Chamblee54

On the last wednesday of 2021, I read the last paragraph of Slow Days, Fast Company: The World, The Flesh, and L.A. by Eve Babitz. Bret Easton Ellis mentioned EB, and SDFC, several times on his podcast. I ordered SDFC from the library. While reading it, on December 17, Eve Babitz died. Did I kill EB, by reading her book? This is a repost.
SDFC has been described as the work of an unapologetically shallow California girl. It is true. Then EB references Virginia Wolff, or Diane Arbus. In one story, EB (no middle name) goes to a gated community in Orange County for the weekend. The people there are so Nixony! Later, one of the ladies commits suicide. EB plows ahead without missing a beat.
EB was gonna design an album cover for Janis Joplin, and went to meet her. Janis was in the studio. The music was painfully loud. Janis was passed out on the floor of the studio. A few days later, EB went to visit Janis at some hotel in Los Angeles. Janis was laying up in the pool face up, not drowning but obviously on a distant planet.
SDFC is an amazing book. It’s not very long, broken down into nine stories. EB went to Bakersfield to hang out with the son of a grape grower. Another is when that EB hangs out with a lady who is a musician, and heroin user. EB thinks that heroin is very glamorous, for other people. EB was a big tequila fan, and consumed a few plane-loads of white powder. SDFC is set around 1973, before the democratization of cocaine in the eighties.
After the demise of Joan Didion, and EB, Bret had Lily Anolick on his show. She did a podcast series about Bennington College. The lady … whose name is not anal-lick … wrote Hollywood’s Eve: Eve Babitz and the Secret History of L.A. Amazon had a one star review: Totally the C Word “After reading this book I thought I was going to have to go to the clinic and get treated for VD. Incredible, did she really have sex with this many people?”
SDFC is written by a woman, from a woman’s point of view. Here is a sample. “Women want to be loved like roses. They spend hours perfecting their eyebrows and toes and inventing irresistible curls that fall by accident down the back of their necks from otherwise austere hair-dos. … The only time men fall in love with roses is on douche commercials.”
Pictures today are from The Library of Congress. Second International Pageant of Pulchritude and Eighth Annual Bathing Girl Revue, May 21, 22, 23, Galveston, Texas, 1927. This article includes the picture of a naked EB playing chess with Marcel Duchamp.