daring to love easy beauty
This Week in Reading
Eve’s Hollywood by Eve Babitz
Eve’s Hollywood is technically filed under fiction, but for all intents and purposes it is a memoir of Eve Babitz’s life growing up in LA. It is essentially an essay collection unconstricted by accuracy.
Eve Babitz writes about Los Angeles in a way that only someone who grew up in the heart of Hollywood can. Her descriptions of LA are visceral and personal. She has none of the distance of a critic. It’s not that she ignores the grimy, tragic current that laces through the city, but she describes these things without judgment. Eve Babitz is the ultimate insider. At times, this can make her writing confusing; she mentions people and places without explanation, blithely assuming that everyone knows who Barry is, that everyone has been to the Rainbow Room in Beverly Hills. Everyone she knows does and has, anyways. But instead of alienating readers with her offhand references and breezy namedropping, Babitz cultivates a sense of familiarity. It is like meeting someone for the second time at a cocktail party and being greeted with the enthusiasm usually reserved for a dear friend instead of the near stranger that you actually are.
It is so easy to hate Los Angeles. People love to tell you that LA is fake and polluted and soulless, that the sprawl is terrible and the traffic worse. They pat themselves on the back for being to see past LA’s facade— for being able to see past the blue skies and swaying palms and 75-degree days and citrus trees dripping with oranges. Outsiders smugly tell you that they could never live in LA, that LA is shallow and ridiculous and ugly (ignoring how unforgivably rude it is to essentially come into someone’s home and tell them that you hate it, right to their face). In a chapter about Nathanael West, Babitz writes, “He can forgive New York’s shortcomings and think of them as charms, but he cannot forgive L.A. for the spaces between the words, the blandness and the complete absence of push.” The golden splendor of California is so obvious that people jump to reject it.
To say that LA is fake and terrible is not a radical perspective. Los Angeles wears its glossy synthetic beauty openly. It is a land of billboards and airbrushing and aquamarine swimming pools. To criticize LA for its falsity is to miss the point. Everyone here knows it is fake, half of them work in Hollywood, creating a synthetic world for the rest of us to inhabit and admire. The falsity is the entire point— L.A. is a city that manifested itself into being. Hating Los Angeles is a lazy opinion. Letting yourself love the easy beauty of California is the actually daring act. Babitz writes-- “It takes a certain kind of innocence to like L.A., anyway. It requires a certain kind of plain happiness to be happy here, to choose it and be happy here.”
There is safety in being a critic. Criticism is a kind of defensive maneuvering, a way of participating from a distance. To love something openly and earnestly is an act of vulnerability. Anyone who went to art school with me, or honestly, has ever had a conversation with me longer than ten minutes, can tell you that I am pretty critical person. But I always try to stop short of being a hater. Liking something requires us to leave our cocoon of disdain and put some skin in the game.
When I hit my one-year anniversary in LA last November I decided to lean all the way in. If I am going to live here, I might as lean into it. Do the thing. Go to a saltwater pool party on a rooftop in the arts district, sunbathe in Malibu, drink a green smoothie. I bought a ridiculous woven sun hat at the flea market, which I refer to as my LA-hiker-girl-hat (people in LA say they love hiking, by which they mean that they love carrying their dog up a trail in Griffith Park; as far as I have leaned in, the Pacific Northwest girl in me can’t help but give some serious side eye). Leaning into LA involves wearing the aforementioned sun hat to the desert, involves saying yes to invitations to insane LA parties with a ball pit and a Ferris wheel. Much of Eve’s Los Angeles, four decades and a social world away from mine, feels foreign from the one I spend my day to day life in, but then she writes about the taquitos on Olvera Street, writes, “if God wants me to believe in him, I'll do it, but only for the Pacific Ocean and sunsets,” and the city becomes cozy and familiar again.
I used to say that LA didn’t give me a lot to love, but it gives me a lot to think about. It still gives me so much to think about, but also, to my great surprise, I have found myself wooed by California, by the tacos and the fuchsia bougainvilleas that cover entire walls. By the way even the freeway glows pink during golden hour.
Eve Babitz feels like Joan Didion’s troublesome little sister (one day I will write a tinyletter that doesn’t reference Joan Didion, but to fail to mention Joan when writing about California seems like a failure to properly cite your sources). Her writing is less precise than Joan’s— she is messier, sloppier, does more drugs, but she writes about Los Angeles with the same tenacity that Joan does. I don’t know how long I will be in this city, but I have no plans to leave just yet. I will probably stay until I have run out of things to say about California.
Studio-ing
My art show is right around the corner! Please come! Friday, May 11th, 7-10pm at Junior High (5656 Hollywood Blvd). I have been working very hard and am very afraid that no one will show up to the opening. So please come. Bring a friend! Bring many friends! If you don’t live in LA, tell someone who lives in LA to come. There are 4 million people in this city, you definitely know someone besides me that lives here.
Further Reading
Joan Didion has said everything there is to say about California, and has said it best. I would especially recommend The White Album for the Los Angeles vibes. A more academic pick: Whitewashed Adobe by William Deverell is a really interesting look on the way Los Angeles has erased its own Latino history.