Though
labelled a 1960s ‘It Girl’ (but never ‘a West Coast Edie Sedgwick’), Eve
Babitz, through force of personality, creativity, and a hard buzz of
underlying craziness, made herself, and those around her, an enduring work of art. That’s a rare
achievement that can’t be strategized or funded—thank God. (Corporations remained puzzled,
restricted by an invisible blockade, unable to monetize whatever ‘It’ is.)
Consider ‘It’ as yet another definition of organic. Eve belongs more to a ‘sense’ of time & place than actual Los Angeles in the 1960s-70s... Faulkner is always the Deep South. Fitzgerald remains preserved in the sparking lapis lazuli of the Jazz Age. A time & place. That’s Eve.
So there she is seated, naked with pendulous breasts, playing chess with Marcel Duchamp (1963), in a moment definitely closer to Dadaism than Cubism. Or she’s dancing somewhere on the Sunset Strip, in a hot club with Warren Beatty or Steve Martin or Ahmet Ertegun or Stephen Stills or Jim Morrison or Edward Ruscha or Warren Zevon or Harrison Ford… or whomever. More explorer than groupie.
Her appetite for Life was enormous, enabling true participatory journalism, involuntarily leap-frogging Tom Wolfe and Norman Mailer and Hunter Thompson and other practitioners of ‘new journalism’. Eve wrote about Eve, even though it’s never clear she totally understood her subject. Thankfully, it’s all about Eve.
Eve’s often outrageous behavior is
somehow subsumed in the inevitability of
her actions—as if ‘it had to happen this
way. Can you describe a more interesting alternative?’
Anyway, it’s those restless, Peter Pan-eccentric
spirits, garnishing dull days with pixie dust, then to dance beneath diamond skies, to bequeath us the prayer ‘There’s wild magic everywhere. You only have to move.’
#evebabitz #losangeles #warrenbeatty #jimmorrison #harrisonford #normanmailer #huntersthompson #marcelduchamp #fscottfitzgerald #williamfaulkner #edie sedgwick #andywarhol #1960s #1970s