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Peter Landau's Reviews > Slow Days, Fast Company: The World, the Flesh, and L.A.
Slow Days, Fast Company: The World, the Flesh, and L.A.
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For the last 15 years I’ve lived in Los Angeles. Now I want to get out. It’s a good time. We just sold our house and my wife completed her masters, plus she hates her job. There are the kids, but I didn’t ask them to be here. They just stuck around. Now they’re an anchor around our necks. Why can’t we just pull up stakes and move this circus elsewhere? I know, I know, better than most. My parents relocated from New York City to the suburbs when I was eight and I’ve only just come to terms with the move. I’m 53 years old. I guess such experiences build character.
Speaking of characters, Eve Babitz. She's the naked lady playing chess with Duchamp in that famous photograph, but that was only the beginning of her illustrious career. She’s a writer, and a very good one, who’s enjoyable company if a bit decadent. I found myself eagerly devouring her prose at the beginning and then getting a little sick to my stomach three-quarters in, but that’s my constitution, not her talent.
What Babitz has done is rekindled my love for Los Angeles. I never hated the place like the cliched New York transplant. There’s as much culture here as anywhere, and the physical beauty is perfectly balanced by the banality of its freeways and strip malls. But the sun is oppressive and has the effect of following you everywhere with its burningly indifferent eye. I never doubted Los Angeles' vibrancy, but it’s a megacity and as such overwhelming and just as provincial as New York City.
But there’s a poetry here, especially in its changing colors, a quality Babitz captures better than any other writer of Los Angeles I’ve read. As she moves about the city and into the desert to the ocean and parties in-between, her color commentary is funny and opinionated. I don’t always agree, but I wouldn’t turn down an invitation from her. The place she describes is crystal clear, but the time of SLOW DAYS, FAST COMPANY: THE WORLD, THE FLESH, AND L.A. is lost to history, embedded in the amber of her prose. The 1970s are long done except in the imagination of those who never lived then. They should step away from their keyboards and talk a walk around Los Angeles now. There’s a lot to see.
Speaking of characters, Eve Babitz. She's the naked lady playing chess with Duchamp in that famous photograph, but that was only the beginning of her illustrious career. She’s a writer, and a very good one, who’s enjoyable company if a bit decadent. I found myself eagerly devouring her prose at the beginning and then getting a little sick to my stomach three-quarters in, but that’s my constitution, not her talent.
What Babitz has done is rekindled my love for Los Angeles. I never hated the place like the cliched New York transplant. There’s as much culture here as anywhere, and the physical beauty is perfectly balanced by the banality of its freeways and strip malls. But the sun is oppressive and has the effect of following you everywhere with its burningly indifferent eye. I never doubted Los Angeles' vibrancy, but it’s a megacity and as such overwhelming and just as provincial as New York City.
But there’s a poetry here, especially in its changing colors, a quality Babitz captures better than any other writer of Los Angeles I’ve read. As she moves about the city and into the desert to the ocean and parties in-between, her color commentary is funny and opinionated. I don’t always agree, but I wouldn’t turn down an invitation from her. The place she describes is crystal clear, but the time of SLOW DAYS, FAST COMPANY: THE WORLD, THE FLESH, AND L.A. is lost to history, embedded in the amber of her prose. The 1970s are long done except in the imagination of those who never lived then. They should step away from their keyboards and talk a walk around Los Angeles now. There’s a lot to see.
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Slow Days, Fast Company.
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Reading Progress
October 4, 2016
–
Started Reading
October 4, 2016
– Shelved
October 9, 2016
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Finished Reading
