EVE BABITZ : SLOW DAYS, FAST COMPANY - THE WORLD, THE FLESH, and L.A. : RAIN

The silver lining was rain.  A sudden, mistaken rain that came all at once in the middle of the following Thursday, vanishing after five minutes upon noticing its blunder. No clouds, seventy-five degrees, no reason, but it rained.  It rained on the hot oily asphalt and made it smell rainy.  It rained the fray from the landscape, just like that, with a snap of its wrong turn.

The wild blue yonder came upon us like a drunken zoom lens thundering into focus.  It seemed that God had made up His mind to change the background without telling anyone.

Los Angeles got huge shafts of pure yellow sunlight surging through office windows.  Daffodils came to mind. Violets.  

You could choose any direction and see as far as you wanted.  Past Catalina and on west all the way to the East. In a quick clap of mistaken thunder the look of Southern California had been transformed miraculously and I have seen nothing like it anywhere else or heard of any such thing.

You could pick up mad gladness from bus drivers and studio chiefs and pool cleaners and check-out girls and guys doing their news on the radio.  "Rain!" they cried, and immediately meteorologists were contacted to predict more rain. Rain from Mexico, rain from the San Joaquin Valley, rain from a storm out in the Pacific, rain coming down from Oregon.  Converging rain -- we're bound to have more rain.

"Did you see it, it rained! everyone said to each other, in soft panting voices as though they were in love.

Excerpt pages 92 and 93 published in 1977

EVE BABITZ : SLOW DAYS, FAST COMPANY - THE WORLD, THE FLESH, and L.A. : FAME AND FRIENDSHIP

 re Janis Joplin in previous paragraphs...

Women are prepared to suffer for love; it's written into their birth certificates.  Women are not prepared to have "everything," not success-type "everything." I mean, not when the "everything" isn't about living happily ever after with the prince (where even if it falls through and the prince runs away with the baby-sitter, there's at least a precedent.) There's no precedent for women getting their own "everything" and learning that it's not the answer.  Especially when you got fame, money, and love by belting out how sad and lonely and beaten you were.  Which is only a darker version of 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.  They'll only give you "everything:" if you appear to be totally confused. Which leaves you with very few friends.

The kinds of friends you get when you have "everything" (after your old friends have decided to send you all their screenplays, so that you're afraid to run into them lest they wonder why you haven't read them) are either your immediate family or other famous people.  A lot of times your immediate family is what drove you into such excess in the first place.  So that leaves other people with "everything." In Hollywood, there's usually a special grace period when you're allowed to grab a few friends before you're pitched into only meeting other famous people ...

Excerpts pages 60-61 Published 1977

EVE BABITZ : SLOW DAYS, FAST COMPANY - THE WORLD, THE FLESH, and L.A. : LA AS A CHARACTER

It's well known that for something to be fiction it must move right along and not meander among the bushes gazing into the next county. Unfortunately, with L.A. it's impossible.  You can't write a story about L.A. that doesn't turn around in the middle or get lost. And since it's the custom for people who "like" L.A. to embrace everything wholesale and wallow in Forest Lawn, all the stories you read make you wonder why the writer doesn't just go ahead and jump, get it over with.

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.

People nowadays get upset at the idea of being in love with a city, especially Los Angeles.  People think you should be in love with other people or your work or justice. I've been in love with people and ideas in several cities and learned that the lovers I've loved and the ideas I've embraced depended on where I was, how cold it was, and what I had to do  to be able to stand it....    

Eve Babitz : Excerpt page 7  published 1977

EVE BABITZ DIES

LA TIMES EVE BABITZ WHO CAPTURED AND EMBODIED .... the culture of Los Angeles, dies at 78 by Mark Olsen, Staff Writer

EXCERPT : Her writing described a world of decadent glamour with fine-tuned detail but also a sense of open-hearted joy, often shared with the dishy candor of a close friend deep into a soggy late-afternoon lunch.