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

Product Information

Babitz was born in Hollywood, California, the daughter of Mae, an artist, and Sol Babitz, a classical violinist on contract with 20th Century Fox. [1] Her father was of Russian Jewish descent and her mother had Cajun (French) ancestry. [2] Babitz's parents were friends with the composer Igor Stravinsky, who was her godfather. [3] She attended Hollywood High School. [4] :39–40 Career [ edit ] 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.

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.”—Lili Anolik, Vanity Fair Anolik, Lili (2019). Hollywood's Eve: Eve Babitz and the secret history of L.A. New York: Scribner. ISBN 978-1-5011-2579-9. OCLC 1057240688. to say the least — eve’s writing style is chatty, gossipy and it reads like you’re catching up with your “cool” friend. some of her observations and lines are hilarious, however, i do think that she’s given way more credit for her wittiness than she actually deserves. most of her writing consists of nothing but surface-level descriptions of la and society and passionless prose.

The New York Public Library convened a 2016 panel on "The Eve Effect" that included actress Zosia Mamet and New Yorker writer Jia Tolentino. [25] [10] In 2017, Hulu announced it would be developing a comedy series based on Babitz's memoirs, a project led by Liz Tigelaar, Amy Pascal, and Elizabeth Cantillon. [26] Slow Days, Fast Company is organized as a loose series of sketches. The thread that ties them together is Babitz herself, who often can be found openly contemplating herself. Her concern with her own magnetic appeal comes across less as vanity, however, than simple self-awareness – in her first book, Eve's Hollywood, she is frank: “I looked like Brigitte Bardot and I was Stravinsky’s goddaughter.” Babitz is aware both that her beauty and connections have given her a pass into a social realm inaccessible to most people, and simultaneously condemned her to inhabit a certain stereotype in the eyes of many onlookers. “I wasn’t as used to the new dumb questions, so when men I had once thought of as wise daddies now asked me 'How do you write?’ I did not try and spill red wine in their suede pants, I would just smile and say, 'On a typewriter in the mornings when there’s nothing else to do.’'' It was so beautifully written— she was a totally captivating writer…..and just so engagingly fun to spend time with.

However, even though I really enjoyed this book, it had a couple of shortcomings. Firstly, I thought the latter essays were inferior to the first couple. I somewhat felt they were a bit long-winded and perhaps a bit self-indulgent, whereas the others were more like thematic depictions of 70s LA. I also thought the book maintains mostly one tone throughout the book (a positive one), and though I understand this was deliberate and that the point of the collection was not to critisize the scene and rather indulge in its glamour, I think this "one-noteness" of it diminished my enjoyment of it. Like her first book, Eve's Hollywood, Slow Days, Fast Company: The World, The Flesh, and L.A. is a series of seemingly biographical essays with an admixture of fiction. Where the first book talked about Eve's teeny-bopper years in the 1960s, in her second she becomes the lovely, knowing score girl that everyone wants to meet ... and bed. She hung out with the likes of Jim Morrison, Steve Martin, artist Ed Ruscha, and gallery owner Walter Hopps. Her writing took multiple forms. . . . But in the center was always Babitz and her sensibility—fun and hot and smart, a Henry James–loving party girl.”—Naomi Fry, New Republic It’s a gigantic, sprawling, ongoing studio,” writes Eve. “Everything is off the record.” I admire this heartbeat close approach, which invites a closeness incorporating but also expanding the male gaze, which is an inevitable albatross for a white cis woman telling stories in Los Angeles at this time. We are asked to enter these worlds, to see Los Angeles as Eve does, to consider happiness a right not a luxury. There is music and warmth and jokes and booze and frequently, hot flashes of color and food, like tiny paintings: “golden bracelets caught the light of the mustard hills.” “A faded rose-suede suit.” “A white powder called Coyote’s Brain.” Above all, Eve is fascinated with women, she likes “to find things out from them.”Undeniably the work of a native, in love with her place. This quality of the intrinsic and the indigenous is precisely what has been missing from almost all the fiction about Hollywood...the accuracy and feeling with which she delineates LA is a fresh quality in California writing. 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. a b c Babitz, Eve (2019). "All This and The Godfather Too". I Used To Be Charming. New York: New York Review of Books. ISBN 9781681373799. Archived from the original on April 21, 2021 . Retrieved April 21, 2021.