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

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Babitz explores the idea that the winds have a way of bringing out the wildness and unpredictability of the city, creating a sense of chaos and excitement. S. Directed by Gabe Polsky, the film stars Nicolas Cage as the frontiersman Miller and Fred Hechinger.

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. Her artist mother, Ed Ruscha told me, was “a real sweet beautiful woman from a little town in Texas.And she even leaves LA now and then, spending an afternoon at the house of flawless Orange County suburbanites, a day among the grape pickers of the Central Valley, a weekend in Palm Springs where her dreams of romance fizzle and her only solace is Virginia Woolf.

The essays found in Slow Days, Fast Compnay are a mix of personal reflections, cultural commentary, and humorous anecdotes that offer a unique perspective on life in Los Angeles during that era. Angeles anyway asked Babitz Bakersfield baseball beautiful Beth blue can’t Chateau Chateau Marmont cocaine coffee color couldn’t Coyote’s Brain David decided desert didn’t dinner door dressed drink drive drove Emerald Bay everything eyes Fast Company Frank freeway friends front Gabrielle Gabrielle’s Garden of Allah girl glass grapes hair happened hate he’d heroin hills Hollywood I’ve Italian Janet Janis Joplin knew Laguna living looked love L.In 1963, her first brush with notoriety came through Julian Wasser's iconic photograph of a nude, twenty-year-old Babitz playing chess with the artist Marcel Duchamp, on the occasion of his landmark retrospective at the Pasadena Art Museum. Unlike her contemporary, Joan Didion, Babits isn't staring into the abyss and reporting back; but she does want to tell you how good the light is out by the abyss. To spend eternity looking out over these pretty green hills or in some overcrowded ghetto cemetery next to the expressway in Queens?

Eve knows success, and how it twists people so they becoming boring "celebrities" who rely on drugs and booze to get through the day.With an undertone of humor, Babitz spills some tea about the people she meets for the first time and hangs out with regularly—including one of her fans, a famous female rockstar from the 60s, a woman she truly adores, and a guy she fell in love with. Babitz was born in Hollywood, California, the daughter of Mae, an artist, and Sol, a classical violinist on contract with 20th Century Fox.

The thread that ties them together is Babitz herself, who often can be found openly contemplating herself. Like her West Coast fellow Joan Didion, she has a stringent–in fact, rather stark–intelligence…Babitz’s perceptions, her aphoristic formulations, are legion and strike me as both startling and profound. 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.Eve intelligently and openly said things that some people might feel shame just thinking about — let alone saying out loud. I found myself eagerly devouring her prose at the beginning and then getting a little sick to my stomach three-quarters in, but that’s my constitution, not her talent. 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.