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.” 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 ] Eve Babitz". New York Review Books. Archived from the original on April 21, 2021 . Retrieved April 21, 2021.

I love L.A. The only time I ever go to Forest Lawn is when someone dies. A kid from New York once said: “Look. Which would you rather? To spend eternity looking out over these pretty green hills or in some overcrowded ghetto cemetery next to the expressway in Queens?” L.A. didn’t invent eternity. Forest Lawn is just an example of eternity carried to its logical conclusion. I love L.A. because it does things like that. Well, gee," I said to him, "there are so many perfect women, it's just horrible you have to spend time sitting here with me."Horrible indeed! No use being morose about it, however. Even if I never found an Eve Babitz, I can appreciate her discriminating mind even at this distant remove. This is a girl who did not believe in the viability of most relationships: "The real truth is that I've never known any man-woman thing to pan out (it may pan out to them, of course, but couples in middle age who don't speak to each other are not my idea of a good movie.)" 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.”—Hermione Hoby, TLS 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. The show was curated by Walter Hopps, with whom Babitz was having an affair at the time. The photograph is described by the Smithsonian Archives of American Art as being “among the key documentary im Babitz was born in Hollywood, California, the daughter of Mae, an artist, and Sol, a classical violinist on contract with 20th Century Fox.Her father was of Russian Jewish descent and her mother had Cajun (French) ancestry.Babitz's parents were friends with the composer Igor Stravinsky, who was her godfather.She was unapologetically candid about sex, drugs, art, music, her relationships, her family, her body, her judgments, and her life in Los Angeles. anyone who has ever started working out with youtube videos will totally understand how a ten minute long workout can feel like ten hours. this is exactly how this book felt like. I did not become famous but I got near enough to smell the stench of success. It smelt like burnt cloth and rancid gardenias, and I realized that the truly awful thing about success is that it's held up all those years as the thing that would make everything all right. And the only thing that makes things even slightly bearable is a friend who knows what you're talking about.” She figured that any day now she was going to start feeling the simple composure of normalcy that Jane Austen's heroines always sought to maintain, the state described in those days as "countenance," and later as "being cool.”

Slow Days, Fast Company is a full-fledged and full-bodied evocation of a bygone Southern California that far exceeds its mash-note premise. In ten sun-baked, Santa Ana wind–swept sketches, Babitz re-creates a Los Angeles of movie stars distraught over their success, socialites on three-day drug binges holed up in the Chateau Marmont, soap-opera actors worried that tomorrow’s script will kill them off, Italian femmes fatales even more fatal than Babitz. Her articles and short stories have appeared in Rolling Stone, Vogue, Cosmopolitan, and Esquire magazines. She is the author of several books including Eve's Hollywood; Slow Days, Fast Company; Sex and Rage; Two By Two; and L.A. Woman. Transitioning to her particular blend of fiction and memoir beginning with Eve's Hollywood, Babitz’s writing of this period is indelibly marked by the cultural scene of Los Angeles during that time, with numerous references and interactions to the artists, musicians, writers, actors, and sundry other iconic figures that made up the scene in the 1960s, 70s, and 80s. Solis, Marie (February 8, 2019). "Eve Babitz's Visions of Total Freedom". The Nation. ISSN 0027-8378. Archived from the original on April 21, 2021 . Retrieved April 21, 2021. When I was growing up, civilized friends of my parents’ and even my parents used to complain all the time about how the L.A. County Art Museum was a travesty unparalleled anywhere for dopiness. They’d really get angry each time they recalled how Stravinsky was never so much as nodded to by “the city.” I used to wonder, when I was little, how a city nodded to Stravinsky. City Hall was all the way downtown and Stravinsky lived in West Hollywood. These adults used to sigh and say, “If he lived anywhere else . . . any where else, they would have done something about him. But not Los Angeles.” I think that the truth was that Stravinsky lived in L.A. because when you’re in your studio, you don’t have to be a finished product all the time or make formal pronouncements. Work and love—the two best things—flourish in studios. It’s when you have to go outside and define everything that they often disappear.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.” 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.”—Lee Grove, Boston Globe Green, Penelope (December 19, 2021). "Eve Babitz, a Hedonist With a Notebook, Is Dead at 78". The New York Times. ISSN 0362-4331. Archived from the original on December 20, 2021 . Retrieved December 20, 2021. a b Nelson, Steffie, L.A. Woman The Los Angeles Review of Books, December 18, 2011 Nelson, Steffie (December 18, 2011). "L.A. Woman". Archived from the original on January 22, 2013 . Retrieved May 1, 2012. It must have been marvelous when the century was young and things impressed themselves in such blatant vivid brilliance that an approaching fire under a starry sky could illuminate, even to a Crimean actress, this sense of “place” – that there was nothing to be wanted from material things, nothing to be saved.”