No one burned hotter than Eve Babitz. Possessing skin that radiated its own kind of moral laws
spectacular teeth and a figure that was the stuff of legend she seduced seemingly everyone
who was anyone in Los Angeles for a long stretch of the 1960s and '70s. One man proved elusive
however and so Babitz did what she did best she wrote him a book. Slow Days Fast Company is
a full-fledged and full-bodied evocation of a bygone Southern California that far exceeds its
mash-note premise. In ten sun-baked Santa Ana wind-swept sketches Babitz re-creates a Los
Angeles of movie stars distraught over their success socialites on three-day drug binges holed
up in the Chateau Marmont soap-opera actors worried that tomorrow's script will kill them off
Italian femmes fatales even more fatal than Babitz. And she even leaves LA now and then
spending an afternoon at the house of flawless Orange County suburbanites a day among the
grape pickers of the Central Valley a weekend in Palm Springs where her dreams of romance
fizzle and her only solace is Virginia Woolf. In the end it doesn't matter if Babitz ever gets
the guy-she seduces us.
