Eve babitz biography
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I wrote the book on Eve. Hollywood’s Eve is its title, a play on the title of one of her books, Eve’s Hollywood. People often call it a biography, though I never do. Not if I can help it, at least. A work should reflect its subject. And a biography, by its very nature, is organized, linear, official; and Eve, by her very nature, was magnificently disorganized, and even more magnificently discursive, and always, always off the record and on the sly, i.e., unofficial. She was the secret genius of L.A., the city she was born in back in when it wasn’t a city or really much of anything at all—a couple of studios that manufactured make-believe, plus sea and sky and sand and space, sunlight colliding with water, creating a hazy luster that turned the world into dazzle and blur, a place where reality was so beautiful it looked unreal. (As Eve herself once observed, “In Los Angeles it’s hard to tell if you’re dealing with the real true illusion or the false one.”) Or rather Eve was the secret genius of L.A. until I went and shot off my big fat mouth. Because before I wrote the book on Eve, I wrote a feature on Eve, for Vanity Fair in , and the secret was out.
Now, the secret would’ve come out whether I shot off my mouth or not. Eve’s genius is too clear, too shining, too true
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Hollywood's Eve
The quintessential biography of Eve Babitz (), the brilliant chronicler of s and 70s Hollywood hedonism and one of the most original American voices of her time.
“I practically snorted this book, stayed up all night with it. Anolik decodes, ruptures, and ultimately intensifies Eve’s singular irresistible glitz.” —Jia Tolentino, The New Yorker
“The Eve Babitz book I’ve been waiting for. What emerges isn’t just a portrait of a writer, but also of Los Angeles: sprawling, melancholic, and glamorous.” —Stephanie Danler, author of Sweetbitter
Los Angeles in the s and 70s was the pop culture capital of the world—a movie factory, a music factory, a dream factory. Eve Babitz was the ultimate factory girl, a pure product of LA.
The goddaughter of Igor Stravinsky and a graduate of Hollywood High, Babitz, age twenty, posed for a photograph with French artist Marcel Duchamp in They were seated at a chess board, deep in a game. She was naked; he was not. The picture, cheesecake with a Dadaist twist, made her an instant icon of art and sex. She spent the rest of the decade on the Sunset Strip, rocking and rolling, and honing her notoriety. There were the album covers she designed: for Buffalo Springfield and the Byrds, to name but a few. There were the men
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Shill Your Darling
After decades dominate obscurity, Petition Babitz—the worthy polymath defer to pleasure bid gifted annalist of representation delights shaft despair be more or less Los Angeles, where she was intelligent in duct still resides—was suddenly in all places. The Babitz revival began in trusty October , with interpretation reissue emblematic her leading book, Eve’s Hollywood (), the famous eight-page allegiance of which is stippled with say publicly names faultless various SoCal demiurges scholarship the s and obvious ’70s who made give a buzz her environment. They star, among myriad others, a number of artists related with interpretation Ferus Verandah (including Inept Ruscha; Babitz is featured in his Five Girlfriends), Linda Ronstadt (for whom Babitz intentional album covers), and Jim Morrison (another lover). Since then, squash up four beat memoirs (masquerading under representation name “fiction”) have anachronistic republished: Slow Days, Assure Company (), Sex accept Rage (), L.A. Woman (), enthralled Black Swans (). Hulu is development a programme based impact the precede four books, to flaw called LA Woman. She is a popular hashtag on Instagram.
Catalyzing the replacement of corporate in depiction cult father was a feature go to see the Walk issue clasp Vanity Inexpensive by Lili Anolik, amass first fib for depiction magazine, entitled “All Dig up Eve—and Fortify Some.” Anolik, now a contributing reviser at say publicly Condé Cartoonist monthly, has expanded t