Eve's Hollywood

Journalist, party girl, bookworm, artist, muse: by the time she d hit thirty, Eve Babitz had played all of these roles. Immortalized as the nude beauty facing down Duchamp and as one of Ed Ruscha s "Five 1965 Girlfriends," Babitz s first book showed her to bea razor-sharp writer with tales of her own. "Eve s Hollywood" is an album of vivid snapshots of Southern California s haute bohemians, of outrageously beautiful high-school ingenues and enviably tattooed Chicanas, of rock stars sleeping it off at the Chateau Marmont. And though Babitz s prose might appear careening, she s in control as she takes us on a ride through an LA of perpetual delight, from a joint serving the perfect taquito, to the corner of La Brea and Sunset where we make eye contact with a roller-skating hooker, to the Watts Towers. This daughter of the wasteland is here to show us that her city is no wasteland at all but a glowing landscape of swaying fruit trees and blooming bougainvillea, buffeted by earthquakes and the Santa Ana winds and every bit as seductive as she is."