I haven't finished Eve's Hollywood (I put it down a while ago and haven't felt like picking it back up), but FWIW, my reaction to the Pachuco chapter and the Watts riots chapter were different from lw's. The Pachuco chapter annoyed me -- EB's objectification of the Pachucos is so total it's almost dehumanizing. It feels racist, except that she objectifies everyone in the early part of her book (I haven't much past the halfway mark, so I can't say about the rest of the book), including herself. She also exaggerates everyone's oddball qualities and their dramatic effect on her, which I suppose is entertaining but is also alienating and exhausting.
The Watts chapter, on the other hand, felt kind of honest to me, in the sense that she presents herself as who she is: a person for whom the Watts riots are less important than drinking with a rich cowboy at the Chateau Marmont. The rich cowboy is objectively not that interesting though, so the chapter itself is pretty boring. (This was around the time that I lost interest in the book altogether. The earlier chapters kind of made me roll my eyes with their breathlessness exoticization and exaggeration and posturing, but at least they weren't boring. Then she started to just talk about the men she hung around with in Hollywood, and while they might have been fun to drink with, they are not interesting to read about.)
I had put it down when I was 3/4 through, because she does get exhausting, but picked it up again after this post and read three chapters and I was so delighted by them. The Academy, The Hollywood Branch Library and the Luau, which only in retrospect I see is a little device, linking three quite different essays with titles of city landmarks. The first is on movies, the second on reading, and in both her stream of consciousness was lively and personal and engrossing and the third was very much about her, and I can't describe it without just loading cliche onto trope so here goes anyway, the girl who's the life of the party in a down time, an inside peek into the inner life of the popular girl who is bright and self aware. It was a bit moving even, first time for the book. So maybe putting it down for a month improves it or maybe I just really liked the Luau.
I loved the book. It was a picture of a world I knew about at the time but which was inaccessible to me, the crazy world of the rich hippies of LA and NYC (though she rejected hippieism) . The world of Ahmet Ertegun, of whom Babitz was the #1 concubine. He played a huge role in music. The fun thing about the pachuco thing is when one of the pachucos turns out to now be a diplomat with a tattoo removal scar. I also liked it as a look at LA, which is not culturally respected but is quite strange a=nd not like anywhere else, with the various racial and ethnic mixes and several gradients of Mexicanness/ Latinoness. It reminds me a little of Mingus's biography about growing up in an ethnically confused area (Mingus had a Chinese grandmother).
Poor sad Jim Morrison.
I liked it when she stated her life plan as being an adventuress. She did a pretty good job of it. Her mom had been one too, heading out to from LA. to L.A. where she knew no one.
And while her fat her was a studio musician, his buddies were Schoenberg and Stravinsky? Adorno? Can't remember. Another weird subculture.
She came to a bad end not from sex drugs or booze but because a spark from a cigar set her nice oil-based synthetic dress on fire. Her sister and cousin, famous competing groupies, now look like nice church ladies.
The moral of the story is natural fibers.
The thing about 60s-70s LA culture was its looseness. People in San Francisco were uptight and sensible in comparison.
I liked the recounting of studio musicians hanging with Stravinsky. I had never listened to Histoire du Soldat , nice to have a book suggest music. I like Pulcinella a lot.
A friend of mine sent me a link recently that describes LA in a way that I think fits John's description of looseness: https://www.bldgblog.com/2007/10/greater-los-angeles/
the generally meh reaction to e babitz renews my faith in you reprobates 💓. we watched los angeles plays itself recently, highly recommend although he wimps out when discussing chinatown, polanski is never mentioned only towne.
you can deduce the large european jewish refugee-immigrant community in los angeles circa 1930s-1940s by listening to the music composed for hwood movies & watching e.g. roadrunner cartoons - roughly 62% of the jokes assume background ambient knowledge of a swathe of educated euro culture.
I don't know anything about Los Angeles except what I learned from Depth Takes a Holiday. I've never been there since I was maybe ten or so. The only thing I remember is the tar pits. I can't even picture Disney Land though I know I was there.
"depth takes a holiday" i am dyyyyyiiiiingggg 🤣🤣🤣🤣🤣
It's a great book. She went on to write for the Atlantic and cut kicked off NPR for swearing.
. . . watching e.g. roadrunner cartoons - roughly 62% of the jokes assume background ambient knowledge of a swathe of educated euro culture.
Impressively long list of classical music used in cartoons: https://threadreaderapp.com/thread/1366449816042102787.html
of course it's s tsing loh! not afraid to be alarming tsing loh! will look for it. this past summer spent more time in bev hills than home, have to say really unfavorite part of los angeles. one meeting had been promised that a rep of the younger gen of an iranian immigrant fam would attend, the gen that had been described to me as all dope addled dissolute no good fiends but sadly dude was just kind of dim unselfaware & goofy. not particularly bright actually just not bright & boring as well.
It's a collection of essays from the 1990s.
To develop it further, hippies in SF were far out in a deliberate, self-aware way and could explain it to you in terms of The I Ching or Aldous Huxley or Gurdjieff , but LA hippies were just naturally weird for no particular reason and didn't even realize they were strange at all.
Looseness: SF weirdoswere all self-aware, with a rationale and a bibliography (I Ching, Tibetan Book Of the Dead, Aldous Huxley, pop anarchism). LA weirdos were all relaxed and just naturally that way.
I have the book out from the library but have not cracked it. These comments are not giving me any urgency to do so.
Ted Kaczynski (who lived in SF 67-69) vs. Jeff Lebowski.