WILDFIRES EVERYWHERE : NO ALLAH IS NOT PUNISHING THE WICKED !

Spiritually sick people are 

posting YouTube videos

 with this sensational religious bigotry. 

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

TRUMAN CAPOTE (1950) HOLLYWOOD - LOCAL COLOR COLLECTION

Yesterday, feeling greedy, I remembered ravishing displays of fruit outside a large emporium I'd driven admiringly past a number of times.  Mammoth oranges, grapes big as ping- pong balls, apples piled in rosy pyramids.  There is a sleight of hand about distances here, nothing is so near as you supposed, and it is not unusual to travel ten miles for a package of cigarettes.  It was a two-mile walk before I even caught sight of the fruit stand.  The long counters were tilted so that from quite far away you could see the splendid wares, apples, peaches. I reached for one of these extraordinary apples, but it seemed to be glued to its case.  A sales girl giggled... "Plaster," she said, and I laughed too, a little feverishly perhaps, then wearily followed her into the deeper regions of the store where I bought six small, rather mealy apples, and six small, rather mealy pears.

Excerpted from:
Page 363-364





Writing Los Angeles
A Literary Anthology
Edited by David L. Ulin
Library of America publisher
Copyright 2002