Read Online Hollywood Eve Eve Babitz and the Secret History of LA Audible Audio Edition Lili Anolik Jayme Mattler Simon Schuster Audio Books
From one of Vanity Fair's rising stars comes a brilliant, star-studded portrait of the glamorous and brazen Hollywood artist, muse, and writer Eve Babitz.
Los Angeles in the 1960s and '70s was the pop cultural capital of the world - a movie factory, a music factory, a dream factory. Eve Babitz was the ultimate factory girl, a pure product of LA.
The goddaughter of Igor Stravinsky and a graduate of Hollywood High, Babitz posed in 1963, at age 20, playing chess with the French artist Marcel Duchamp. She was naked; he was not. The photograph, cheesecake with a Dadaist twist, made her an instant icon of art and sex. Babitz spent the rest of the decade rocking and rolling on the Sunset Strip, honing her notoriety. There were the album covers she designed for Buffalo Springfield and the Byrds, to name but a few. There were the men she seduced Jim Morrison, Ed Ruscha, Harrison Ford, to name but a very few. She was a sun-kissed Edie Sedgwick.
Then, at nearly 30, her "It girl" days numbered, Babitz was discovered - as a writer - by Joan Didion. She would go on to produce seven books, usually billed as novels or short story collections, always autobiographies and confessionals. Her prose achieves that American ideal art that stays loose, maintains its cool, and is so sheerly enjoyable as to be mistaken for simple entertainment. And yet, during her career, Babitz was under-known and under-read. She's since experienced a breakthrough, and is now, 20 years after her last published work, on the cusp of literary stardom, and recognition as a - as the - essential LA writer.
For Babitz, life was slow days, fast company until a freak fire in the '90s turned her into a recluse, living in West Hollywood, where Lili Anolik tracked her down in 2012. Anolik's elegant and provocative new audiobook is equal parts biography and detective story. It is also on dangerously intimate terms with its subject artist, writer, muse, and one-woman zeitgeist Eve Babitz.Â
Read Online Hollywood Eve Eve Babitz and the Secret History of LA Audible Audio Edition Lili Anolik Jayme Mattler Simon Schuster Audio Books
"Even if you’ve never heard of Eve Babitz, if you’re a movie fan or just enjoy great writing about one of the most compulsively fascinating women ever, get this book and start reading. You won’t be able to stop"
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Hollywood Eve Eve Babitz and the Secret History of LA Audible Audio Edition Lili Anolik Jayme Mattler Simon Schuster Audio Books Reviews :
Hollywood Eve Eve Babitz and the Secret History of LA Audible Audio Edition Lili Anolik Jayme Mattler Simon Schuster Audio Books Reviews
- Hollywood’s Eve is without question an artistic success. It offers the reader a view of Eve Babitz as the ultimate 21st century feminist icon who both owned and used her sexuality to get who and what she wanted and as a form of artistic self-expression.
It also offers a vision of Los Angeles in line with Babitz’s novels Anolik neither praises L.A. as the city of earthly delights nor condemns it with the fire and brimstone of a Didion novel. It is the land where everyone is on stage and some act their parts better than others. Both pink sunsets and Skid Row make their appearance. Those who think that the subtitle of the secret life of L.A. means only debauchery and decadence are in for a surprise.
And there is a certain unity between the work and Babitz’s own life and writings. This is prose and life at full speed the glories of beautiful people, fabulous wealth and easy access to the full range of narcotics.
The author even explicitly confesses her infatuation with Babitz the gorgeous girl from Hollywood High who slept with many A listers then turned to writing about both the joy and agony of the Hollywood fast life. The L.A. girl who could successfully act a part and then turn that part into her personality.
My only hesitancy about this book is that Eve Babitz’s life could be viewed very differently. Drug addiction, unfulfilled artistic promise and being pimped to powerful Hollywood suits are not exactly the features that most people would want in their lives. The fact that Babitz now spends her days listening to conservative talk radio and rarely meeting anyone outside a small inner circle also seems like a depressing coda for someone who was once the quintessential it girl.
But if one enjoys prose that captures the young Eve Babitz—both courtesan and writer—one is sure to be delighted by Hollywood’s Eve. Anolik states in the introduction that the story is less a factual biography and more an appreciation. Where truth ends and legends start is anyone’s call. I just wonder if, at root, the whole account is something of a Hollywood illusion. That behind the many men, money and artistry Babitz starred not in a comedy but in more of a tragedy. But to Lili Anolik she is an exemplar for the modern woman. The reader can determine the veracity of this for themselves. - I have read Eve Babitz's books. She made a career of having gone to Hollywood High School and through her family knew lots of important people and posed for a naked photo playing chess with Marcel Duchamp. She wasn't beautiful. That was it. Except for sleeping around. At the beginning the author tells us what she is attempting to write about. That should be a clue.
To fill a whole book about very little requires talent and that is missing here. The same material is gone over and over.
The writing style is a third (forth) rate attempt at channeling Joan Didion.
I quit at a third of the way through. If you want to find out about Eve Babitz go to wikipedia and save your money. - I am interested in the subject. How a woman in the early 1960s found power. A cultural look at the so-called sexual revolution and its effect on women. A closer look at Eve Babitz's writing, some of which is great (the pre-cocaine addiction books are great). And it was blurbed by many writers I admire! Well, the author must be well-connected. Because what should have been a great boo is silly, due in part to the the trying-too-hard, fan-girl, faux-gonzo prose full of alliteration "lucky, luscious, lewd lady from L.A." (If you think that's good writing, then this book is for you.) Also it tries and fails to be be intellectual--saying, for example, that the novel as a genre died when the pill was invented--but lacks any kind of informed sense of the history at all. It's an elongated gossip magazine article. And Eve Babitz is important enough--historically--to deserve better. Oh, and the author inserts herself in the story about 40% of the time, and she's not at all notable.
- More inventive than a biography, more intimate than a history, Lili Anolik’s Hollywood’s Eve is best viewed as a portrait, certainly of a place and time – Los Angeles, broadly over the last 75 years, deeply in examining those intriguing decades, the ‘60s and ‘70s. But even more, at once with proximity and distance, attraction and repulsion, Hollywood’s Eve is a portrait of a certain kind of cultural avatar, Eve Babitz – subject, object, observer, participant. Let’s be candid mostly participant, emphatically so in her era’s synthesis of hedonism and confrontation, creation and destruction, along the front lines of sex, drugs, art, music, cultural change and a city that exerts a gravitational pull on the American sensibility. With delicacy and just the right amount of self-exploration, Lili Anolik (LA, ha ha) has told an excellent tale.
- Even if you’ve never heard of Eve Babitz, if you’re a movie fan or just enjoy great writing about one of the most compulsively fascinating women ever, get this book and start reading. You won’t be able to stop
- really was not looking for a fan girl book ....as for originality not to my pov
- I really enjoyed Lili Anouk's writing. Her blue is the best blue. I am also very fond of Eve Babitz's blue now.
- Anolik takes pains in her foreward to almost apologize for her non-linear biographic take on Babitz. She has no need to the book places the reader up close to Babitz and her world, unflinchingly. A great writer illuminates her subject in HOLLYWOOD'S EVE.