"But luck is like beauty or diamond earrings: people who have it cannot simply stay home and receive compliments unless they've an enormous sense of public duty."
Title : Sex and Rage
Author: Eve Babitz
Date Published: 1979
Type:
Description
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.
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Eve Babitz captured the voluptuous quality of L.A. in the1960s in a wildly original, totally unique voice. These stories are time capsule gems, as poignant and startling today as they were when published in the early 1970s. Eve Babitz is not well known today, but she should be. Her first hand experiences in the L.A. cultural scene, translated into haunting fiction, are an unforgettable glimpse at a lost world and a magical time
BOOK EXTRACTS
The idea of an “artistic community” evaporates into the slow days. Inspiration and words like that get buried along with the fast company; its imposible to tell if one’s been inspired, or if it was the cocaine, or what.
I cant keep everything in my lap, or stop rising furies of sudden blind meaning. But perhaps if the details are at put together, a certain pulse and sense of place will emerge, and the integrity of empty space with occasional figures in the landscape can be understood at leisure and infull, no matter how fast the company.
Film : petrified forest – belle davis
There was no reason I could give him for being in Bakersfield other than I was a frivolous young women prone to adventure – and his dignified posture was not about to get an explanation like that from me.
I realize now what an outsider I was, what an object of curiousity though at the time I just sailed right in, not devoid of curiosity.
There ascent into the mountains is so quick that suddenly it says “sequoia National Park “ white on the other side of these Sierras the great Mojave Desert stands waiting. Inside these mountains is leke Isabella, a man made lake surreally available for water skiers and speed boat racers, no trees in sight.
He wore a cowboy hat with the eye of a peacock feather stuck in the band, and he was one of those creatures so young and almost mystically cheerful that he seemed doomed.
I was dancing, dancing through the crowded room and absolutely unable to stop smiling. Women who dance with their eyes closed, smiling, are as near to heaven as you can get on earth, and there I was, in heaven, only in Bakersfield.
The next morning I awoke with a hangover lending a distance to my senses, and feeling lost and tender.
My claustrophobia from San Francisco begins to vanish – that cheerful shipshape vitality of the north violates my spirit and I long for vast sprawls , smog, and the luke night : LA it is where I work best, where I can live, oblivious to physical reality.
What shall we drink? “ she asked , when we sat down in the restaurant. We drank the same thing when we were together for some reason, maybe symmetry.
“but darling” she insists “ let me just say this one thins. With actors first they find out what you like, and then they do it. They instinctively understand. But its not real. You know? “
( he had fans everywhere; people were always coming up to him on the street and commiserating with him about his horrible wife cookolding him.)
In japan, I understand, its considered obscene to eat in the same room as someone of the opposite sex.
“listen” he said – he never had to say his name, our voices were imprimted on each other’s aural hearts.
Early in life I discovered that the way to approach anything was to be introduce by the right person. Like the first time I smelled caviar, I put it right back down on the plate and waited 5 years until a Russian countess offered it to me again with cold vodka in her exile’s parlor and then I loved it.
And we have to stick together or else heroin-ism will us home alone with no women to go out drinking with, and in America this can lead to stronger spirits, wilder music, and an early grave.
Smoking has been so glamorous for so long, all those matches , those pauses, the lipstick on the tips – the smoke itself curling its casual way through the most nerve wracking moments.
Heroin is the celebrated romantic excess of our time.
Theres no precedent for women getting their own “everything” and learning that its not the answer. Especially when you got fame, money, and love by belting out how sad and lonely and beaten you were.
In Hollywood, there’s usually a special grace period when you’re allowed ti grab a few friends before you’re pitched into only meeting other famous people. The trick is to find friends who are sophisticated enough to understand what you’re talking about but disinterested enough not to come to you with their screenplays.
Janis Joplin was always wondering when her prince would come , and the wait was such a bore that she purchased total surcease on the smooth, blank, clear, smiling lake of heroin.
A famous friend of the famous.
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 its held up all those years as the thing that would make everything all right. And the only thing that makes even slightly bearable is a friend who know what youre talking about.
I wonder if you wish you hadn’t been there with the future looming up in such utter chaos before us, and meanwhile , the night was old and you were beautiful
Together , we covered the entire strata of LA type events ; we went to press parties, museums functions, art openings, dinners, screenings, and we even went places together when we didn’t have to, like out to dinner. It was passionless lethargy that bound me to him.
The way Gloria Steinem says women are not to desert women just because a man shows up.
She was bored with the ancient decadence that her own country provided and had come to LA because everything seemed so fresh.
…and come to Hollywood with no family in the business and no experience but charm and a determination to please at all costs.
I believe that most people put 98% of all their creative energy into trying to stage marvellous love scenes. I believe that adultery is an art form. In France, they more or less lay their cards on the table, aennoble love affairs for the creative adventures they are, because for most people, these are the only creative adventures they’ll ever get to touch the face of heaven.
Men take one look and start calculating how they can get rid of obstacles and where the closest bed would be. This all happens in spite of my being much too fat and everyone else being just right.
Qualudes, taken circumspectly ( which is their whole problem because the moment people find out that by god this is an aphrodisiac that actually works, they start cramming them wholesale down their throats. Qualudes reverse your peristalsis and you wind yo choking to death on your own vomit like jimi Hendrix because they turn your body too relaxed and you don’t want to be that relaxed) ..oh, qualudes taken circumspectly , are just wonderful for those nice Sunday lay abouts, or even, if you take just a quarter of one, a night on the town. You’ll end up dancing and having a wonderful time in avery relaxed way, a way so relaxed that you forget to drink and the next morning you wake up and you’ve actually lost a couple of pounds an gained some exercise.
People take us aside and say things like “ you two have the secret of life “ or they look at us fondly and say “ you really do know how to love each other. “ passion ornamented with chemistry.
True blue iris flower
at 2 am that rainy nigh, much less explained how we all three wound up in bed. I think it was something about a brandy. Al Stils wanted a brandy, I wanted to be with Shawn, Al Stils wanted to be with me and I have this brandy. Shawnd had brandy and so…but then, how did we all get into bed together without ever drinking the brandy??
My mother once said that sex was only good if it was dirty and verboter and I;ve never found anything to disapprove this.
Chateau marmont, Beverly hills hotel, Beverly Wilshire
Books granite rainbow
The common reader’
“You’ll see “he said cheerfully “ tomorrow it’ll be a beautiful day and you'll have a dreadful hangover. Which you deserve.
David was already there. Shawn was making lovely farewells, for which he could a;lwyas be adored, since social amenities are his raison d’etre
She was either completely in r totally out of fashion, I though, her clothe were so her own.
One afternoon I was sitting on a veranda at a party with about 6 women and the information that was exchanged commonly called gossip, wa enough to run the world for months. Suddenly a hush fell over the womn and I kooked around and there was a man. The women slid masks over their faces, the subject changed…
There are a lot of people who don’t grow limp with hatred when they’re kept waiting. I know a whole bunch of people who don’t consider the concept of 15 minutes times at all. So if they say they’ll meet you at 11 and they show at at 11:25, they apologize ( if they remember) for being 10 minutes late – the other 15 mintures never existed and there is some sort of common understanding amoung most people that those 15 minutes are a grace period.
Silent film star – alla Nazimova
Dancer – cyd Charisse
Diane and actaeon – Greek mythology
I had now grown up and had tbeen able to persuade men ti take me to the Russian tea room for caviar , to the plaza for lunch, to the vianeto for Campari and sodas, and to the Coronado hotel for cream of asparegus soup – but I had never been able to get one, not one, man to take me for a cozy little weekend by the ocean.
Beatles and movie stars, writers and counting singers and of course always her LA artists who were the most fun of all. Ed rusha, billy al bergston, larry bell, ken price, and ed moses
Did it mean that we were going to have to be gloomy now that we were about to be thirty? Or maybe she was in love with him and it ate up all her charms
Authors She Mentions
d.h Lawrence – author
Ford madox ford – author
Raymond chandler – author
Isben dramas
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