{"id":51114,"date":"2025-11-13T11:27:07","date_gmt":"2025-11-13T11:27:07","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/51114\/"},"modified":"2025-11-13T11:27:07","modified_gmt":"2025-11-13T11:27:07","slug":"10-spots-to-relive-l-a-s-bohemian-past-like-eve-babitz-did","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/51114\/","title":{"rendered":"10 spots to relive L.A.\u2019s bohemian past like Eve Babitz did"},"content":{"rendered":"

L.A. is a harmony of contradictions: It\u2019s a bankrupt skyscraper covered in graffiti<\/a>, a Mercedes-Benz G-class SUV with an expired registration, the quiet confusion of wondering whether a stranger\u2019s outfit means they\u2019re unhoused or just new to Silver Lake. L.A.\u2019s refusal to make sense is what makes it irresistible, and no one understood that better than writer, artist and provocateur Eve Babitz<\/a>, who died in 2021<\/a>.<\/p>\n

\u201cLos Angeles isn\u2019t a city. It\u2019s a gigantic, sprawling, ongoing studio,\u201d she wrote in her 1974 book \u201cEve\u2019s Hollywood.\u201d \u201cEverything is off the record.\u201d<\/p>\n

Born in Hollywood in 1943 to a classical violinist father and an artist mother \u2014 and with Igor Stravinsky<\/a> as her godfather \u2014 Babitz was destined for \u201cIt\u201d-girl-ism. While people tend to flee their hometowns to start over in a new city, usually a place like L.A. or New York, Babitz knew she was exactly where she was meant to be. She tried New York once as a typist for Timothy Leary<\/a>, because it\u2019s where \u201creal writers\u201d lived and worked; she gave it one year before moving back to L.A. <\/p>\n

\u201cShe lived in Rome for six months, and that was the only other city she loved, almost as much as L.A.,\u201d Mirandi Babitz, Eve\u2019s younger sister, told me. Despite her growing popularity in the \u201960s and \u201970s, Eve Babitz didn\u2019t hightail it from her Hollywood bungalow to live in Pacific Palisades or Topanga or Malibu \u2014 she lived and died in the heart of it all.<\/p>\n

When I asked Mirandi what Babitz would think of today\u2019s coffee-shop lines, overpriced wine bodegas and tinned fish<\/a> culture, she said with a laugh, \u201cShe\u2019d roll her eyes.\u201d <\/p>\n

Babitz may have been synonymous with places, including the Chateau Marmont and Musso & Frank Grill, or with people such as Jim Morrison and Ed Ruscha<\/a>. But it wasn\u2019t because she was a hanger-on, desperate to be cool or famous. She was the keeper of cool, and L.A. was the only muse she gave a damn about. \u201cI did not become famous but I got near enough to smell the stench of success. It smelt like burnt cloth and rancid gardenias,\u201d she wrote in 1977\u2019s \u201cSlow Days, Fast Company: the World, the Flesh, and L.A.\u201d<\/p>\n

After graduating from Hollywood High, Babitz skipped the traditional UCLA route and instead took classes at Los Angeles City College. \u201cThe school was located about 4 blocks from the hospital I was born in,\u201d she wrote in \u201cEve\u2019s Hollywood.\u201d \u201cIt was on Vermont near Melrose, which is an indeterminate lower-middle-class sort of neighborhood with no delusions. Westwood, where UCLA is, is so insanely crappy you could throw up. It\u2019s so WHITE and it\u2019s so clean and it\u2019s so impervious \u2026\u201d<\/p>\n

At age 20, Babitz made a name for herself in the art world. She posed nude, playing chess with a fully clothed Marcel Duchamp for Esquire<\/a> \u2014 a cheeky act of revenge against her lover, Walter Hopps, who wasn\u2019t returning her calls. Shot by Julian Wasser at the Norton Simon Museum, the now-iconic photo did its job: Hopps rang her soon after. That photo is now described by the Smithsonian Archives of American Art<\/a> as being \u201camong the key documentary images of American modern art.\u201d<\/p>\n

Babitz also launched her independent career as an artist, designing album covers for Linda Ronstadt, the Byrds and Buffalo Springfield. Her foray into the music scene \u2014 where she partied with (and allegedly had affairs with) legends like Morrison of the Doors (\u201cI met Jim and propositioned him in three minutes,\u201d she wrote in \u201cEve\u2019s Hollywood\u201d) and some original Eagles members \u2014 blossomed into a social life so magnanimous that names like Andy Warhol, Steve Martin and Annie Leibovitz came up as casually as what Babitz had for lunch that day. <\/p>\n

She went on to publish several books and worked as a journalist, writing about everything from Salvador Dal\u00ed to the best taquito stand in L.A. (Don\u2019t worry \u2014 we listed it below.) Although Babitz\u2019s love life kept the city gossiping, it was always apparent that her true love was the city itself. Her books, including \u201cSex and Rage<\/a>\u201d (1979) and \u201cL.A. Woman<\/a>\u201d (1982), are all love letters to a city she knew inside out. In turn, her life in L.A. became the stuff of urban legend \u2014 and decades later, we\u2019re still talking about it.<\/p>\n

Babitz understood L.A. better than anyone, including its seductions and secrets. Her legacy is being revisited in the Huntington\u2019s exhibition \u201cLos Angeles, Revisited<\/a>,\u201d which explores how L.A. has been shaped \u2014 and reshaped \u2014 by its visionaries. Babitz and her mother, Mae, a self-taught artist known for her preservation work on the Watts Towers<\/a> and her sketches of L.A.\u2019s vanishing buildings, have drawings included in the show. The exhibition runs through Dec. 1.<\/p>\n

Consider what\u2019s below your invitation to see L.A. as Babitz did \u2014 expansively, honestly and maybe a little recklessly. Just a heads-up, though: You won\u2019t find a single coffee shop with a DMV-like line on this list.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"L.A. is a harmony of contradictions: It\u2019s a bankrupt skyscraper covered in graffiti, a Mercedes-Benz G-class SUV with…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":51115,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[27],"tags":[32781,32786,32785,1409,32782,32787,1743,12898,2303,48,52,51,47,50,49,63,32788,32783,22578,32784],"class_list":{"0":"post-51114","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-los-angeles","8":"tag-babitz","9":"tag-beef-taquito","10":"tag-chateau-marmont","11":"tag-city","12":"tag-eve","13":"tag-eve-babitz","14":"tag-hollywood","15":"tag-huntington","16":"tag-l-a","17":"tag-la","18":"tag-la-headlines","19":"tag-la-news","20":"tag-los-angeles","21":"tag-los-angeles-headlines","22":"tag-los-angeles-news","23":"tag-los-angeles-times","24":"tag-lover","25":"tag-mirandi","26":"tag-olvera-street","27":"tag-slow-day"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/51114","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=51114"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/51114\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/51115"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=51114"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=51114"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=51114"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}