I used to be charming The rest of Eve Babitz

Eve Babitz

Book - 2019

With Eve's Hollywood Eve Babitz lit up the scene in 1974. The books that followed, among them Slow Days, Fast Company and Sex and Rage, have seduced generations of readers with their unfailing wit and impossible glamour. What is less well known is that Babitz was a working journalist for the better part of three decades, writing for the likes of Rolling Stone, Vogue, and Esquire, as well as for off-the-beaten-path periodicals like Wet: The Magazine of Gourmet Bathing and Francis Ford Coppola's short-lived City. Whether profiling Hollywood darlings, getting to the bottom of health crazes like yoga and acupuncture, remembering friends and lovers from her days hobnobbing with rock stars at the Troubadour and art stars at the Ferus Ga...llery, or writing about her beloved, misunderstood hometown, Los Angeles, Babitz approaches every assignment with an energy and verve that is all her own. I Used to Be Charming gathers nearly fifty pieces written between 1975 and 1997, including the full text of Babitz's wry book-length investigation into the pioneering lifestyle brand Fiorucci. The title essay, published here for the first time, recounts the accident that came close to killing her in 1996; it reveals an uncharacteristically vulnerable yet never less than utterly charming Babitz.

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2nd Floor 814.54/Babitz Due Apr 12, 2024
Subjects
Genres
Essays
Published
New York : New York Review Books [2019]
Language
English
Main Author
Eve Babitz (author)
Other Authors
Molly Lambert (writer of introduction)
Physical Description
xiv, 433 pages ; 21 cm
ISBN
9781681373799
  • All this and The godfather too
  • My God, Eve, how can you live here?
  • Needles in the land of fruits and nuts
  • My life in a 36DD bra, or, The all-American obsession
  • No onions
  • On not being a tomboy
  • Losing weight made me a new person, a novelist
  • Shopping
  • Sunday, blue pool, Sunday
  • Venice, California
  • Honky-tonk nights : the good old days at L.A.'s Troubadour
  • A Californian looks at New York
  • Anna's Brando
  • The girl from Gold's Gym
  • The tyranny of fashion
  • Tiffany's before breakfast
  • Skin deep
  • Out of the woods
  • The path to radiant pain
  • Sunset tango
  • Sober virgins of the Eighties
  • Attitude dancing
  • Ronstadt for president
  • Rapture of the shallows
  • The sexual politics of fashion
  • Gotta dance
  • The soup can as big as the Ritz
  • Blame it on the VCRs
  • Jim Morrison is dead and living in Hollywood
  • I was a naked pawn for art
  • Life at Chateau Marmont : the sequel
  • They might be giants
  • Great legs
  • Chairmen of the board
  • Party at the beach
  • Hippie heaven
  • Billy Baldwin
  • The American scene
  • A city laid out like lace
  • Hello Columbus
  • Nicholas Cage
  • Girls' town
  • The Manson murders
  • Jackie's kids
  • Keeping time in Ojai
  • Santa Fe : angels we have heard on high
  • Love and kisses
  • Scent of a woman
  • I used to be charming
  • Fiorucci : the book.
Review by Publisher's Weekly Review

Novelist and journalist Babitz's one-of-a-kind voice and sharp, observational eye make for a singular, often exhilarating, ride in this assemblage of her articles from the 1970s through the '90s. Their through line is provided by Babitz's clear-eyed but loving evocation of her native city, Los Angeles. It's filled with a starry cast of characters, including Glenn Frey, Jim Morrison, and Linda Ronstadt, and with alternately glamorous and gritty locales, from the famous Troubadour club to a diner seemingly unchanged since the '30s, which is "sort of the only place in L.A. you can go without accidentally bumping into an alfalfa sprout." Else-where, she comically but cannily discusses the "physical insanity" of the exercise craze she partakes in, wryly muses on the relations of men to her large breasts ("no man has ever made a serious pass at me without assuring me he was a leg man"), and analyzes the joys of ballroom dancing. In one particularly memorable essay, she recounts how she ended up in the famous photograph of Marcel Duchamp playing chess with a naked young woman. And despite the title's implication, Babitz's writing remains, in fact, charming, as well as funny and insightful, throughout this fabulous collection. (Oct.)

(c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved
Review by Kirkus Book Review

Zesty essays by a sly observer.Journalist and novelist Babitz (Two by Two: Tango, Two-Step, and the L.A. Night, 1999, etc.) gathers nearly 40 personal essays, book reviews, travel pieces, and celebrity profiles, published between 1976 and 1997, that give ebullient testimony to her colorful, star-studded past. "I have always loved scenes," she writes, "bars where people come in and out in various degrees of flash, despair, gossip, and brilliance." And she loved parties, too: "Nothing makes me feel worse than knowing I'm missing the right party." She recounts parties galore: in Los Angeles, Hollywood, Miami, and New York; in swanky apartments, mansions, and nightclubs; attended by the rich, famous, and soon-to-be-famouse.g., pre-Doors Jim Morrison. Babitz met Morrison at a Sunset Strip club when she was 22 and "propositioned him in three minutes, even before he so much as opened his mouth to sing." He was sexy, seductive, and, she soon discovered, self-destructive: "Jim drank, got drunk, and wanted to be shown the way to the Next Whiskey Bar." Sex, drugs, and rock and roll characterized "an entire generation" that became "dazzled by a drug with the density, force, and newness of LSD," recoiled at images of napalm bombings, and surged together "As One waiting for the next Beatles album to come out." But the generation learned a crucial lesson, as well: "that the price of freedom is eternal vigilance." The collection includes a charming recollection of posing nude with Marcel Duchamp; sympathetic portraits of actors James Woods, Nicholas Cage, and Billy Baldwin; and a paean to her friend Linda Ronstadt, whose voice was "opulent with happiness and excellence." Babitz muses on body-building gym culture; her efforts to lose weight with the help of "diet, amphetamines, and the gentle augmentation of cocaine"; the pain of yoga; and, in a particularly endearing piece, the unexpected pleasure of ballroom dancing. The title essay, never before published, recounts a 1997 accident that resulted in devastating third-degree burns.A spirited, entertaining collection. Copyright Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.

Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.