ’70s. One man proved elusive, however, and so Babitz did what she did best, she wrote him a book. Kakutani, Michiko, "Books of The Times; Los Angeles Middle Agers Fighting the Old Ennui," New York Times, October 1, 1993 People nowadays get upset at the idea of being in love with a city, especially Los Angeles. People think you should be in love with other people or your work or justice. I’ve been in love with people and ideas in several cities and learned that the lovers I’ve loved and the ideas I’ve embraced depended on where I was, how cold it was, and what I had to do to be able to stand it. It’s very easy to stand L.A., which is why it’s almost inevitable that all sorts of ideas get entertained, to say nothing of lovers. Logical sequence, however, gets lost in the shuffle. Art is supposed to uphold standards of organization and structure, but you can’t have those things in Southern California—people have tried. It’s difficult to be truly serious when you’re in a city that can’t even put up a skyscraper for fear the earth will start up one day and bring the whole thing down around everyone’s ears. And so the artists in Los Angeles just don’t have that burning eagerness people expect. And they’re just not serious . It makes friends of mine in New York pace and seethe just remembering the unreasoning delight one encounters with the cloudlike marvels of Larry Bell.

It’s well known that for something to be fiction it must move right along and not meander among the bushes gazing into the next county. Unfortunately, with L.A. it’s impossible. You can’t write a story about L.A. that doesn’t turn around in the middle or get lost. And since it’s the custom for people who “like” L.A. to embrace everything wholesale and wallow in Forest Lawn, all the stories you read make you wonder why the writer doesn’t just go ahead and jump, get it over with. One afternoon I was sitting on a veranda at a party with about six women and the information that was exchanged, commonly called gossip, was enough to run the world for months. Suddenly a hush fell over the women and I looked around and there was a man. The women slid masks over their faces, the subject changed, the man said, "What are all you girls doing out here? Come in and join the party." And the summit conference was over.”

In these ten cajoling tales, Los Angeles is the patient, the heroine, hero, victim, and aggressor: the tales a marvel of free-form madness. Like Renata Adler, Eve Babitz has fact, never telling too much. Olsen, Mark (December 18, 2021). "Author Eve Babitz, who captured and embodied the culture of Los Angeles, dies at 78". Los Angeles Times. Archived from the original on December 19, 2021 . Retrieved December 19, 2021. Women are prepared to suffer for love; it's written into their birth certificates. Women are not prepared to have "everything," not success-type "everything." I mean, not when the "everything" isn't about living happily ever after with the prince (where even if it falls through and the prince runs away with the baby-sitter, there at least a precedent). There's no precedent for women getting their own "everything" and learning that it's not the answer. Especially when you got fame, money, and love by belting out how sad and lonely and beaten you were. Which is only a darker version fo the Hollywood "everything" in which the more vulnerability and ineptness you project onto the screen, the more fame, money, and love they load you with. They'll only give you "everything" if you appear to be totally confused. Which leaves you with very few friends.” I can’t think of any other author who was such a stand for the city of Los Angeles like she was. I can’t think of anyone -living today who is.

Anolik, Lili (March 2014). "Eve Babitz on Being Photographed Nude with Marcel Duchamp". Vanity Fair . Retrieved March 1, 2014. Babitz died of Huntington's disease at Ronald Reagan UCLA Medical Center in Los Angeles on December 17, 2021, at age 78. [18] [19] [20] Resurgence [ edit ]

In the View section of the L.A. Times every now and then, you’ll read about some doctor or lawyer who says, “My wife, Shirley, and I have thought it over and we’ve decided to retire from success and try failure for a few years. We feel the variety will enlarge us.” I know L.A. is the only place on earth where people do that.What we now call a ‘fictive memoir’ comes in the form of ten extended anecdotes about Los Angeles, delivered with all the gossipy sprezzatura of the most desirable dinner guest. Food, drink, drugs, sex, sunsets and a surfeit of move stars soak these tales with colour, while the most colourful component of all is our narrator herself.