i dream in super eight

I’m about half way through Eve’s Hollywood and you know how I said she seemed like a crazy/cool aunt? I want to amend “crazy” because the voice here is actually really sane. Sane and dazzling — which is hard to beat. Babitz can be superficial and thoughtful and funny pretty much at the same time. It makes sense that she once posed nude playing chess with Marcel Duchamp. She’s sometimes vain but her vanity has an irony to it, which makes it likable and real. And while she’s not at all self-serious, she takes her self seriously enough to avoid excessive self-deprecation. Not that self-deprecation is a bad thing, but it often reads as narcissism and false modesty. You know, that tone of “Oh, I’m such a loser… And yet I managed to parlay my loserdom into a 300 page book all about myself!”So, here she is on weight-loss:

“The privileges of beauty,” Jean Cocteau said, “are enormous.” I have this pasted to my icebox and thought of adding, “so don’t you be,” but that would be sacrilegious, touching up Cocteau with my diet strategies.

On being single, she reveals that her secret ambition, if she ever gets out of Hollywood, is to be a spinster and live in a stone house in Ojai with orange trees and a goat. And you believe her. Because she makes it sound appealing, rather than trying to convince anybody that it’s an exercise in self-empowerment.While she’s breezy about things, she’s not invulnerable. She’s not too-cool-for-school. Well, actually, she sort of is too cool for school, but you’ll see what I mean. There’s a chapter where the character elliptically talks about her experience at Hollywood High in the late ’50s, the differences between an ingenue, a neighborhood belle, and a sorority girl — and which kind of girl she is:

Even today I am sometimes nearly heartbroken not to be invited to something, so you can imagine how the prospect of sororities looked to me at the age of 14 . . . the only way out of it was not to be there, and I was not schizophrenic enough not to be there while I actually physically was there, so I removed myself physically and lied. I gave a fake address and went to a peaceful residential school called Marshall High. . . ” (It works for a year, and then she reluctantly attends Hollywood High).

She follows this bit of information with a reference to the movie Death Takes a Holiday (later remade as the Brad Pitt vehicle Meet Joe Black). Death disguises himself as a prince to “take a few days off, leave his kingdom, and come to visit Life in order to discover why people cling to it so much and what Love is.” At a party thrown by a wealthy family, the neighborhood belle flirts with him “until she looks into his eyes, see death, shrieks and flees. She is too practical to love Death, even though he is so beautiful.” In contrast, the daughter of the house “is such an ingenue that she decides she sees beyond what is in his eyes and to prove her love, she insists on following Death into his kingdom and abandoning her fiance who is a nice guy.” Discussing this movie with friends, Eve notes:

Only I remember the neighborhood belle who fled from the patio. She was a kind of brazen girl; she flirted and insinuated shamelessly. But flirting with disaster is the not the same as courting it like the ingenue did or not noticing it like the sorority girls. The sorority girls have no place in their souls for the unknown. . . The neighborhood belle is all I’ll ever be. Knowing where disaster lies and getting as far away as possible from it.

Eve’s Hollywood was Babitz’s first book. She’s gone on to write several more, which I’m really looking forward to reading.

I just got this book out of the library — Eve’s Hollywood by Eve Babitz — and I’m already in love with it. And I haven’t even made it much beyond the eight page dedication.Babitz, a writer and artist “known for her collages” according to the backflap author bio, seems like the crazy/cool aunt you never had but wish you did. The aunt whose beautiful youth was full of dreams and excess. Who is as observant of life as she is enchanted by it. Published in 1974, her “confessional novel” chronicles the adventures of a young woman growing up in Los Angeles and does so in a tone that manages to be loopy, arch, enthusiastic and withering — sometimes all in the same sentence or two.Even her introductory note evinces a dotty yet straightforward and persuasive confidence, ostensibly clearing up some minor grammatical points, but really serving to dismiss and dispatch the kind of reader who just isn’t going to be up for this trip:

I want to tell you a little about myself. I am really an artist, not a writer. So, I like the way Arabic numbers look un-written out on a page. When I say someone is 15 years old, I like the way 15 looks. I like the way 9 million looks and I hate the way nine million looks. 9 seems like more a number to me.

Also, I believe that places should be capitalized. North, South, East and West are all places as far as I’m concerned… West, especially, is a serious place that should ALWAYS be capitalized. It also sounds more adventurous to go West than to go west.

Since this is my book and since the advent of James Joyce, why don’t we let me have my way? It’s such a small thing, and just think, I could be James Joyce writing in latin all the time and stuff.

Why not let her have her way? But wait — I want to go back to what may possibly be the best dedication ever. First and “mainly,” the book is dedicated to Sol and Mae, her parents. But the list of dedicatees goes on (and on) to include, among a host of some notable names and places, the following:– The Didion-Dunnes for having to be who I’m not– Eggs Benedict at the Beverly Wilshire– the purple mountains’ majesty above the fruited plain– Frank O’Hara’s “LUNCH Poems”– Dr. Boyd Cooper, gynecologist extraordinaire– sour cream– time immemorial and the suspension of disbelief– Saturday– the one whose wife would get furious if I so much as put his initials in– Desbutol, Ritilin, Obertrol and any other speed. It wasn’t that I didn’t love you, it was that is was too hard.You know what I love about as much as this book? The New York Public Library. For having this out-of-print masterpiece and for having such a great hold/pick-up system. Thanks, NYPL!I’m sure there will be a lot more to come with this. . .Sidenote: Why can’t people publish confessional novels — somewhat fictionalized memoirs — nowadays? Why is it more preferable for publishers to fishily market something as a non-fiction account and then for everyone involved to act hurt and disappointed when it turns out to be fabricated? Why not just admit it from the start? There’s a difference between fact and truth and regardless of the facts, Eve’s Hollywood certainly feels true.

So the Oxford American dusted off this footage of Big Star shot by Chris Bell and bassist Andy Hummel — and someone put it up on youtube! The thing speaks for itself but I’ll just say I like being in that ultra-brown living room. Yeah 1970s color desaturation!

And okay, this other video is weird and distracting (killer sheep? yoga chicken?) but it was the only rendition I could find of the gorgeous Kim Deal and Tanya Donelly take on “You and Your Sister.” Sometime around 1999 and the advent of Napster, this song was played over and over in the office I worked in. I guess it was the kind of office where you could just as easily pretend to be in your bedroom with a set of headphones and a broken heart? I thought it was the saddest/sweetest love song. Until I heard Chris Bell’s original, which is somehow sweeter and even more sad.